Sub Rosa: LitRPG Dungeons

A text-based LitRPG, descended from classic MUDs and rewritten for the phone in your pocket.

You do not play a run. You read a book. Each book is five chapters, each chapter a place descended at four depths, and one protagonist walks all twenty of them: your level, your virtues, your health, your gear, your relics and your purse come with you from one descent to the next. There are ten books, in fantasy, pirates, sci-fi, horror and western.

Every dungeon is written whole before you arrive, every room in view of the others, so what one room plants a later one pays off, and the road out of one chapter is the road into the next. The walls describe themselves. Enemies have reasons to be there. Choices in narrative rooms are not dice rolls dressed up: they shape what the dungeon becomes.

Experience is earned where you earn it. Kill something or read a room truly and the numbers appear beneath the prose, in their own hand: the roll, the damage, the gold, the experience. Cross a level in a corridor and you place the point there, in the room that gave it to you. At the third level, the fifth and the seventh, the dungeon offers you a trait to keep.

Chapters open in order. Clear a place at all four depths and the next one opens; lose a descent and the chapter in progress is taken back, though nothing you carried home is. What you take home from a victory is a relic or more, halved in strength but kept in memory, and every descent you finish is written into your chronicle, re-readable as prose long after the dungeon is closed.

Combat is four virtues and a single die. Strike, brace, speak, study, each resolved in candlelight.

Once a week, a single dungeon is drawn for everyone who dares it. Same rooms, same seed. Descend it and see where you stand: survivor, contender, ascendant, or paragon. Place well and the week pays you in coin and a trophy for your study. Earlier weeks stay on the shelf as unranked practice. (A subscriber feature.)

Features
- A protagonist per book who levels, learns and lasts all twenty descents
- Ten books across five settings, five chapters each, four depths a chapter
- Dungeons written whole, each chapter leading into the next
- Callings, virtues and passive traits: a build that grows over a whole book
- The chronicle: every descent you finish, kept and re-readable
- Relics, gear and a purse that survive the door
- The weekly ranked descent: one shared dungeon, standings, and prizes
- Trials and ironman: harder descents for richer rewards
- Manuscript aesthetic: dark parchment, single-candle light

Subscription
Sub Rosa is free to begin. Free readers open one fantasy or pirates book and walk its first chapter at three depths. A subscription, monthly or a one-time lifetime purchase through your App Store account, opens every book at every depth, a protagonist in each, ironman, the weekly ranked descent, and a new book each month.

Sub rosa: under the rose. What is said under the rose stays there.

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