Enter the Metadungeon

Fifty years of roleplaying games.

One impossibly massive basement.

Even infinity doesn’t have enough room to hold it all. 

The DIE Metadungeon is intruding upon our reality.

We’ve played roleplaying games for a really long time. Like, a really long time. If you took everyone at Rowan, Rook & Decard and summed up our cumulative experience, it’s well over a century. It might even get close to two. So as a team who have, collectively, been gaming 2-4 times longer than TTRPGs as we know them have even existed, we feel pretty confident in presenting to you a definitive view of roleplaying history.

Just kidding, no we don’t. We’ve been on social media. But we do feel confident that Gareth Hanrahan (who wrote Dagger in the Heart, among other triumphs) can turn fifty years of TTRPGs into one hell of a megadungeon, especially with the spectres of Kieron Gillen (DIE, etc.) and Grant Howitt (you know, the Honey Heist guy) looming over his shoulders.

Now, to be completely honest, Gar’s been trying to convince us to do this for a while. And we said (paraphrasing) “A dungeon crawl? For DIE? Preposterous! Can’t be done!”. But since Goodman Games are launching Megadungeon Month on Backerkit next year, this seemed as good a time as any to do the experiment.

(Megadungeon Month is, for the uninitiated, a month next year – April, if you’re being specific – in which the folks at Goodman Games are spearheading an attempt to get as many megadungeon campaigns live on Backerkit as possible. And Matt, our Professional Friendly Person, really likes DCC. So we’re in.)

You probably know what a megadungeon is, even if you haven’t heard the word before. It’s those dungeons you can spend a whole campaign in, maybe more. Places like The Temple of Elemental Evil, or the colossal living dungeon in Eyes of the Stone Thief (oh look, it’s Gar again!). Places that have developed into their own self-contained worlds, with rules, customs and secrets impenetrable to outsiders.

Any resemblance to roleplaying as a hobby is purely coincidental, we assure you.

Gar’s dungeon is six levels deep. Every floor is an era of gaming: Paragons will burrow down through the roughly hewn caverns of 1970s classics from the dawn of D&D, through the new factions and foes of the 1980s, the edgy darkness of the 1990s and on into the schisms and resurrections of the twenty-first century. We’re not saying that’s all that happened in the last 25 years, we’re just keeping some things quiet until closer to the crowdfunding. 

But you can’t just isekai a bunch of adventurers into RPG history and call it DIE. The framing matters. This whole excursion is the fault of your group’s particular Master – or possibly Masters – who has spent their life immersed in this strange, niche world and want to show it to you. They want you to understand. They want you to do it right.

They are the sage. The vessel for the old powers. The gatekeeper. 

And they’re not letting you out until you really get it.

There will be temporary escapes from the dungeon – although Die always pulls you back. Time to discover what you missed while you were fighting for your life against the Forge god’s minions, and to reflect on what you might face next. If you’ve played DIE before, that’s the biggest addition to what you’re used to: you’ll get to step in and out of your Personas’ real lives, whether the characters are frantically clinging to them or desperate to escape back into Die.

Every time you step between Die and the real world, you’ll get to know your character better, with questions and development exercises to reflect on what the next level of the dungeon will mean to them. Who was your character’s first character? Which game did they have such a bad time with they can’t even speak its name? Who did they lose in the Edition Wars?

Just like they do in regular DIE, the answers will shape what characters encounter. This isn’t just history – it’s their history. It’s roleplaying as a whole, seen through the lens of the people who play it. We think that’s more interesting than why someone decided to make a Dallas RPG – though we might answer that along the way.

We think the Metadungeon’s for you if:

• You’ve got a certain nostalgia for “your” era of gaming
• You’re curious about the movements and ages you missed
• You have Big Thoughts about who roleplaying made you, as a person

Want to know more about DIE? 

Check out the core book here, or listen to My First Dungeon play it. 

Want to give it a go? 

Pick up the free PDF quickstart. 

Want to ask us some questions about the Metadungeon?

Join our Discord, and swing by Gar, Kieron, and Grant’s live discussion of it at 7pm GMT (2pm EST) on 19th December.