The Four Phases

Each adventurer has a personal quest (p. 24) that compels them into the lightless depths. Once their quest is fulfilled, they can finally retire and rest. Until then, it is a cycle of descending into the Underworld and returning to the City to restock and rest.

The flow of the game consists of four distinct phases, each with its own style of play and rules.

The Crawl Phase

During the Crawl Phase, the guild explores an interconnected network of dungeons called the Underworld (p. 85). During this phase, adventurers test their wits and skills against inhospitable forces in order to fulfill their quests. During the Crawl, players charge their Bonds with their guild-mates (p. 26). The Crawl is where you’ll spend most of your time.

The Challenge Phase

A Challenge Phase occurs when you need to focus on the beat-by-beat action (p. 107). This phase is when choices and consequences bear the hideous, overripe fruit of rotting bodies and terminated possibilities! During a Challenge, play moves from a freeform style to a tactical system. Play is split up into rounds and turns, during which people perform various specific actions.

“Many sink down and few return to the sunlit lands.”

The Camp Phase

As the adventurers get worn down by journeys and battles, they’ll pause and use the Camp Phase (p. 135). The focus of the Camp Phase is interpersonal role-playing, drama, and connections between members of the guild. During this phase, players burn charged Bonds to rest and recover.

The City Phase

Each delve is punctuated by the City Phase (p. 147). The City Phase resolves the entire sequence and gives the guild a chance to spend their hard-earned loot, advance their long-term agendas, and reflect on their progress.

– The Silver Chair, C.S. Lewis

Against canon (sidebar)

Throughout this book, there are references to an implied setting that are never elaborated on. We name and discuss people, places, and historical events without describing them in great detail. This is intentional.

Instead of providing a gazetteer with everything carefully plotted out and a hundred-and-one nonsense fantasy words for you to memorize, we’ve painted with a fairly broad brush. It’s our intention to give you a sense of scope and flavor without bogging the game down with lore to memorize or binding your story to a metaplot. The game world and the storyline are intended to vary from table to table.

It’s our hope that the implied setting of His Majesty the Worm stimulates your imagination and allows you to tell the stories that you want to tell.

As the setting details provided invoke a certain aesthetic for you, we hope that you will use them. As the setting details provided feel frustrating in their obscurity or contradictions, we hope you will change them, ignore them, or tear them physically from the book. At times, the provided material will be inherently contradictory, obliging you to make a decision about which version you want to be “true.”