Delve: A Solo Map-Drawing Game

[Music] well hello you bearded bastards and welcome to dell usually i play dwarf fortress on my channel but yeah switching it up today now that delve it's a solo map drawing game based around an underground dwarven citadel pen and paper sort of stuff you know it was created by anna blackwell and it can be picked up at itch.io as a you know digital download or you can get a copy of the rules in the mail which is what i did now cards on the table here i am like incredibly unfamiliar with this game i played it one time didn't finish the game i got through like six turns but i could really see the potential i think it's right up my alley and i figured i'd just make a video on it just to help try to engage my imagination a little bit more i think it's gonna be really fun that being said totally unsure on the rules so if you've played delve and i'm doing something wrong um write it down in the comments below i'd appreciate it but for now we're just gonna try to figure this thing out together and i should also say too that this isn't like a tutorial or anything like that i'll be talking about some of the rules but like not going seriously in depth with it just gonna be having fun today now then let's see we're gonna need a pencil and eraser okay grated paper i've got graph paper here but like you know we could just kind of make some bigger squares on the you'll see what i'm talking about need notepad a deck of standard playing cards and a bunch of tokens uh yeah yeah i think we could manage that easy enough and now the very first thing we have to do is on our grid sheet here we're gonna have to draw the entrance to our dwarven citadel in a way this is the most important part of the citadel because well it's where we star and be if monsters or stuff get to this place here and escape our citadel that means we lose and there we go just nothing too fancy oh you know maybe we should go and like yeah we can like fill in this area out here with some uh some sort of a stoney texture or something like that how does that sound really get that feel like we're digging through the stone okay there we go and i'm starting to already feel like we're in the dwarven fortress frankly you just picture it now the dwarves embarking on their quest a quest that says here in the construction booklet to find the void crystal now i'm not too sure what this void crystal does it doesn't really tell you just as we're searching for the thing but i mean could be a whole slew of reasons i suppose and you know that being said another idea i had to kind of implement here alongside delve is to include some other tables now these ones aren't ones that are included in delve but the instruction booklet really tries to encourage you to do your own thing just have fun with it you know and so i figured what the hell no let's see in order to figure out why we need a void crystal maybe we should figure out who our dwarves are first and so i'm gonna head over to random fantasynamegenerators.com a place i'd highly suggest checking out if you need some random fantasy names and gonna head over to the country description generator and here we go our people are the dwarves of etrian which is a country built on the leadership famines and industrial advancements of its past this country is now among the luckiest countries in its corner of the world their export clean water and natural resources are among its current greatest strengths unfortunately they lack a little in science and income maybe we're lucky because the uh the natural environment out here is pretty non-hostile we're not as advanced as others but we don't have to be etrian is a socialist country there are a couple of opposing groups against the current leadership and this has been so for quite some time however the current greatest threat to the nation is air pollution but the current leadership does whatever it takes to solve this issue air pollution that seems odd in a fantasy setting i mean well i suppose they're dwarves right they live underground um for the most part maybe they have a lot of coal in their area and they just burn a lot of coal makes things a bit smoggy it's a nice natural environment but it's kind of being a little mucked up by all the coal smog i could see that for sure the dwarves of etrian are gratified they live wonderful lives and while science might be lacking their export helps relieve most of their issues religion holds barely any importance in their lives and if anything has made them more reserved the dwarves of etrian are extremely spiritual however and they have intriguing rites of passage and special rituals oh that's fantastic hopefully we get to take a look more at that later but at least now we have an idea of who these people are already know i've i've been showing a flag on the screen too another randomly generated bit there from chaoticshiny.com the flag is a gonfalon with a solid grey brown background and a diagonal bar of deep green from right to left the emblem is a willow tree and a tree branch interesting interesting now notice i didn't really include a tree branch on there i uh kind of got carried away with the whole willow tree design and i figured that's fine probably won't be sticking a hundred percent to some of these random descriptions especially if the mood strikes me you know anyways yes so that's our people and as for that void crystal maybe it has something to do with the air pollution we were talking about maybe they require a void crystal in order to help clean or process the air in some fashion very interesting concept yes i like that a lot oh and you know what i suppose we