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Today we updated the Homepage of Lathmar: The Fallen Depths.

Lathmar: The Fallen Depths | Dark Fantasy Dungeon Crawler

There is new Race and Guild information page, with a cool graphics effect, thanks to a supporter of this project.

u/The GM Craft Tavern is the portrait provider of the game.

Thanks to all who are part of this community project.

--> Free Game Material: Ancient Dungeons 1 <--

Full PDF available

If you read the article about "Ancient Dungeons 1: Hawara" you maybe asked you, can I use this place in my TTRPG group? How can I use this setting?

I prepared a brief introduction of the Hawara campaign for your table, with history, Quest-Ideas and Random Encounters. You can even integrate Lathmar: The Fallen Depths in this story-line, because with it's malfunctioning doors there could be a portal to or from the City of Lathmar to the remnants of Hawara.

Are you interested in a setting in the "living" Hawara? In the time of the Pharao? Let me know, and I can prepare more gaming material for this setting.

Series: Real Ancient Dungeons (1)

https://www.patreon.com/posts/160226303

What the Ancient Egyptian Labyrinth of Hawara Can Teach Modern RPG Designers

When most of us think about dungeon design, we usually look at games for inspiration. Wizardry, Bard's Tale, Dungeon Master, Eye of the Beholder, Dungeons & Dragons. We study maps, encounter design, progression systems, and puzzle layouts. But recently I stumbled across something that made me stop and think.

What if some of the oldest dungeon design ideas are not found in games at all?

While researching historical labyrinths, I came across an old reconstruction of the legendary Egyptian Labyrinth of Hawara. At first glance it looks almost like a dungeon map from an RPG sourcebook. There are distinct sections, a large central complex, themed areas, and a layout that seems designed to guide visitors through a series of increasingly important spaces.

The surprising part is that this structure may have been built nearly four thousand years ago.

The Lost Wonder of Hawara

Today almost nothing remains of the original building. The Labyrinth of Hawara was constructed during the reign of Pharaoh Amenemhat III around 1800 BC, and over the centuries its stones were dismantled and reused elsewhere. What survives are archaeological traces and the accounts of ancient writers who saw it while parts of it still stood.

The most famous description comes from Herodotus, who visited Egypt around 450 BC. According to him, the labyrinth contained twelve great courtyards, thousands of chambers, and a bewildering network of corridors spread across multiple levels. He even claimed that it surpassed the pyramids in magnificence.

Ancient historians were not always known for understatement, and it is entirely possible that Herodotus exaggerated what he saw. Yet even other ancient writers described the complex as one of the greatest architectural wonders of Egypt. Whatever the exact numbers may have been, everyone agreed on one thing: this place was enormous.

Unfortunately, that mystery is part of what makes Hawara so fascinating today. Archaeologists have uncovered foundations and fragments of the site, but nobody can say with certainty what the complete structure looked like. In a strange way, its disappearance has become part of its legend.

Why Build Something So Complicated?

What fascinates me is not the size of the labyrinth but its purpose.

Unlike the dungeons we explore in RPGs, Hawara was never built to contain monsters, treasure chests, or wandering adventurers. It appears to have served as an administrative center, a religious complex, a ceremonial site, and possibly part of a funerary monument connected to the nearby pyramid of Amenemhat III.

In many ways it functioned like a city enclosed within a single building.

Priests, officials, guards, workers, and visitors all moved through different areas that served different functions. Access was controlled. Certain rooms were public, others restricted. Some spaces were intended for administration, others for worship.

When you think about it, that is surprisingly close to how many memorable RPG locations are designed.

The best dungeons rarely feel like random collections of rooms. They feel like places that once had a purpose. Someone built them. Someone lived there. Someone used those halls long before the player arrived.

That idea is much older than fantasy gaming.

The Dungeon Before Dungeons

One of the biggest misconceptions in fantasy design is that dungeons exist solely to provide combat encounters.

Historically, large enclosed complexes were built because they solved practical problems. They protected valuable objects, controlled movement, reinforced social hierarchy, and created separation between ordinary people and sacred or politically important spaces.

The deeper someone travelled into such a complex, the more restricted access became.

That pattern appears again and again in modern RPGs. The outer halls are relatively safe. The inner chambers belong to priests, nobles, cultists, or powerful creatures. The final destination is reserved for the most important figure in the entire structure.

Whether that figure is a king, a lich, a dragon, or a mad wizard depends on the setting.

