DELVE is an extraction RPG because every expedition is organized around a return decision.
A workshop or world institution publishes an economic contract with a target, offered equipment, promised compensation, and desired return. A DELVE party enters a procedurally generated dungeon carrying that intent into an ecology that can answer it.
DELVE is cooperative PvE. Hostile delver PvP is not its default source of uncertainty. The living dungeon owns that pressure through changing routes, remembered tactics, ecological responses, deceptive opportunities, and the accumulating consequences of intrusion.
The expedition tension
During a run, the party repeatedly chooses among:
- satisfying the contracted quota;
- pursuing an unexpected discovery;
- recovering a fallen delver or lost equipment;
- preserving scarce supplies;
- retreating before the dungeon’s response escalates;
- pressing deeper for a return that may transform both modes.
Extraction is successful when something meaningful returns, not only when the original number is met. Injuries, maps, creature observations, evidence of core behaviour, broken equipment, and expedition history are persistent outputs alongside material.
Failure must hurt without deleting the evening. A retreat can return partial value. A lost expedition can leave maps, testimony, injuries, debts, recoverable bodies, and equipment that has become dungeon matter. These consequences can create rescue and salvage work rather than reducing failure to an empty inventory screen.
The living target
The dungeon is not a loot table around combat rooms. It remembers pressure, adapts to recurring techniques, moves valuables, develops counter-organisms, and may learn the signatures of particular workshops or parties.
Because bounded delving is part of its life, the core permits and produces opportunity while resisting intrusion. The extraction field is therefore neither a passive mine nor a moral patient waiting to be left untouched. It is a participant whose goals are only partly legible.
The return stroke
HOLD players process what returns and live with what does not. Equipment lost below becomes dungeon matter. A successful material stream enables automation and raises future demand. A discovered ecological warning may be worth more than the quota if anyone believes it.
The two modes meet in this argument over what the expedition was for.
Preparation without clerical labour
Inventory choices inside the dungeon are tactical pressure. Reconstructing the same equipment by hand between expeditions is not.
Delvers manage equipped gear, limited carried inventory, unlimited private Hold storage, and five saved loadouts. Restore fills what remains available and exposes every missing, damaged, inaccessible, or over-capacity entry for player resolution. Workshops and institutions supply equipment and explicit repair or refit services through ordinary custody and contract terms. The founding distribution policy initially supplies an expedition path when no workshop player is online, but later governance or material failure may remove that local path. The interface exposes the responsible shortage, policy, or failed service and the available responses instead of inventing replacement gear.
Progression and time
Progression should add verbs, knowledge, roles, routes, and equipment interactions rather than merely raising gear score. Persistent achievement is not periodically erased to repair an inflated economy. The world creates new pressures and needs instead of relying upon universal seasonal wipes.
Expeditions support different commitments. A party can satisfy a narrow contract and leave, or continue through deeper thresholds for discoveries and greater risk. Solo and smaller-party work remains viable where the contract and dungeon conditions support it rather than being treated as a defective version of a full party.
Three design commitments follow:
- every expedition produces a story, including failure;
- every extracted object has a use, claimant, or discoverable significance;
- every preparation step is somebody’s play, not an administrative toll passed between modes.