DELVE/HOLD is a small persistent-world experiment about the relationship between living dungeons, the people who enter them, and the workshops that turn their spoils into an industrial civilization.
The title changes emphasis with the player’s perspective:
- DELVE is a cooperative dungeon RPG. Delvers accept contracts, enter procedurally generated cores, survive their ecologies, and bring home materials and knowledge.
- HOLD is a cozy social incremental. A single mage performs useful work by hand, encodes those actions into runes, and gradually grows a workshop into a magical factory shared with a graph of neighboring players.
They are not separate worlds. CultMesh carries one typed world into two deliberately incomplete projections.
The old bargain
Dungeon cores need to be delved. Intrusion is part of their lifecycle: it exercises defenses, circulates mana and matter, exposes mature growths, and gives the core the contest through which it learns and renews itself.
Industrial extraction must therefore remain legible to dungeon instinct as traditional delving. A drill driven directly into a crystal chamber reads as injury. Delvers entering through recognized boundaries, accepting danger, overcoming resistance, taking bounded rewards, and leaving again satisfy the older metabolic grammar.
The factory cannot replace adventurers. It can equip, schedule, measure, abstract, and increasingly misunderstand them.