The principle itself has remained remarkably consistent for thousands of years.

Architecture tells a story before a single word of dialogue is spoken.

Lessons for Dungeon Designers

The more I studied the reconstructions of Hawara, the more I found myself thinking about dungeon design in Lathmar and other classic RPGs.

One lesson is the importance of distinct regions. Many reconstructions divide the labyrinth into separate sections, each with its own symbolic purpose. Modern players respond to exactly the same idea. They remember the Spider Caves, the Ancient Crypts, or the Hall of Kings. They rarely remember corridor number thirty-seven.

Another lesson is the value of a central hub. Several reconstructions place a massive central structure at the heart of the labyrinth, with surrounding sections branching outward. Modern dungeon crawlers use this approach constantly because it encourages exploration while helping players maintain a sense of orientation. Players can venture into one section, return to a familiar location, and then choose a different route.

Perhaps the most interesting lesson is the power of mystery.

Nobody knows exactly what Hawara looked like. That uncertainty has allowed generations of historians, artists, and dreamers to imagine their own versions of the labyrinth. In game design we often feel pressure to explain everything, but some of the most memorable locations are memorable precisely because they leave questions unanswered.

Who built this place?

Why was it abandoned?

What happened here?

Sometimes mystery creates stronger memories than explanation.

The Building Is The Adventure

Many RPG dungeons are designed as obstacle courses. Players move from encounter to encounter, collect rewards, and eventually defeat a boss waiting at the end.

The descriptions of Hawara suggest something very different.

Visitors were meant to be impressed by the structure itself. The scale, complexity, and symbolism of the building were part of the experience. Long before anyone talked about environmental storytelling, architects were already using physical space to create emotion.

People entered these places and felt small.

That is a powerful design lesson.

Sometimes the dungeon itself should be the most memorable character in the adventure.

When players think back on their favorite RPG experiences years later, they often remember places before they remember statistics. They remember the city beneath the mountain, the endless catacombs, the forgotten temple, or the haunted fortress.

The location becomes part of the story.

More about questing in this post ⚔️ To Hack or to Quest — That Is the Question | Patreon

Four Thousand Years Later

What I find most remarkable about Hawara is that it was never intended as entertainment. It was built to demonstrate power, inspire awe, and create a sense of mystery. Yet thousands of years later it still captures our imagination in much the same way a great dungeon does.

As dungeon designers, game masters, and RPG fans, we often search for inspiration in other games. Sometimes it is worth looking much further back.

Long before the first tabletop campaign, before the first dungeon crawler, and before anyone rolled a twenty-sided die, people were already creating spaces that inspired curiosity, exploration, and wonder.

The technology has changed.

The goals have not.

Next time we'll leave Egypt behind and travel to Crete, where another famous labyrinth awaits us. Unlike Hawara, that one supposedly had a monster waiting at its center.

And every dungeon crawler knows exactly how that story begins.

Where do you want to go? What unknown place should we explore in this series about real dungeons?

As always. many thanks for reading. Please leave a comment or feedback.
Michael aka Mufti999

Disclaimer
All texts and pictures are © protected and may not be reproduced or modified without prior permission.
If you share my work, please include a link to the original post.
I always appreciate a quick message letting me know where Lathmar content appears. Thank you for your support.

I took the Armwrestling rules from Lathmar TFD and released it as D20 rules for TTRPGs.
Please test it and leave a comment.

Free game material:  D20 Armwrestling Rules

#DRPG #TTRPG #D20 #DnD #Pathfinder #Dejenol #Mordor

Follow up post to Quest that left Scars : r/DRPG
Original post on: Who the f*** is ALICE? | Patreon

Before there are any more negative comments about me trying to rip you all off with Patreon – this is my free main blog, and I invite you to follow me there as I develop my DRPG.

From ALICE to Lathmar: How a 1960s Chatbot Ended Up in My Tavern

There is a woman named ALICE who has been answering questions since 1995.

She is not a real woman. She is a chatbot. She does not get tired, she does not have feelings (or so she claims), and she has been asked "Are you human?" approximately four million times and has never once given a straight answer.

She is also, in a roundabout way, one of the reasons the NPCs in Lathmar's tavern are about to get considerably more interesting.

Let me explain.

It Started With a Psychiatrist

Before ALICE, there was ELIZA.

ELIZA was created in 1966 by Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT, and she was designed to simulate a Rogerian psychotherapist — specifically the kind of therapist who responds to everything you say by gently rephrasing it back as a question.

