Introduction

The Underworld blasphemes the earth under the City at the center of the world. Most games begin with adventurers taking their first steps through the gate to the Underworld from the City.

Tarot

What’s up with the name?

This game uses tarot cards (instead of dice) in its procedures and mechanics. Chapter 1 provides an overview of the basic mechanics used during the flow of the game.

Players

Players take on the role of adventurers. Adventurers descend into the Underworld in search of impossible things that can never exist on the surface world. They explore collectively as a guild—a chartered union of adventurers.

• The procedure for creating adventurers and filling out the adventurer sheet is found in Chapter 2: The Adventurer on page 15.

• The procedure for filling out the guild roster is found in Chapter 3: The Guild on page 41.

The Game Master

Before play, the Game Master (GM) takes on the responsibility of using the tools in this book to create a series of interconnected dungeons and populating them with interesting challenges. This process takes one or two lazy Sunday afternoons.

• A procedure for creating interesting monsters is found in Appendix C: Dungeon Denizens on page 241.

• A procedure for creating an evocative City for the players’ home is found in Appendix D: City Creation on page 289.

• A procedure for creating a series of dungeons that connect to form the Underworld is found in Appendix E: Underworld Creation on page 329.

During play, the GM takes on the role of a referee who arbitrates the actions of the players’ adventurers within the context of the City and the Underworld.

• General advice for running the game is found in Chapter 10: The Worm Turns on page 175.

The game—and indeed, this very book—contains mature, fantastic themes that can range from sophomoric to graphic. As adults, work together to find what works for your group and leave the rest behind. Be kind. It is the shared responsibility of everybody at the table to ensure that the trials, battles, romances, successes, and failures had by the guild are fun for everybody involved. The title of this book is taken from Italo Calvino’s The Castle of Crossed Destinies (Italian: Il castello dei destini incrociati). The experimental novel’s narrative details a group of pilgrims who find themselves unable to speak. Thus impaired, they use a set of tarot cards to illustrate their backgrounds and tell each other stories. Because this game also uses tarot cards to tell stories, the allusion seemed apt.

Why tarot? (sidebar)

Tarot cards are informationally rich. They have number, suit, direction (upright vs. reversed), and symbolic meaning. This information is persistent. You can have cards in your hand, drawn from the top of the deck, drawn from the discard pile, facedown in front of you, etc. This is a rich space for game play.

Plus, they’re just cooler and more interesting to look at than playing cards.

Tarot cards are available online and in spooky new age stores that sell crystals and stuff. You’ll want a deck similar to a “classic” Rider-Waite deck: 78 cards total, with a minor arcana consisting of four suits of ten numbered cards + four face cards and a major arcana numbered 0 to 21.

Game Principles

His Majesty the Worm aims to make dungeon exploration fun. It forefronts what might otherwise be fringe rules for food, light, and time, and shines the spotlight on the visceral experience of the dungeon crawl.

The (Demi-) Human Experience

This game focuses on the personal experiences of the adventurers exploring the mythic Underworld.

Players portray fantastic characters. However, the game is designed to make these adventurers feel real through a persistent focus on basic “human” needs. Adventurers will become cold, drunk, hungry, horny, stressed, happy, hurt, etc. This allows players to immerse themselves in the experience of their adventurer.

The essential meta-currency of the game are the Bonds the adventurers share with each other. When players role-play with their guild-mates, they charge these Bonds. Players then spend these charges to recover from the mental and physical ailments accumulated from dungeon delving.

Rulings, Not Rules

Ultimately, no rule system completely encapsulates every possibility of player action—and that’s the fun of tabletop RPGs! There are fringe cases, strange situations, and unconsidered possibilities that inevitably arise during play. Having a GM to arbitrate these situations is one of the advantages of tabletop games compared to other game forms. As such, these rules are presented as a resource with the expectation that there will be ample homebrewing and hacking.

When unexpected questions arise, GMs can adapt the rules to fit the situation at hand. When that situation comes up frequently, the GM and the table can collaborate on turning that ruling into a more hard-and-fast rule. And, when hard-and-fast rules seem to fail the tests of common sense, verisimilitude, and fun, it’s the GM’s responsibility to make calls that change the rules for the better.

The Scaling Underworld

The Underworld is not a place of balanced encounters. There’s no expectation that the players are ever in a “level-appropriate” place. A sleeping dragon might be an unbeatable guardian for a beginning party and must be snuck past. A somewhat more experienced guild might try and defeat the dragon to win her treasure. Either way, the dragon provides some type of challenge for the adventurers, whether they are novices or veterans.

Players should feel empowered to experiment and take risks, with all the rewards and consequences that risk entails.

The Deadly Underworld

The game—and the adventurer sheet—are actually pretty simple. There are few numbers and not a lot of special powers or abilities. There are no “spot checks”—only players describing where and how they’re searching. There are no “disarm trap” skills—only players describing how they move the knife across the tripwire or tap their ten-foot pole ahead of them.

Ultimately, this game is about exploring the Underworld. As such, there are no abilities that mitigate the essential dangers of the dungeon.

• Darkness is always dangerous. No adventurer can see perfectly in the dark.

• Rations and torches are always precious. There are no “conjure food” spells, and the arts that sorcerers have to conjure light are dangerous. Being bereft of light or food means death.

• Traps must always be navigated. There are no “perception” or “disarm” skills. Each trap is a unique puzzle to be solved.

• Combat is always deadly. Healing is laborious, requiring that the adventurers undertake a Camp Phase. Adventurers draw their swords at their own peril.

Whimsy

A fair bit of His Majesty the Worm is whimsy . This is an RPG that knows it’s an RPG. You play adventurers who know they are adventurers. It is playful with its tropes. It’s unpretentious. During a game, both players and GMs will deconstruct and reconstruct common dungeon delving tropes. This should be fun. This should be delightful.