Fifty-two years ago, five friends went down to the fifth level.
One came back. She’s eighty-one now,
and she wants to go down one last time.
The Long Way Down is a classic dungeon crawl: five levels of traps, monsters and dwarven ruins, with one difference. The party’s guide has been here before. Ida Crane is the last of the Merry Ruin, the most famous delving company the Deep ever saw. She is tiny, half deaf, gloriously rude, the best archer alive, and out of breath at the top of every stair. She knows every room in the dungeon, as it was half a century ago. She is often right. When she’s wrong, people get hurt.
The mountain is waking, and in five days the town will seal it forever. Ida says she wants to bring her friends’ bones home, and to find the man who ran and left them to die. On the way down, the dungeon starts replaying the past: silver ghosts of five young people, laughing and singing on their last descent, out of order, one level at a time. Somewhere below, the story she has believed for fifty-two years is waiting to be checked.
- 56pages
- 13scenes
- 5dungeon levels
- 5echoes of the past
- 5conversations
- 6set pieces
What makes it different
Then and now
Most rooms come with two descriptions: what Ida remembers, and what’s really there. Trust her and save time, or check and lose it. Her memory saves lives. Until it doesn’t.
A guide who can’t keep up
Ida’s Breath turns frailty into choices: rest and lose time against the blasting deadline, or press on and risk her. She will fight you on it. She will lose. She will be furious.
Funny first
Ida is the rudest person your players will ever be grateful to. Players earn Chalk, the adventure’s rewards, for painting the shot and for making Ida laugh, which is harder than killing a basilisk. A filthy song about a bishop and a barmaid runs through the whole dungeon, and a mushroom has been singing it for fifty years.
The Echoes
Five scenes from fifty-two years ago, replaying in the rooms where they happened, in the order the party finds them, not the order they happened. Assembling them is the mystery.
Conversation as play
Five structured scenes: a job interview, a bar full of old delvers’ worst stories, five candle stubs and one small true thing about each, a game of who you’ll be at eighty, and a last toast.
Any table
Companions scale the story from one player to four: an archer, a halfling with a frying pan and a notebook, and a rival company of young fools. Six backstory Threads let players write themselves in.
Moments your table will carry home
- A blue moth landing on a rope-shop counter after fifty-two years.
- “Mind the seventh step.” She’s exactly right.
- A bridge “solid as a mountain” that fell thirty years ago.
- Five candle stubs on a stone, one never named.
- An old woman young again, for three rounds, and running.
- A five-day countdown, and fuses at dawn.
“I asked him why once and he said it was so he’d never lose his place. I said what place. He said, ‘The place where I am.’”
Act Two · The Five Candles
Look inside
Pages from the free preview. Click any page to see it larger.
What’s in the free preview
The opening chapter, the rules for story-first play (Chalk, Then and Now, the Echoes, and Ida’s Breath), the backstory Threads, the town and the five levels of the Deep, and all of Act One, down to the bottom of the Grand Stair. Every page carries its page number from the full edition. It ends with three short glimpses of Act Two, chosen to show how deep it goes without giving away what’s at the bottom. Read the preview.