"I am feeling sad." "Why are you feeling sad?" "Because my father was cold to me." "Tell me more about your father."

That is it. That is the entire trick. ELIZA had no understanding of language, no memory of previous exchanges, and no model of the world whatsoever. She was matching keywords and choosing from a list of pre-written templates.

And people loved her.

People told her their deepest secrets. People refused to let Weizenbaum's secretary use the terminal because they wanted privacy with ELIZA. People got emotionally attached to a program that was, architecturally speaking, slightly more sophisticated than a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book.

Weizenbaum was horrified. He spent the rest of his career warning about the dangers of anthropomorphizing machines.

ELIZA had no idea. She just kept asking about your father.

The C64 Years

ELIZA's descendants spread everywhere.

By the early 1980s, versions of ELIZA were running on home computers — including the Commodore 64. These were stripped-down implementations with perhaps a hundred pattern-response pairs, fitting into the limited memory of the machines. They were janky. They repeated themselves constantly. They had the conversational depth of a very patient cardboard box.

Kids loved them. I loved them.

There was something genuinely magical about typing words into a computer and receiving what felt like a response. The bar for "convincing" was lower then, partly because the technology was new and partly because we wanted to believe. The ELIZA effect — the human tendency to project intelligence and empathy onto things that merely simulate them — is apparently hardwired into us in a way that even Weizenbaum couldn't argue us out of.

These home computer chatbots were terrible by any technical measure. They were also, in their way, the first interactive NPCs.

ALICE Arrives, and Raises the Bar

In 1995, a researcher named Richard Wallace built something considerably more ambitious.

He called it ALICE — Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity — and where ELIZA had perhaps a few hundred rules, ALICE had tens of thousands. Wallace wrote them in a language he invented called AIML: Artificial Intelligence Markup Language. It was essentially XML, and it worked like this:

<category> <pattern>WHAT IS YOUR NAME</pattern> <template>My name is ALICE. What's yours?</template> </category>

Simple. But multiply that by 40,000 rules, add wildcards, add the ability to reference previous inputs, add context-switching between conversation topics — and you get something that can hold a conversation for a surprisingly long time before the cracks start showing.

ALICE won the Loebner Prize — a real competition where programs try to fool human judges into thinking they're people — three times. In 2000, 2001, and 2004. She was not perfect. She was repetitive. She occasionally forgot what you had told her thirty seconds earlier. She had opinions about things that made no sense.

But she talked. And for a long time, she was the best thing available.

The Problem With Rule-Based Chat

Here is the thing about AIML and systems like it.

The library is the content. If you want your chatbot to talk about medieval taverns, you have to write rules about medieval taverns. If you want it to know who Garmund the innkeeper is, you have to write that. If you want it to understand that asking about "work" might mean asking about quests, you have to write that too.

ALICE's 40,000 rules were useful if you wanted to talk about computers, the internet, or ALICE herself. For a dungeon crawler set in a city plagued by demonic corruption, they were about as relevant as a user manual for a toaster.

This created what I will call the Content Problem: a rule-based dialog system is only as good as the rules someone sat down and wrote. The technology scales fine. The author does not.

For a solo developer building a game — hi, that's me — this is a significant obstacle.

What Happened Next (The Short Version)

The chatbot world moved on.

In the 2000s and 2010s, various improvements were made — better memory systems, smarter pattern matching, integration with knowledge bases. The game industry developed its own approaches: behavior trees, dialog trees, Twine, Ink. These weren't trying to simulate conversation so much as structure it — branching narratives, tracked variables, quest states.

Then, in the 2020s, Large Language Models arrived and essentially ended the competition. A modern LLM does not need pre-written rules. You give it context and it generates responses. It can talk about Garmund and the tavern and the Fourth Age of Lathmar without you writing a single rule, because it understands language at a level that ELIZA could not have imagined and ALICE could only approximate.

The problem for game developers: LLMs require servers. They require internet connections. They require ongoing costs. They are too large to ship inside a game. And for a game intended to run offline on ordinary hardware, they are simply not an option.

So I found myself back where ALICE was in 1995.

Staring at a problem that has not fundamentally changed in sixty years: how do you make an NPC talk?

What We Built for Lathmar

Here is where the dungeon crawler meets the chatbot history lesson.

