Saturday Night Delves: A Brief Introduction

What is the Saturday Night Delve Series?

Saturday Night Delves are a series of fourthcore dungeon adventures designed to be played in a single 4-hour session. Published quarterly, Saturday Night Delves feature extremely difficult encounters, a variety of challenges ranging from combat to puzzles, and evocative adventure sites that are both memorable and sinister.

Packaged with a complete suite of materials for DMs and players, SNDs are a great way to throw down an evening of high-energy, high-stakes, tournament-style Dungeons & Dragons.

Overview

Saturday Night Delves takes its name and, in part, its inspiration from the introduction to Stonehell Dungeon, a Labyrinth Lord megadungeon adventure designed by Michael Curtis. In it, he writes that:

Parallel to Curtis’s conception of Stonehell Dungeon, SNDs are designed to be – first and foremost – fun, straightforward dungeon crawls filled with iconic locales, open-ended challenges, and not a few touches of the strange, swingy, unpredictable, and fantastic.

While SNDs are designed for groups playing at home, they nonetheless make great events for conventions, games days, and tournaments.

Pure Fourthcore

Saturday Night Delves are a complete expression of the fourthcore design philosophy. Unlike the articles published on this blog, which are fragmentary and only give a partial, decontextualized picture of fourthcore, adventures in the SND series show how everything snaps together in gratuitous detail.

In fact, much of what you’ll see in a SND are applications of the crunch and concepts introduced on this site – and some not yet introduced.

Complete One-Shot Experience

Each SND comes with everything you need to run it, including:

• complete adventure notes,
• detailed (but legible) maps,
• 6 diverse pregenerated characters,
• magic item and treasure cards,
• rumor, equipment, and wraith cards,
• monster initiative and reference stand-ups,
• player initiative and reference stand-ups, and
• handouts and illustrations.

Moreover, each encounter in an SND is marked with symbols that denote its emphasis (combat, trap, puzzle, or roleplaying), its danger level, and whether or not a battle mat and miniatures are required. Not only does this let DMs see what’s coming at-a-glance and prepare appropriately, but it also gives those looking to adapt individual rooms an easy way to find what they’re looking for.

Tournament Play

The emphasis of every SND is on the challenge, the act of playing through a dramatic medieval obstacle course designed to test both character build and player skill. Like the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Tournament and the D&D Ultimate Delves, the object of an SND is to make it as far as possible as quickly as possible while collecting treasure and trophies along the way. To this end, adventures in the SND series feature an optional scoring system Dungeon Masters can use to rate the performance of the dungeoneers and compare them against other groups. Points are awarded for defeating monsters, overcoming traps, solving puzzles, and exploring new areas. Points are lost if someone is killed, if resources are depleted, or if the heroes dawdle.

Competitive or not, SNDs are nonlinear and eminently replayable. There is no one correct path through the dungeon, though some paths reveal themselves only to skilled, perceptive, or lucky dungeoneers. Every playthrough – even by the same group of adventurers – is bound to be different.

Bleeding Edge

Adventures in the SND series strive to reflect the latest in 4th Edition math, presentation, and design, shining the torchlight on new or under-utilized aspects of the game like rituals and alternative rewards. SNDs draw on the successful developments of published adventures past while offering its own innovations – all in an effort to create a qualitatively different play experience from anything that’s come before.

That said, SNDs also aim to reinvigorate the tradition of adventures like the Tomb of Horrors and the Labyrinth of Madness by blending classic dungeon-crawling tropes with modern design principles and rules tech. The SND series is not an attempt at retraux-cloning or an ‘old-school’ project. It is, instead, an homage tumbling into a wholehearted embrace of D&D 4th Edition; an expression of the system free from the constraints imposed by the tastes and taboos of designers both professional and amateur.

SND01: Revenge of the Iron Lich

The first Saturday Night Delve, Revenge of the Iron Lich, will be released for free on February 22nd, 2011. In this adventure, a group of 16th-level heroes must stead the Tomb of the Iron Lich and destroy him before they succumb to the corrosive gas that fills every chamber of the dungeon. The traps, tricks, and guardians that ward the Tomb are as lethal as they are numerous, so only the most skilled, courageous, and well-armed parties should dare enter.

More information – including a preview – will drop on Thursday! Die standing up!