1. You can make “dungeon packs” with a Claude Skill that asks a few questions about setting/tone/forgivingness before generating all the loot, creatures, and settings. The dungeon packs are saveable to your device storage.

2. It has an AI GM for when you’re in combat and want to try something silly, stupid, or resourceful.

The GM is user-tunable as part of dungeon pack creation, so if you want a real stickler for the rules, you can have that, and your attempts to Do Something Creative in combat will be adjudicated straight down the middle; or you can make one with theater kid energy who’s forgiving of just about any gambit.

During an encounter where you decide to Do Something Creative you get 500 characters to describe it, and the GM makes a ruling.

I extended the Cairn system a little bit to give each piece of loot a characteristic, and each monster a weakness. So if you encounter some undead thing, and have a holy item, you can use the holy item when you Do Something Creative to work against the monster’s weakness. If you encounter a hooded thief, you can try to bribe it or convince it a piece of junk is actually a treasure to distract it.

When you first visit the game, you get assigned a passphrase — something like dark-meadow-jagged-39 — and that’s it for the user account system. You can drag that passphrase around from devisaveablece to device if you want to keep a common ledge of runs.

I need to improve the directions on the dungeon pack system: They get stored on your device and can be loaded from a URL (e.g. a gist) or uploaded from disk. The game comes with several: A classical dark fantasy dungeon crawl, a sort of silly “playroom gone wrong,” an ice-age barbarian survival thing, and a haunted spaceship. If you click “Dungeons” in the bottom nav you can pick which ones to install and use.

I just added darkness system: Borrowing the idea from Shadowdark, light slowly ticks down, replenishable by torches and lanterns as you find them. As the light decreases, you’ll be more susceptible to traps, you’ll know less about your enemies, and it’ll be harder to do stuff. Using the medium itself, the visual treatment of the game dims and details leave the UI as you lose light.

Next up? Not sure. Maybe make it less linear. Right now it is doing what I wanted to do, which is give me a simple little game to play in idle moments.

After a little research, I picked an RPG engine (Cairn) because it has an open license and there’s plenty of creature and loot content out there.

The game is pretty simple, but I picked two things to customize/make customizable:

First, the game content (creatures, treasures, settings) are all defined in YAML files:

- id: root_goblin
  name: Root Goblin
  str: 8
  dex: 14
  wil: 8
  hp: 4
  armor: 0
  attack: { name: "spear", die: "d6" }
  special: null
  tier: weak
  weaknesses: [poison]

- id: hooded_thief
  name: Hooded Thief
  str: 10
  dex: 12
  wil: 6
  hp: 4
  armor: 0
  attack: { name: "dagger", die: "d6" }
  special: null
  tier: weak
  weaknesses: [greed]

Once I’ve got it working with the initial data, I want to make the data files interchangeable and write a Claude Skill that lets the player answer some simple questions about atmosphere and setting that generates a custom YAML file.

Note the weaknesses field: That helps drive the next feature:

The first thing I noted trying to playthroughs using stock Cairn rules is that it is a super unforgiving system. The game requires you to get through 13 rooms, and I couldn’t make it past four without fleeing a lot. I considered nerfing things, or buffing the characters, but I was also just finding the game itself pretty boring.

So I’ve added an AI GM (a Haiku API call). When you encounter a creature, you can do the usual attack or flee, but you can also improv using anything in your inventory:

… and Haiku ajudicates:

For v1, I’m just kicking the tires on the virtual GM. Eventually, the same way I want settings, creatures, and loot to be user-definable, I want to be able to define the GM’s temperament: Everything from the classic by-the-book realism killjoy to what I’m calling “failed improv class instructor.”

You may have also noted with that Hooded Thief creature up there that there’s a weaknesses: [greed] field: The GM uses that to help it judge the effectiveness of your gambit: If you’re holding a coin purse and come across the hooded thief, it’ll get distracted if you just drop your money and run away.

I still want the game system to be a little tough, and still want to make getting to that 13th room hard, but it might as well be more fun along the way.