Lathmar has a tavern. The tavern has NPCs. Those NPCs are generated from a pool of race, guild, alignment, and personality combinations — potentially thousands of different characters, each one emerging from the same underlying systems. I did not want every NPC to be a puppet on a dialog tree. I wanted them to feel like people.

The solution is a three-layer system, and it owes a direct debt to ALICE.

Layer 1: AIML

We built an AIML archetype library — 50 files covering every race, guild, alignment, and personality in the game. When a player types "do you have work" or "what are you" or "tell me about yourself," the AIML layer recognizes the intent and routes it appropriately. A Dwarf Gravewalker answers differently from a Kataxi Swashbuckler, because they are loading different archetype files.

The library is built entirely on Lathmar's own lore. Every race file reflects the actual history and worldview of that race in the game world. Ask an Ithrax NPC about slavery and they will answer from the Ithrax perspective. Ask a Deep Elf about the surface and they will give you the specific weight of someone who has not seen sunlight in generations.

ALICE would recognize the approach immediately. The difference is that instead of 40,000 generic rules, we have 50 focused files that know exactly what world they live in.

Layer 2: Ink

AIML is good at recognizing what you say. It is bad at managing what happens next.

For structured interactions — quests, drinking, gambling, hiring — we use Ink, the narrative scripting language developed by Inkle Studios (the people behind 80 Days and Heaven's Vault). Ink handles the dramatic flow: offer a quest, track whether it was accepted, remember that the player bought the innkeeper three drinks and they are now old friends. At least I hope I can get to this stage of immersion.

Every interaction in the tavern feeds into a Relationship Score — a number from -100 to +100 that tracks how the NPC feels about you. Buy them the right drink: +5. Win a game of dice: +2. Accept their quest: +8. Get thrown out of the tavern drunk: the Barbarian thinks it's hilarious (+2), the Paladin does not (-5). Of course there are more rules. And the proposed prestige points for guilds is waiting to be implemented.

Layer 3: C#

The game engine ties everything together. It sets variables before conversations start, processes the action tags that Ink produces, and decides when an NPC should proactively offer a quest instead of waiting to be asked.

ELIZA would find this extremely complicated. She just wanted to know about your father.

What This Means in Practice

When you walk into the tavern in Lathmar and sit down across from a Gnome Thief with a Greedy personality, several things happen simultaneously.

The AIML layer loads rules from gnome.aiml, thief.aiml, neutral.aiml, and greedy.aiml. The Ink story loads tavern_generic_v2.ink with that NPC's specific variables. The C# layer sets the talk depth (Greedy personalities open up after two exchanges, not immediately) and checks whether this NPC has an available quest.

When you type "what are you" — the Gnome Thief says something that reflects their race, their guild, and their alignment. When you buy them a drink — Gnomes take whatever you offer, but they would have preferred wine. When they try to pick your pocket — whether you notice depends on a Perception check against your character's Wisdom score.

None of this was possible on a Commodore 64 in 1984. Most of it wasn't possible in a solo-developed game two years ago. And nothing of it, could be made in a weekend by one person alone. Thank god for the AI raising my ideas to life.

But the fundamental question hasn't changed since Weizenbaum sat down in 1966 and asked himself: what would make this feel like talking to someone?

ALICE spent thirty years trying to answer it.

We're still working on ours.

A Note From the Developer

If you are reading this on Patreon: thank you. This is genuinely one of the more technically interesting things I have built, and writing it up forces me to articulate decisions that I made intuitively. The history of chatbots is a fascinating subject on its own — I recommend looking up ELIZA's original paper if you want to go deeper.

The tavern system will appear in an upcoming build. The NPCs have opinions. Some of them will try to rob you. A few of them will become genuine drinking companions if you treat them right.

ALICE would have something to say about all of this.

I'm not sure what. She'd probably just ask about your father.

What would you ask her?

Original postet here: Quests That Leave Scars | Patreon

Dungeon crawlers have always had a strange relationship with quests.

At their worst, quests are just a polite excuse to send the player back into the dark. Kill ten rats. Bring me one hundred rat tails. Find the lost thing in the third basement and come back alive. That kind of structure will exist in Lathmar too, because it works. It gives direction, it supports progression, and sometimes a simple monster hunt is exactly what a dungeon RPG needs.

But it should not be the whole game.

