Every year at the Gen Con game fair, hundreds of heroes find their way into the Dungeon Delve -- a gigantic dungeon filled with traps and creatures taken from the D&D game. At the show, the Delve runs eight hours a day, with new players and characters cycling through every hour, exploring rooms, killing monsters… and filling the Roll of the Honored Dead. (Hopefully, they send a few monsters to the Roll of Dishonored Dead, too!)

At Gen Con you might have been lucky enough to play through just one or two rooms a day. Now you can download all five sections of the Delve and hack and slash your way through the entire dungeon. Here’s how it works:

Each day of Gen Con, the Delvers covered new sections of the dungeon in challenges that grew progressively more difficult until the climactic battle on Sunday. For home play, Dungeon Masters should select their preferred difficulty level and download the appropriate files: DM-only files, characters, and map sections.

Each day’s "DM File" contains instructions and room descriptions for the appropriate sections of the dungeon map. Certain rooms also feature "player notes": poignant (often painful) memories that players at the convention wrote on index cards after completing their rounds. If you want to play the entire dungeon, start with "Day 1" -- this method most accurately reproduces the way the Delve was played at Gen Con. Be warned: The DM files contain some notes that reflect the "revolving door" style of play at the convention, where different players picked up the characters each hour to continue the adventure. Consider such notes part of the "flavor" of the Delve, but not necessarily relevant to home play.

Next, download the set of characters that corresponds to your chosen day. (You may already have met some of these PCs in our Character Closeups or seen them pictured in the Player’s Handbook.) As the dungeoneers progress through the rooms, they must periodically update their characters to the proper level. If you prefer, you can play your own characters instead…if you dare to risk them!

Finally, download the map sections appropriate to the rooms for your selected "day." You can preview the map here.

And you’re ready to begin! Fight well, and join us for next year’s Delve at Gen Con 2001! Who knows what new dungeon denizens will await the unwary?

DM File	Characters	Map Sections	Download
Day 1	1st-level	A (left and right)	ZIP1 (367k)
Day 2	3rd-level	A (left and right) plus B (left and right)	ZIP2 (599k)
Day 3	5th-level	B (left and right)	ZIP3 (703k)
Day 4	7th-level	C	ZIP4 (630k)
Download the Full Delve (2.4mb)

Special thanks to this year’s Dungeon Delve organizer, roleplaying game editor David Noonan.
Maps by Ian R. Malcomson using Campaign Cartographer 2.0.

Delve On!

If you just can’t get enough of the Delve…

• Log onto the Dungeon Delve message board and compare tales of victory and woe with other Delvers.
• Visit Virtual Gen Con’s coverage of the 2000 Delve at the show.
• Check out the 1999 Dungeon Delve online.
• Dungeon Delve 2000 Art Gallery direct from Gen Con!