If you wanted to make the game crunchier, you could integrate mechanics for rations (5 rations = 1 inventory slot, eat 1 ration after 6 rounds or something like that), rules and feats for camping and expand on the stress mechanics by giving players quirks as a result of reaching 20 stress.Īnyway: I did some Darkest Dungeon monsters using the TIER-system in ICME, which I wanted to share with you.
If you borrow the structure of The Grind from Torchbearer you can even have a “town phase” (stocking up on torches, weapons, rations etc.), a “dungeon phase” (exploring, fighting, looting) and a “camp phase” (where players can rest, eat, regenerate HP or stress). Instead of planning encounters, I just prep monsters and decide for every scene if there are monsters or not (by rolling the skull dice skull = monsters, no skull = no monsters). Darkest Dungeon lends itself to a Dungeoncrawl quite well, I think, so prep is really easy, because you can plan your “dungeon rooms” as separate scenes with stuff in them that player’s can interact with.