Into the Depths

Into the Depths is a solo, push-your-luck, campaign card game. It's analog, meaning you'll need a surface and a standard deck of cards to play. Something to write with and on is needed, too, but you can use a digital notepad or Google Doc or whatever.

Do You Dare Enter the Depths?

As shopkeeper and owner of The Summit Shop, at the foot of the Mountainy mountains, you struggle to earn enough to survive. One day, you discover an old mine that's full of trinkets and goodies.

After earning enough to comfortably make it through the week, you discover a crack that leads deeper.

Over the weeks, you find new, mysterious ways to go deeper into the mines. With each new depth comes more valuable trinkets, but also a shadowy figure determined to make you leave. And a drill-powered crystal of darkness. Then a hammer made of pure shadow, visible only by the space where no light exists... *CAN* exist... Is it... talking to you?

Mysteries surround you, but all you care about is that you get MORE...

No Printing Required

While this IS an analog game, you don't have to print anything. I do recommend opening the PDF twice, though: once to follow along with the game, and again to check on the card effects (after you reach chapter two).

This Is a LONG Game, But You Can Make It Shorter

Playing through the entire game should take an estimated 2-3 hours total, but may take more or less time depending on your reading speed. The document is 40 pages long, including the cover and table of contents: about 2/3 narrative and 1/3 rules for playing through the five chapters. The full game also requires playing through most, if not all, of the first four chapters at least once.

To make the game shorter, you may pretend you've failed at each chapter as many times as necessary to unlock all of the upgrades to your boons for that chapter. Doing so does skip over part of the meaning of the game, though, and detracts from the experience. The game is purposely set up to be very difficult at the beginning of each chapter, then get easier and easier, both to capture the repetitive nature of mining and also to show you that repeating something makes you better at it. Even when luck is a huge part of the driving force.

Postmortem!

I wrote an in-depth postmortem covering inspiration, how the weekend went, future plans, lessons learned, and more. You can read about it on my blog here.

Inspiration - SPOILERS HERE for Alan Wake 2 and This Game

In case you don't wanna read the 5,500-word postmortem, here's a tl;dr about the inspiration for this game

This game is a combination of Lord of the Rings' mining too deep and discovering the balrog + Alan Wake (especially Alan Wake 2). The premise was based upon LotR, but I leaned HEAVILY on Alan Wake 2: the shadow is based on the Yungian struggle of self, as you battle against your own greed. In fact, the shadow represents yourself, although this first version of the game takes some twists at the end that don't fit that narrative lol. It also uses the darkness of Alan Wake in that it seems alive, it rebels and toys with your mind, it burns away with light... The lantern of inner light is a blatant representation of your own struggle against that darkness, although gamified to hopefully make that slightly less obvious.

In fact, the original idea had you play through the game and lose, and then discover that you've been taken in. You then learn that "IT'S A SPIRAL!" and play again, but with flashes of insight throughout, a massive steal from Alan Wake 2 lol.

It was a blast to make what's essentially a fangame, while not actually utilizing either world, so that it's very much its own thing. It's also far darker than a lot of what I create, and I was able to lean into the graphics a lot more despite using Canva to create and use images. This was the most I've played with imagery, altering and combining and such, in a single game.