Dark Delves - 5E & OSR Adventures

Welcome to Dark Delves!

Dark Delves is a series of adventure ‘modules’, each self-contained and centered on a pseudo-medieval village. Dark Delves are designed for an Old School flavor, where the world is dangerous and doesn’t care about heroes — it’s up to you to survive, and if you’re skilled, smart, and above all lucky, maybe, just maybe you’ll thrive!

Each module includes notes on using it with Kabouter Games’s Spears & Spells fantasy RPG, as well as Fifth Edition and Old-School Revival (OSR) games like Basic Fantasy, Labyrinth Lord, and Dungeon Crawl Classics.

Design Intent

A while back, Ben Dutton (or whoever’s in charge of the Five Torches Deep Twitter account) wrote: 

"Potentially unpopular opinion: there’s a real shortage of vanilla, classic, easy to understand OSR and adventure content produced in the modern era. Y’know, like a village near a dungeon with a problem." 

Sitting in our mushroom workshop, the Kabouter Games team pondered this over coffee and stroopwafels. It didn’t take long before we waggled our conical red hats in agreement and started brainstorming. This book is what came out of that  brainstorming session: classic, easy-to-understand, “out and down” adventure modules for low-level characters. 

We created a village — Little Witham — in the same vein of our Legendary Locations line, with core NPCs and resources  adventurers need to do their thing. Then we set out to make some adventure modules using Johnn Four’s Five Room Dungeon paradigm. We tried to give each dungeon a fun twist. Additionally, we did our best to reward the classic player archetypes: Explorers, Slayers, Roleplayers, and Achievers.

Minimal Prep. Our main design parameter was to require minimal GM prep beyond reading the module before play. While it’s a good idea to familiarize yourself with the village around which the adventures orbit, you can ignore it if you want and drop the module into your own setting. Each module has multiple calls to action that introduce a relatively simple problem that needs solving.

Self-Contained. There’s no intricate, overarching story or campaign arc that requires a flowchart to run. You can string these adventures together or use them as one-shots. It’s totally up to you and your table. We give you the tools. We’re not going to dictate how you use them.

We hope Dark Delves excite and delight!

What You Get

• Five Old-School adventures complete with a starting location.
• Maps suitable for VTT use.
• VTT tokens for all creatures.
• A PDF of printable paper minis for your in-person game. 

Who Are We? 

Kabouter Games is a pico-publisher of tabletop role-playing games and adventures, creators of Spears & Spells, a rules-light fantasy RPG, and Toxandria, the FIRST complete game released under Chaosium Inc's Basic Roleplaying OGL! 

Kabouter Games creates adventures, GM support materials, stuff for players, and more, all for a variety of RPG systems - click here or the logo for our DriveThruRPG store (opens in new window).

Chief Kabouter R P Davis is a veteran RPG freelancer who's written and edited for a passel of pico-publishers, as well as bigger names like Kobold Press, Cubicle 7, Loresmyth, Onyx Path, and Wizards of the Coast. It was only a matter of time before he started his own thing.