Lowmoor Idle RPG: An Adventurer's Chronicle

Sold matted tail x3 for 9 gold pieces. "The Guild buys by weight," says Master Pell. "The Guild has always bought by weight."

A zero-player RPG, after Progress Quest

Lowmoor is written in the voice of the old adventure modules. You enrol at the Adventurers' Guild of Mereward, sign the Roll, and keep the chronicle while your adventurer hunts, gains rank, hauls trophies to market, commissions better steel, and descends. Six floors below the town a dragon sleeps upon its hoard, and something older waits below the dragon.

Watch the descent, keep it in the corner of a second monitor, or close it altogether. Time passes in the deep while you are gone, and the Guild renders an account of your absence when you return, capped at four hours.

Your counsel is asked once

Choices arrive as sealed letters from the road. Leave one sealed and it settles itself safely. Break the seal and some go to the dice: a d20 against a difficulty class, rolled in the open.

Five arcs, complete and free from end to end

Arc I, The Way Down, is six floors, a plot told in sealed letters, staged bosses with their own phases, and an ending. The goblin king falls in the first half hour, and the wyrm is an afternoon of leaving it running.

Past the wyrm, Arc II opens the elder stair the dragon's weight kept shut, six deeper floors charted at about a day. Arc III opens under the quarry floor, six halls kept by a mage who has watched the whole descent through a thousand small eyes, charted at about two days. Two arcs wait below those: the offices behind the Court of the Lich, and, past the last door, the debt the Maw was dug to bury.

When an arc closes, the game writes your run out as a page of module prose to copy for whoever asks how the descent went.

What the chronicle holds

• An illustrated bestiary of 132 beasts with the Guild's field notes. A mastery once entered stands for every chronicle after.

• Twelve folks and twelve trades, each carrying one small gift stated in plain figures.

• Seven schools of workings that fire themselves upon the road: spells for the lettered trades, knacks and the battle-fury for the martial ones.

• Six bands of rarity up to the artefact. A Trophy Case and a Guildhouse that stand across every run, and treasures that keep their provenance cards.

• 45 achievements at +1% speed apiece, a prestige Roll of Honour whose nine endowments change how the next run reads, and Guild titles at lifetime marks worth +3% speed for good.

• Weather in the deep, tavern rumours composed from the true state of your run, a clerk with a voice for every floor, and a line of its own for every boss's fall.