Delicious in Dungeon: The Game

I’ve been a little obsessed with Delicious in Dungeon, an anime about (among other things) a party of adventurers who run out of resources while dungeon-crawling and decide to eat what they kill. As I’ve been thinking about how to revive (or, more accurately, actually properly begin) this project—and thinking about how to shift focus from just actual play to questions narrative storytelling and TTRPGs more broadly—I found myself reading through a hack of the Trophy system that got me thinking about a DiD TTRPG. D&D and related fantasy games are very obviously an influence for original creator Ryoko Kui, and so the idea of doing a DiD-inspired dungeon crawl had obviously been floating around in my mind, but I felt that despite the superficial similarities, 5e wouldn’t really be the right system to bring out the things I found interesting and important about the story.

Reading through Trophy gave me two ideas. First, a system for sketching out a DiD TTRPG, and second, a fun exercise to share in this newsletter: trying to find the right system or structure to adapt games based on existing narratives. I’ve always thought that adaptation is one of the most interesting and useful ways to think about what is essential to the heart of a story, so I think it will be a really cool lens for considering the narrative engines of different TTRPG systems. My knowledge of systems is far from exhaustive, but I’m looking forward to expanding it. For now, let’s dive in!

I am not going to try and lay out all the details of how a Rooted in Trophy DiD game would work, just touch on some of the key mechanical and thematic elements. But if anyone feels like developing the whole hack, please tell me about it! This was created with reference to the Trophy SRD.

This will include SPOILERS for the ending of the manga of DiD, which includes many things the anime has not yet reached. These will begin in the ‘The Endgame’ section, so you’ll be good to read up until there.

The Basics

Delicious in Dungeon is about a group of adventurers trying to explore a dungeon for their own reasons. They also live off the land, discovering as they go that the dungeon has an ecosystem.

Trophy, which exists as Trophy Dark (a one-shot) and Trophy Gold (a multi-session campaign) is about a group of hunters in an inhospitable forest, trying to hunt monsters and survive. The game is doomed to end in death and failure, and rather than the triumphant, progressive nature of heroic fantasies like D&D and Pathfinder, the mechanics chart the characters’ moral and physical decline.

Now, this might sound like a weird fit for what is largely a comedy. But there are some narrative reasons I’ll get into below for why I think this is a perfect structure. For now, suffice it to say that what works about this is the way the peril increases rather than decreases as the adventurers approach the heart of the dungeon and have their goal within their grasp, but the adventurers themselves are not really gaining new skills or advancing their martial or magical power in dramatic ways as they go.

The central mechanic of Trophy involves rolling two pools of d6s, light and dark. Light dice represent the character’s strengths, or help from others. Dark dice represent the risks they are taking, or the damage to body or soul they might incur. The degree of success depends on the number of your highest die, but also whether your top result is a light or dark die.

There is also an interesting and fairly streamlined combat system that relies heavily on teamwork, which I quite like and think works very well as-is.

Decline

Trophy includes a stat called ‘Ruin,’ which basically tracks a PC’s physical and/or mental and/or moral decline. It can be gained when succeeding on a roll with a dark die as your top roll, or in other ways. This is one of the biggest superficial changes I would make for our game. Instead of a track that fills up, this will be a resource that depletes: Desire. It reflects your will to continue in the face of the inhospitable dungeon, and the drive that pushes you to risk your life to continue to pursue your goals. So, in every instance where you would gain Ruin in Trophy, here you lose Desire.

Whenever you gain a new point of Ruin, you also take on a Condition, which can be any number of things from an injury to a magical condition, and I think that works perfectly here.

When you reach 6 points of Ruin, you Lose Yourself and either die or flee into the wild. The same would be true when you deplete your Desire, though the options are a little less dire: you could disappear into the dungeon, but you may simply decide to return to the surface, or die knowing that resurrection is common and possible, but your journey with this party is finished.

Hunting

In Trophy Dark/Gold, you are hunting for treasure. You do this by making Hunt rolls, which gain you Hunt Tokens as well as information about the world. These rolls also include dark dice, though, and thus some degree of risk, including determining how dangerous the things you encounter on the way will be.