should come up with a name for our fortress too this place has to have a name right okay well i rolled up some random dwarf names here and the first last name that i liked was silverstone so this here is fortress silverstone named for its leader that's right we should come up with characters too i think and the first one we're going to come up with is right here gilligrid silverstone a description that once again came from random fantasynamegenerators.com and a good one too she has ginger straight hair tied in a bun it reveals a lean friendly face narrow amber eyes she has some sort of a mark on her cheek that stretches from her nose to the bottom of her right cheekbone it leaves an amusing memory of forbidden adventures there's something odd about her perhaps it's her patience or perhaps it's simply her decency but nonetheless people tend to ask her for favors while spreading stories about her interesting well i guess that's who's leading this place who could say why exactly she's been sent here i mean well i mean we know it's because of the void crystal but like you know just for the hell of it not gonna use a random generator we'll say she was tasked by the uh the leader of the nation the socialist nation maybe not quite a king then uh some sort of a hegemon of some variety a figure with great political power and influence over the country of etrian and we'll go with the venerable gargac mary mace master of the mountains a very powerful figure he's got a number of armies under his control i'd figure and yet he's also well liked by the populace yes maybe he is tasking kill a grid here with going out and finding a void crystal in order to help her country dwarves and so that maybe one day she too could be registered in the illustrious murals in the mountains she could be a legendary figure just like any of these other dwarves in here like thrac rivera red spine slayer of worms that would be something certainly incentive you get to help your people you get to be forever immortalized i mean it's a win-win really when you get down to it for duty and glory gilligrid has set out here to create her own fortress mine to search for the void crystal yes that'll work out just fine hey how about we continue and continue digging i got a little carried away there but it's fun you know i like to get to know the people we're playing as i like to get in the mind a little single player role-playing boys like the games like this anyways okay don't ramble let's continue on what do you say now that oh something i didn't mention i'm already gonna start skipping over some rules here but like when you start out playing you have two types of resources okay you got well your resources these are the ones used mostly to uh construct buildings and whatnot their utility items that sort of stuff and then you got your trade goods these are treasures and that sort of stuff i would imagine stuff that holds a large monetary value but not necessarily a utility value we start out with 20 of both of those okay oh and also something else we got to do is remove the jokers from our deck of cards kind of set those aside for now you add them in later on when you start digging really far down but we won't need them now and oh yeah it's gonna shuffle the deck too real quick here we go and now then we could take our first to turn we still haven't even really taken a turn yet and how we go about this is choosing a space in which we want to dig from one of our pre-existing rooms our entrance and i'm gonna say we dig right and to figure out what we discover what might be buried in the earth we have to draw a card and so we have our shuffled deck here let's see what we get and it's the jack of diamonds okay now diamonds represent trade goods and so when you draw a diamond card you add its value plus the level that you're on currently to your total trade goods so 11. we get 11 trade goods and the spot we dug into is now opened up it's just a empty cavity right now and in that cavity we could build a room if we want so you start your turn by digging and then you can decide what rooms you want to build and now there's a whole slew of rooms i'm not going to go over them all right now of course but something i feel would benefit us is a storehouse which is a pretty straightforward little room after this is built rooms on this floor cost half resources to build while the storehouse itself costs 15 resources to make so yes easy enough we'll do that right here dwarves of all walks of life move in and out of the storehouse carrying goods to where they need to be the space is rich with the smell of wood metal and spices in a small army of fortress felines a safeguard against any rat or moth that dare wanders in there is no shortage to what one can find in there everything from pickaxes mounted on the wall to bolts of berry dyed fabric waiting to be stitched into new garments and there we go wonderful nice place to store our resources sort them out get them to where they have to be again this is the first time i'm playing the game so i don't know a lot of the meta or anything like that but i assume this is a very important building just seems like it'd be very helpful anyways that's the storehouse and i believe we should move on now okay round two and i think we'll dig right from the storehouse let's just keep it rolling that way and so we have to draw once more is a three of diamonds three more trade goods plus one because of our depth and that there brings us up to 35 trade goods and we're down to five resources now that's okay bro because another thing we could do is trade after you're done moving you can trade some of your