The desk
Write a dungeon people can finish
Pick some floors, say what they may bring, and send somebody the link. You do not have to write a word of it if you would rather not: the shelf is full of rooms other people wrote, and six of those is a real dungeon.
What makes this different
Nothing you build goes out untested. The moment you save, the same solver that works out the daily’s par runs your dungeon against every character you allow, and tells you the truth about it.
Three lines of a report, made up here as an example:
- Nobody gets out of this one. The best character you allow, playing perfectly, runs out of Vigour on floor four.
- Floor 3: everybody takes “Cut the rope”. The others are furniture.
- Par is 41. Nine of the thirty-six characters you allow get out alive. This one is Stiff.
The difficulty word is worked out, never chosen, so nobody can call a walkover brutal.
Yours
What the desk checks, and when
Two passes, and they run at different speeds because they cost different amounts. The first is instant and fires on every keystroke: it counts your floors, reads your doors and looks for things that are wrong on their face. A floor with no name. A floor with only one way to try it. A check with no number to beat. Two doors on one floor sharing an id, which sounds like pedantry and is not: the runner resolves a submitted move by finding the first match, so a duplicate id means the wrong door opens.
The second pass is the solver, and it is the expensive one, so it only runs when something that can move par has changed. Prose cannot move par. You can rewrite every sentence in the dungeon all afternoon and it will not solve once, which is deliberate: writing is what an author is doing most of the time. Change a target number, a price, a mark or the shelf, and it goes again.
What it does then is enumerate every distinct character your settings allow, play each one perfectly all the way down, and report what happened. It can do that exactly, with no sampling and no guesswork, because every room throws its die before the player picks a door. There is no probability in the problem, so the best line for a given character is a walk rather than an expectation. That is the whole reason this feature exists: a level editor that can tell you your level is impossible is a rare thing, and it is only possible here by accident of the engine.
The caps exist to keep that honest rather than to be tidy. 3 to 8 floors, 1 to 4 Callings allowed, and 2 to 6 things on the shelf. They were measured, not chosen: at the top of that range a dungeon solves in about a quarter of a second, and letting everything through would take several seconds, which is a desk that feels broken while it thinks.
What a rejected dungeon looks like
Almost nothing is rejected. A block is kept for a dungeon that is not a dungeon, and there are four ways to write one.
Nobody gets out. The best character you allow, playing perfectly, runs out of Vigour on a floor the report names for you. That is usually a pricing problem two floors above the one you are staring at.
Only one or two kinds of person get out. That is a lock rather than a dungeon: you have not written a challenge, you have written a key and a keyhole, and everybody who does not happen to be carrying the key has an unwinnable evening.
A door that can never open. Marks are the things a floor leaves on you, and a lower floor can ask about them. Put a door on floor four that wants the lamp, and hand the lamp out nowhere above floor four, and you have written dead content. Neither floor looks wrong on its own, which is why this one is worth a machine.
A floor with no way through. Every floor needs one door that always works and always costs, and at least one of those has to be open to everybody. Gate the checks all you like. Gate the guaranteed door and somebody arrives carrying nothing, meets two checks they can fail and a door that will not open, and stops. A floor is a price, never a wall.
Everything else warns and publishes anyway. You will be told when one door on a floor is taken by everybody and the others are furniture, when a Calling has quietly become a requirement instead of a choice, when a mark is handed out that no door ever reads, and when nine tenths of the people you allow stroll out of it. None of that stops you. A brutal dungeon is sometimes the point, and a validator that refuses taste is a validator people learn to route around.
The one thing you never get to choose is the difficulty word on the card. A walk, Fair, Stiff, Brutal, Barely possible: it is derived from how many of your allowed characters survive, so nobody can call a walkover brutal. The Hall explains how the rest of the card is worked out, and tonight's official dungeon is the same engine if you would rather play one before writing one.