Some of the RPGs I admire most used quests as a way to make the world react. Wizardry VII and Wizardry 8 used alliances, rival factions and betrayal to change what parts of the story stayed open. Shin Megami Tensei (showed up in my research. Who knows it?) split whole routes through Law, Chaos and Neutrality, which remembers me of Chaos Strikes Back. Might and Magic VII made the choice between Light and Dark feel like a real fork in the road. Fallout, Planescape: Torment, Arcanum, Gothic and Knights of the Old Republic all understood the same basic thing: a choice is only interesting if something closes when something else opens.

That is the direction I want to take with Lathmar.

Lathmar will have a Prestige system tied to its guilds. Helping one faction will not simply give gold and experience. It will change how that guild sees you. Support a noble order, and its masters may trust you with better quests, better rewards and more dangerous secrets. Sell the same order out to a darker faction, and another door opens instead.

Some guilds in Lathmar already lean more toward the lawful, honorable or protective side of the city. Others are much closer to shadow, greed, death or raw power. A few guilds stand directly opposed to each other. At a certain Prestige level, you will not be able to keep playing both sides forever. At some point the game should ask a simple question:

Who are you becoming?

This is not meant to be a giant morality lecture. I do not want a glowing angel button and a red evil button. I want reputation to feel like something earned through specific actions. Who did you help? Who did you betray? Who still lets you through the door?

A central place for this will be the tavern, in the city structure.

It will be a place for rumors, handcrafted NPCs, unusual jobs and possible companions. The Menagerie gives you monsters. The tavern gives you people. Mercenaries, drunks, pilgrims, liars, deserters, scholars, desperate merchants, wounded knights and the occasional person who should probably not be trusted.

Some of them may offer quests. Some may join the party. Some may need to be escorted through a dungeon alive because they urgently have to reach another place. Some may lie about why.

One idea that came out of a Discord discussion with "Pageplant" captures the direction very well. Imagine a paladin sitting in the tavern, ashamed and wounded. He lost the holy book of his order somewhere below the city. The basic quest is obvious: go into the dungeon and find the book.

The interesting part is what happens after that.

You could take the paladin with you, sharing the danger and perhaps the reward. You could go alone, keeping all experience and loot for yourself. You could return the book and gain the trust of his order. You could keep it because it is a useful artifact for your casters. You could sell it to a shady figure from an opposing guild. You could even use the book as leverage.

The dungeon location might be fixed in one scenario, or partially randomized in another. The quest itself could stay recognizable, while the path to solving it changes from run to run.

That is the kind of quest design I want for Lathmar. Not endless dialogue trees. Not walls of lore that never touch the game. Short conversations. Clear motives. Sparse information. Enough room for the player’s imagination. Then a decision that changes something.

Prestige would make these choices matter beyond a single reward screen. Help the paladin and his order may open new services, quests or companions. Betray him and the Gravewalkers may take notice. Repeated choices could eventually lock you out of rival guild content. Not every quest needs to do this, but the important ones should.

This also helps Lathmar move beyond pure grinding.

Mordor had a brilliant loop, but at its core it was a grind machine. A wonderful, dangerous, addictive grind machine. Lathmar keeps that DNA, especially the party building, the dungeon descent and the auto battle structure. But I want players to remember more than numbers going up.

I want them to remember the paladin’s book.

The greedy dwarf.

The witch who offered the better reward.

The companion they kept alive for six dungeon levels.

The guild master who stopped trusting them.

The faction they chose and the one they lost.

That is where replay value becomes more than another loot roll. A second playthrough is not only “same dungeon, different party.” It can become “what happens if I give the book to the wrong people this time?”

That is the goal: old school dungeon crawling with consequences. Simple quests where useful. Handcrafted choices where they matter. A city that remembers enough to make the dungeon feel less like a treadmill and more like a place where your decisions leave scars.

Which game do you remember, had meaningful choices?

As always. many thanks for reading. Please leave a comment or feedback.
Michael aka Mufti999

Disclaimer
All texts and pictures are © protected and may not be reproduced or modified without prior permission.
If you share my work, please include a link to the original post.
I always appreciate a quick message letting me know where Lathmar content appears. Thank you for your support.

Please have a look. Should be much better on mobile now.

Lathmar: The Fallen Depths | Dark Fantasy Dungeon Crawler

The Fallen Depths is a dark dungeon RPG with old-school roots, party management, guilds, monsters, and tactical auto-battles.
Please habe a look at my latest DevUpdate and join my Blog on Patreon for free, to follow the further development.

Monsters Are Becoming Real Creatures | Patreon