items and there's kind of an unequal conversion rate one trade good is worth two resources likewise we could trade two resources for one trade good so we're gonna sacrifice four trade items for eight resources and that gives us 31 trade goods and 13 resources and once again we have a big empty spot over here to the right of our storehouse a spot in which we could build something and so now i was looking over these rooms here and i'm thinking a barracks would go nicely like just judging on the fact that we can we could ultimately draw any old weird card and like have a monster come out and start attacking us this very instant it might be good to protect ourselves right i would think so i would think so that being the case okay barracks they go for eight resources but we're gonna cut that in half because of our storehouse so four resources and so let's get that underway here in the barracks a ceaseless observer gazes upon the training soldiers stone eyes marking their progress in a large cavernous room the scent of sweat metal and armor polish mingles with the torch smoke yet this has done little to prevent civilians from stopping by to observe drills and mock battles aspiring young dwarves hoping to gain a position in the military dash back and forth with water and rations hoping to one day join the ranks of the fortress guard and there we have it wonderful okay it's all carved out it's all in place now and as for its utility a barracks can be used to recruit soldiers i'm sure you guessed as much it could be used to recruit either like warriors or gunners melee arranged fighters and when you recruit them they kind of just sit in this room until combat begins from what i understand now we're not going to do that quite yet but um yeah maybe next turn i guess i'm feeling confident this next card won't ruin our entire fortress here let's just see let's move on to round three and this time i want to dig left from our entrance okay we're gonna go back over this way and we're gonna draw a card three of spades okay now that there is a remnant diamonds like we've been drawing are trade goods but spades are remnants which are just dangerous but you ignore spades up on the top row here this is like the safe zone of the fortress kind of a place to get you started and so you ignore spades up here we're just going to draw again let's see what we get an ace of diamonds okay that's a little better two more trade items not a lot but we'll take it now again we still have a lot of trade items here so we're going to trade some off six of them for 12 resources and in this new chamber here i want to construct a shrine of fortune and it costs 20 resources to build but this is halved because of our storehouse really not that bad when you get down to it and now let's see here the dwarves of etrian believe there is one force in this world far more powerful than any god that force being fortune the coins of the shrine gleam with the ever-present flame of the sconces above these otherwise useless discs of metal are used to feed the poor elevate position and turn impossibilities into things quite possible the riches of silverstone pour forth from the sacred chamber and there we go just like that done deal now what this building here does is that from this point forward anytime we draw a diamond card it's worth plus three trade items and seeing as how we've drawn three diamond cards already i'd say that bodes well for our future prospects another thing to know is that shrines can hold a single cleric and the cleric have to be present in order to activate the shrine's effects so we might as well hire a cleric now they're kind of expensive they cost eight trade items but well it's gonna be worth it i'm sure we'll do that okay here is our cleric and they're just gonna sit in this chamber right here now that unit there can be used to fight kind of not really fighters clerics are more used to like shield your units or something still a little foggy about that whole system but we'll figure it out in time i'm not too worried about it that being said i think we could use a unit to actually fight for us too clerics aren't strong at all and so yes we're finally going to build a soldier over here in our barracks that costs five more trade items so just like that we're down 13 trade items but that's fine because now we have a cleric and a soldier a soldier has five strength and a cleric only has one something to note there i believe they can kind of like move towards each other and combine their power if combat begins i don't know again we'll look into it at some point whenever we find combat i suppose now then moving on to round four and you know what i'm gonna dig right of the barracks one more time we had some pretty good luck this way i figure if we dig over here when we do encounter some sort of a monster it'll have to pass through the barracks right so yeah that'd probably be pretty smart of us now let's see what we get oh it's a four of clubs what is a club oh dear the eastern wall of the barracks had always been sort of damp it was an annoyance for sure but not an emergency that is until the miners began their task before they could know what happened a river swept through a chunk of the fortress like some terrible serpent throwing citizens and equipment alike against the stone walls with tremendous force there was nothing they could do against such an occurrence this would serve as an early loss for the dwarves of silverstone as well as a reminder of the dangers that could be encountered underground okay so clubs are natural formations and a four of clubs is an underground river so when you dig out into