The Last Delve - An OSR Game

The stars are falling.

The sky is more empty each night, and across the world frozen wastes slowly consume each city, town, and lonely farmstead, leaving the land more barren than the stars. Each day, we see that sky has turned green and purple like shattered alexandrite. Reality is slipping.

Rumours reached the world of a place of safety. And in time, we survivors gathered in a city built on crumbling cliffs, dangling over a grotesque chasm, a rent in the broken world. Within its nightmare-filled tunnels, we gathered to hide from the world. 

Never enough food. Always the threat of disease, far more common than wolves in our crowded little streets. Always hoping the King In Exile did not demand tribute today; that you didn’t slip on the creeping ice; that it wasn’t your turn to go and cut wood. But at least it’s home, we say. It’s family. Safety. Better than the nothing out there, and whatever lurks below.

And then I saw them.

Desperate-eyed, nothing to keep them in these festering pits, those people who go below. Some ranted about gods long dead, or held crumbling books and rusting swords, a hunger for treasure in their shattered faces and scarred limbs. A hunger greater than the dread of traps, monsters, darkness and betrayal in the ruins beneath us. For there lie those who came before us; the civilisations that fell and rotted like ours does now. There, perhaps, there is a chance to become more than what you are.

And I asked myself - was it worth staying here, crammed into poverty and a slow death? In the end, everything falls into the chasm below. The end will come, one way or another.

And that’s why I’m here. Nothing but a dagger and a few days’ rations. But I’ll go, if you’ll only let me join you.”

That’s the last thing he said to me, miss, before he went below. A few days ago. Seen a fair few like him, over the years. I don’t think he’s coming back.

The Last Delve is an OSR game about desperate, doomed-to-die adventurers. Designed to feel familiar to D&D players, with a fast-track character creation system to make character death feel like a fun part of the adventure, and not a waste of hours of preparation time, this is a set of tools for those who want to play a gritty campaign with their friends, but not put too much time into preparing it.

TL;DR: I've been trying to design away from my usual comfort zone of late. Here's my go at an OSR-type game, with heavy Powered By The Apocalypse influences.