Spending one Hunt Token lets you find treasure worth one Gold: in our game, it will gain you an Ingredient. You can also gain Ingredients from defeating monsters, of course. This will be the biggest departure from Trophy: in the original, you can only reduce Ruin by betraying the party members in secret and making a roll to try to go unnoticed. In our game, you can increase Desire with Ingredients—by cooking and eating together as a group, of course. As many players as you spend Ingredients on a meal can roll to increase their Desire: 1-2 fails to increase it, 3-5 increases it by 1, and a 6 increases it by two. Alternately, you can let one PC in particularly dire straits use all of the Ingredients for that meal, meaning they can roll all of the dice and take the highest result. Players will explain which ingredients they’re using, how they’re combining them into a meal.

Players who are rolling to increase Desire will state what their PC would need to revive their will to continue, and the other PCs will strive to provide it through the food or the conversation that follows. If Conditions can be reasonably healed through food, rest, or conversation, those can be lost automatically at the same time, but some might need extra ingenuity from the party in the form of applying their Skills or Magic. A Condition can’t be shed until the associated Desire point is regained.

A player can also spent three Hunt Tokens to achieve something related to their Drive, the reason they have come into the dungeon. This might mean finding an ancient spell, a clue about the whereabouts of a lost loved one, or maybe just a hoard of gold and treasure. After spending three Tokens in this way, the player must roll three dice: on a 1-3, you lose a point of Desire, as the partial satisfaction of your wishes decreases your will to keep going. On a 4-6, you gain one point back (you cannot exceed 6) as more information has only whet your appetite to continue.

The Endgame

This section includes spoilers for the end of DiD! If you want to skip them, you can start reading again with the paragraph that begins, “The system I’ve imagined here…”

Okay, so the rules for eating a party member—

Not really, not really.

The final fight in the dungeon is naturally against the Dungeon Master. Deciding on this person’s personality and the desires they are enacting through their control of the dungeon will help the GM decide on what kinds of monsters, traps, or other obstacles they will set out to prevent the PCs from reaching them. One of the things the PCs can gradually discover is that the dungeon itself seems to have a will, and they are actively being prevented from reaching its heart.

The Rooted in Trophy game that inspired this whole thing is called Chalice, which is now a solo game, but the version I’ve been reading can still be found in the demo section at the link. Chalice tells the story of doomed Grail Knights. The section that really pinged my DiD radar was its description of how to structure the phases of challenge that the knights face: hope and confidence, then isolation and physical difficulty, instilling doubt and sapping resolve, supernatural trials that ask what they’re willing to compromise or sacrifice, and finally a requirement to bargain with their morality. I would propose structuring the dungeon in almost exactly the same way, with the exception of the final stage.

In DiD, it turns out that the Dungeon Master is not the true final trial: that is the demon at the heart of the dungeon, who offers you untold power to achieve your deepest wishes by becoming the Dungeon Master yourself. After the PCs defeat the Dungeon Master, any PCs with 5 or 6 Desire remaining are secretly offered the opportunity to become the next Dungeon Master and thus to fulfill their Drive and the deeper emotional needs or wounds that it represents. The remaining PCs must find a way to return them to themselves… or, if they cannot, they must abandon them as a new dungeon takes shape and the cycle begins again.

Jesse Ross, the creator of Trophy, writes in the SRD:

These are also the two key elements that make it a perfect fit for a this game. The characters must be desperate—pulled on by a sense of longing and need that ultimately the demon can turn against them. They also risk losing this very desire in the face of the perils of the dungeon, and have to find ways to hold onto the will to go on.

The system I’ve imagined here is much more forgiving than Trophy, and instead of incentivizing dissolution and betrayal, follows in the spirit of DiD by incentivizing teamwork and collective healing. However, I think the fact that the very resource that draws the PCs forward is the one that can destroy them in the end still makes this a good fit for Trophy. Unlike the heroic fantasy systems like D&D that it emulates on the surface, DiD is much more concerned with the questions that Trophy asks: what does it take to keep going? And what happens if you do?

I hope you had fun reading this—I certainly had fun writing it! Do share any thoughts or additions in the comments, and if you enjoyed, consider subscribing for more or sharing with a friend.