this space here you find the river you draw the river all the way to the closest page edge and the place where you dug into serves as like the source of water okay now liquids in here they move out from their source to spaces if they encounter a way to go downwards they flow all the way down just trying to wrap my mind around the whole process here so i think all that happens here is the water comes out two spaces ruining our barracks in our storehouse and killing the units within so our one soldier that we just recruited died that's a damn shame and now these two rooms are filled with water some stellar i am now just skimming through the rule book here rooms can be damaged but i don't think these rooms are damaged it's not something you have to repair though they are filled with water and i would assume you have to pump the water out in order to use them again makes sense to me yeah okay it says rooms filled by liquid or gas can be drained at a cost of five trade items really okay so i suppose we should do that um five trade items to pump the water out of the store room just like that and then five more trade items to pump the water out of the barracks now again i'm pretty new to the game but i believe this whole river section here all of these tiles count as empty chambers that are filled with water and so if i wanted to i could continue spending trade goods and pump the water out of each of those tiles as well and then build rooms in them which would be pretty neat not gonna do it but something to know man oh man our items are looking pretty bad right now we're down to four trade items and 11 resources hoping for some good news coming up speaking of which how about we continue on what do you say now okay move the river over to the right gonna want to stay up here on the top level for now i'm thinking and so with that in mind our only option is left of the shrine of fortune let's get to digging dwarves and let's see what we have here it's a three of diamonds hey all right that's a three plus one for the depth and plus three more for the shrine of fortune seven trade items just what we needed okay and now we have ourselves this uh big empty chamber here too and i suppose we should probably build something in here and you know what i think we need i think silverstone could use a nice kitchen what do you say the kitchens were loud today following warhawk cave ballet's newest creation not a single soul had ever guessed brazing groutons with cherry sauce would be such a crowd pleaser dwarves of all ages lingered on the stone staircases watching with hungry eyes as warhawks slowly churned away another fragrant batch of cherry sauce the warmth of the cooked fires did little to turn them away in the scent of the secret spices borax sprinkled into the cauldron only drew in more now okay there we have it our kitchen nice little place i say now a kitchen will allow units that are nearby i guess during combat to have plus 50 strength all right so like if you had two soldiers in a room that was adjacent to the kitchen here that'd be 10 strength normally but because they're next to the kitchen it would bring them up to 15. i think that's gonna be good because well i mean we don't have any soldiers right now but it'll kind of like amplify the power of the ones that we do have coming up gonna get right to that but first i think we have to generate up a new dwarf i figured because we have a kitchen here we should probably get a head chef don't you say and so i messed around with some generators and got this guy here his name is bora hawk cave belly head chef of silverstone an interesting fellow for sure his short golden hair hangs over a full warm face big round pale eyes set sunken within their sockets watch eagerly over the stronghold they fought for for so long tribal marx in the form of two stripes under his right eye marks his upbringing but more importantly leaves a pleasant memory of deceased love i like him i like to cut up his jib and i gotta say adding generators into the mix is really it's feeling good i think oh speaking of which i wanted to create a signature dish for this guy but i couldn't really find any good food generators online so i had to make up my own step one i had to roll a d6 for the main portion and i got a one meat for the meat type another d6 rolled a six for unidentifiable so we have unidentifiable meat so far the meat cooking style another d6 there i rolled the five for braised and for additions another d6 i got fruit sauce and it went with cherries just for the heck of it so we have a braised unidentifiable meat with some sort of a fruit sauce and that's where the braised croutons with cherry sauce came from which i think is just a lovely little dish little disconcerting what the unidentifiable meat is but i figure it could just be some like meat scrapings or something maybe it's just scraps like leftover stuff a hot dog right hot dog with cherry sauce okay i mean i guess it doesn't sound so appealing but the dwarves like it that's for sure that's all that matters it's a silverstone specialty anyways yes okay so now we have our cook we got our groutons we got our kitchen excellent now yes we should probably hire on a new warrior just so we have someone to defend our fortress besides just the single cleric and there we go right over there good luck to you soldier that's minus five trade adams and it's gonna bring us to the end of round five right there okay okay we're starting to come back after that river fiasco now then uh yeah round six let's keep it rolling to the left gonna dig again let's see what we get here an eight of hearts okay that's not bad