Now seeking funding via Kickstarter, Into the Dungeon is an illustrated choose-your-own-path gamebook with hundreds of different paths through the story. To be published as an A5 softcover with a matt-laminated cover, Into the Dungeon will feature 100+ pages, with black & white illustrations of monsters, dark passageways, traps, characters, loot and more, as well as instructions and note pages that you can use to keep track of playthroughs.
In Into the Dungeon you’ll find yourself down in the dungeon eagerly looking for treasure and adventure. After finally tracking down an entrance that you’d heard rumours of located in the ancient ruins of a castle, you may, on certain paths, discover more about its previous owner and history.
The book features four pre-made characters with various skills and motivations (some of them are looking for gold, others for arcane artefacts or to restore their reputation) or you can create your own playable character, rolling a 6-sided dice to determine their abilities. Some of the pre-made characters are more challenging to play than others, and trying different approaches during your adventures will reveal new stories and endings – and the more you play, the more you’ll find out which paths are best avoided…
Into the Dungeon will be packed full of illustrations by a team of four professional artists and designers who specialise in monsters, dungeons and fantasy narratives: Hari Conner (author and award-winning comic artist and illustrator); Felix Miall (traditional media illustrator); Faye Stacey (graphic designer and illustrator, and creator of the choose-your-own-path artbook Inkblot Forest); and Letty Wilson (award-winning comic author/illustrator).
Focussed on narrative and player choices, Into the Dungeon has been designed as a fun and accessible gamebook with a balance of challenging gameplay and options for players that wish to charm, outwit, or run away from any monsters they encounter. Accessible to players both familiar and unfamiliar with interactive gamebooks and RPGs, Into the Dungeon has a set of choices for every challenge that you will meet during your adventure. Usually your player stats will determine how the encounter develops, but each is unique: e.g. it may be that a player with high strength will fare better in a fight, but they might not. Players will also find items and information that may help or hinder progress, and discover unique endings for the set characters if they locate the right treasures.
Kickstarter backers can pledge for extra rewards such as a special Game kit (wooden die, exclusive foil-stamped pencil and notebook), wooden pins, T-shirt and original artwork. The Adventurer’s kit and above tiers also come with a set of achievements in the form of ‘achievement bingo,’ where you try and hit four squares in a row with the smallest number of playthroughs.
The Into the Dungeon Kickstarter campaign – which has already surpassed its funding goal by a considerable amount – will conclude on November 1st.
It’s amazing how much money that Kickstarter has raised for what looks like a simple 100 section gamebook. Perhaps the designers are well known?
I agree – they all must be well known with a lot of enthusiastic followers keen to support their work. Let’s hope the adventure itself is worthwhile.
Thanks for bringing this to light. If some of these backers would be interested in other gamebooks, then I reckon we might all enjoy some new recruits for the community.
Hopefully these sort of projects do introduce new people to interactive fiction in all of its various forms. It certainly shows that a healthy appetite for the format does exist.