“You are not the heroes of this story. You are the people the heroes hired.”
Total Party Knights (TPK) is a co-op roguelite dungeon crawler played across two screens: a shared Tabletop host and each player’s personal webapp controller. This vault is our internal rulebook: The player-facing rules, world, and content in one maintained place. It is not the GDD; systems architecture, netcode, and pipeline live elsewhere.
Total Party Knights is an RPG Dungeon Delve, where players assume the roles, not of epic heroes, but of the expendable hireelings on irrelevant quests to find an impossible, probably fake treasure. It’s a game of fantasy tropes, cooperative frustration, nostalgia, and most importantly it’s really freaking simple for players to join and play.
Total Party Knights is a patchwork of some of Scott’s favorite things:
- It's the roguelike party and metaprogression of Darkest Dungeon
- It's an old school Dungeon Delve with traditional fantasy elements
- It's the Tabletop Miniature vibe of Mordheim
- It's the turn-by-turn tactics of Slay the Spire
- It's the ease of play of Jackbox
- It's the simple but frustrating cooperation of Overcooked
- It's Eon Altar, but as we meant it to start with - a TTRPG for fast casual play and non RPG players.
How This Vault Is Organized
| Folder | Contents |
|---|---|
| 00 Introduction | The world: the valley, the town, the Widowmaker |
| 01 Species | The fourteen playable ancestries |
| 02 Archetypes | The six starting classes and the twelve on the horizon |
| 03 Combat | Wind, Guard, Vitals, Boons, Banes, and the Stagger window |
| 04 Equipment | Weapons, armor, and gear |
| 05 Exploration | Time, contracts, and the fairness ledger |
| 06 Rabengaat | The first region deck |
| Loose Threads | Everything we haven’t decided yet |
The Three Tone Rules
- The world is takes itself seriously. Gothic, played straight, never winking. See 02 The Valley of Cairnfall.
- The comedy is yours. Silliness emerges from the novices and their situations, not from the setting.
- The dungeon is fair. Players might squabble but they have a job to do. A bit of light competition with mistakes made aren’t calamitouus, just start a new run. Find ways to let players laugh off those failures. Secrets are real, but every hidden rule is revealed and accountable after the run. See 03 The Fairness Ledger.
Editing Conventions
- One page per entity; link with
[[wikilinks]]. - Mark undecided material with a link to Loose Threads rather than deleting or guessing.
- Spoilered text (
||like this||) marks run-time secrets — safe to show players out of session, hidden in session.