that gives us nine resources we'll take it and you know what maybe we'll um yeah what the hell we'll get another soldier too so now we have two soldiers sitting over in the barracks minus five more trade items that's not bad though we can spare them and you know what that's gonna wrap up round six let's keep on rolling speed things up a little for round seven we're gonna dig leftward once more and now let's see what happens looks like we have a ten of clubs that's another natural formation as the silverstone miners broke through the thin crust of rock a brief shift in air pressure pulled dust into billowy clouds as the wispy haze began to settle the dwarves peered through the aperture and into a chamber unlike anything created by dwarven hands an ancient obsidian tube stretched far down into the dark where its bottom might lie was anyone's guess though surely none wanted to be the one who found it okay that's a dormant volcanic shaft and you draw it all the way down to the bottom when you discover it that's pretty wild huh that's gonna be what eight tiles down that's nuts so be it so we have this giant just tube here now which i guess creates some problems mentally for me with the rules because like could i dig from the bottom of this if i wanted i don't think so right skimming through the rules okay there's a um it looks like you can construct stairs like if i wanted to i could build stairs down through this thing it doesn't really make sense that we could just like throw dwarves down over the edge and just start digging at the bottom well no matter let's figure out what we're gonna be doing here um okay that last chamber that we dug out still haven't done anything with that how about we build in here an oversear's office how does that sound i mean it costs 15 resources but that's half because of the storehouse just not sure whether to round up or down so i'm gonna flip a coin heads we round down and heads it is now what this is gonna do here i figured we put it here because um any diamond cards that we find below this room are worth double now i figure we can probably start i guess like maybe building stairs into this um this volcanic tube over here maybe um yeah still a little unsure of how the whole thing works frankly but well i guess we're gonna be focusing downwards now and it would be useful if the diamonds down here were worth double overseer gilligrid's office was said to be one of the finer examples of etrian architecture the silken banners were never left to dust and the candles above cast a purposeful shadow on the overseer station a large stone throne sat next to an even larger stone desk which housed silverstone's ever so vital records of history and commerce it served as gillagrid's throne room in a sumptuous place it was the only complaint was a periodic scraping beneath the floor stones is still finding their way into a settled position only slightly annoying no real issue at all okay then now we have our overseer's office and i'm looking through the rule book here and it looks like stairs and corridors that's like a little bonus building you can make and i would have to build stairs in a couple of these tiles over here in the volcanic shaft and if you know if we want to go down farther which i do but they still count as your one building a turn that you can build so i can't build stairs this turn yes we're gonna be moving on to the next turn because there's not really that much else we could do that's fine though um yeah round seven done round eight and since we have to dig at the start the only place we're gonna want to go is down right here under the overseer's office and so let's get to it start digging dwarves let's see what we got here oh boy another club a king of clubs as the dwarves began to crack away at the overseer's floor they found there to be a little resistance in the stone below pink pink pink they continued on but the stones began to shift and soon fell away exposing a terrible sight as the flabby slabs of greenish flesh began to roil in the slime coated chamber blow the dwarves stood in awe that is until they saw the teeth their doom had come okay that's not good at all king of clubs it's a burrowing beast with 20 strength it digs a tunnel straight up from this space when it reaches one of your rooms combat starts and it moves normally towards the entrance okay so this is our first combat that we've experienced and well you can see the creature here um there are some tables in the book that i could roll on to see what kind of monster it was but i mean this game tells you you can just do whatever the hell you want so for our creature i created a new table for the type of creature a d6 ruled the three and got amphibian for its body type another d6 i got one for a worm-like body type it's limless we have a limbless amphibian for the head slash face another d6 i rolled a six and got unidentifiable so we have an amphibian that's like a worm without an identifiable head and for its abilities another d6 i got plated so we have some sort of an armored amphibian without any limbs and no identifiable face or head which you know you can see the creature right here it's uh it's it's got a mouth you know where its head is for the most part but like that's just to keep it interesting yeah so this is what we're working with this terrible horrible creature um yes this thing just i mean i guess burrowed straight up into the overseer's office crashed up there and now combat begins oh and you know i'm also saying here in the instruction booklet that the triggered combat will give the enemies a starting strength but as you go deeper under the ground they will get stronger when spawning an enemy add 5 to its strength for each level of depth okay so this thing's on level two instead of 20 it's gonna be 30 strength on this worm okay great and how combat works is the enemy goes first and attempts to move towards the fortress entrance which that's going to bring it right over here into our kitchen and so for our fighters i mean boy there's really not that much we could do huh we have our two soldiers in the barracks and then our one cleric and is trying to fortune we couldn't even get our soldiers over to the kitchen if we wanted to i guess i'll move the cleric over towards the entrance and we'll shift to the two soldiers over towards the storeroom move out soldiers the fingers are looking bleak on the next turn the worms gonna move over towards the shrine it's now in the shrine of fortune and i'm gonna move our soldiers a little bit more towards the entrance they're now paired up with the cleric but i don't know there's much we could do and okay for the next turn we see combat between the worm of 30 strength and our poor poor fighters over here who have a paltry 11 strength five for each warrior and one because of the cleric and well they put up a good fight but there really wasn't that much they could do unfortunately they were just smashed by the thing the cleric has a shield which adds a little bit of protection but it wasn't of no use whatsoever they were absolutely obliterated and unfortunately this worm has reached our entrance which means silver stone has fallen [Music] damn it well it goes to show you how fast the fortress can fall huh gotta say you do feel pretty helpless when you see all that stuff playing out like that you know just the worm kind of going down the corridors and making its way towards your warriors which you know can't possibly fend it off but still now something i'm going to want to do here is because our fortress ended and well the worm came up straight underneath the overseer's office i think we should do a roll to see whether or not our overseer survived obviously a lot of civilian dwarves fell that we haven't seen but gilligrid was in peril during that so we're gonna flip a coin heads she perished now there we have it okay well for a little context i'm gonna flip it again to see whether it was a heroic death or an accidental death heads it was heroic ah damn okay so she must have just been sitting at her desk when that worm came barreling up like that and well that was that poor gilligrid looks like her story and the story of silverstone has come to an end [Applause] the abyss to max is a rarely encountered beast that looks under the shallow stone of etrian's western ranges unfortunately for the dwarves of silverstone it was only very early in their quest they encountered such a beast the fortress had failed in its quest for the void crystal and the dwarves of etrian became ever more desperate as their smog choked skies became darker still though where there is hope one will always find dwarves willing to do their part in donning the mantle of crystal seeker in etrium every story's end marks the beginning of another even grander tale and there we have it so ends our first fortress here in delft and i gotta say i had a pretty darn good time too hopefully you could tell as much really inspiring you know ever since i was younger i've always wanted a game that could be kind of like played as a role-playing game but you know solo and that also really jogged your creativity and delve seems pretty perfect for that you know it's got those rules in place but it also really encourages you to do your own thing too really you can play any way you want and speaking of which actually at the back of the book there's this little blurb that i really liked i'll put it in quotes feel free to let your imagination run wild make your hold as weird wonderful fun or dark as you like if you want candy golems and luchadors go for it see that's inspiring right there you know if you wanted to bend the rules just slightly i could say we were playing as goblins right that were like digging down underground in search of i don't know something other than a void crystal right the demon's skull or something hell i could say we're playing as mold people even on their way down to find some sort of i don't know the golden grub something ridiculous just a fun little game and from what i understand it's got a bunch of expansions to it too i haven't really looked into it though i'll put some links down in the description below if you want to go check it out i highly encourage that you do and if you enjoyed this video please let me know in the comments below it's a bit different for my channel and i'm trying to figure out if i should pursue more stuff like this or maybe even continue on with delve for a little while or just try some other games and maybe add some random generation into the mix too still trying to figure things out anyways my bearded bastards i really do hope you enjoyed yourselves today thank you for watching if you did enjoy yourself an awful lot while i do have a patreon where one dollar goes a long long way to helping me and my family create these videos and i've also been trying to do behind the scenes pictures like daily pretty much pictures and music other stuff too i thank you in advance my friends and until next time you bearded bastards [Music] you

Channel: Kruggsmash

Views: 106,466

Keywords: roleplay, delve, game, dwarves, fantasy, dnd, story, creative, unusual, map drawing, illustration, drawing, a solo map drawing game

Id: egU3-sPmFUw

Length: 31min 57sec (1917 seconds)

Published: Sat May 07 2022