{Tesselate Crypt}

{Tesselate Crypt}

This was originally a combination effort to make myself a single player dungeon deck as well as to force myself to consider various challenges for the stats in my MtG RPG. Your components are easy.

• First you gather two non-permanents of each color, one colorless non-permanent, and a Key artifact. Could be anything, I use a Skeleton key. This is your loot.
• The face cards of a deck of cards, AKA Jack/Queen/King, as well as an Ace of your choice. Should be 13 cards total. These are the rooms.
• A Horde Deck. This is about a 60/40 deck of tokens and non-tokens meant to be played as an autonomous opponent. More and better has been written on them, a search will give you examples. The short of it is that you draw until you draw a non-token – that's a single spawning.
• d10s. I have many on hand, but the default roll is 2d10.
• A Token to represent yourself/your party – I use my RPG Mini.

Set the Ace aside and shuffle the face cards. Draw one and set it aside, then put the ace in the pile and shuffle them. The card you drew is the Entrance – Put your Token on it. Lay out the loot face-down in a grid of 3x4, centered on your entrance. Lay the Rooms crossed over them in the same grid.

Gameplay has some changes.

In order to claim the loot in a room, you have to first beat the challenge it presents. Each face card represents a different stat based on what face and color it is.

	[JACK] Physical	[QUEEN] Mental	[KING] External
[B]Force	BOD [Creatures, (G)]	ARC [Sorceries, (B)]	TCH [Artifacts, (C)]
[R]Finesse	REF [Instants, (R)]	KNO [Enchantments, (W)]	CHA [Planeswalkers, (U)]

On your Main phases, you get a chance to Move a space OR to challenge a room. This means you get two chances per turn to beat a challenge or two spaces to move.

To challenge a Room, you need to roll over a rating that depends on the suit of the room – High suits (Spades and Hearts) need an 18+, while the low suits (Clubs and Diamonds) need a 13+. Your default roll is 2d10, but you can increase that by citing or pitching a card. To cite a card, reveal it if it is in your hand or tap it if it is in play. Each card cited will grant you a +1 to your roll, but you can only cite something that matches the required stat. The exception is an unplayed land – you can cite land in your hand for any challenge. To Pitch a card, you either discard it from your hand or sacrifice it if it is in play in order to get an extra d10 to roll for each card pitched.

At the beginning of each upkeep without any Horde creatures in play, put 2 time counters on the Horde deck. At the beginning of each upkeep, if you can, remove one. If you remove the last one, spawn from the horde deck. If the Horde runs out of cards, shuffle the graveyard into a new horde.

To enter the dungeon, you must first beat the entryway challenge. You will have 2-3 turns to ready before the horde busts down the door to get at you, so prep but don't stall. You cannot move to another room if there are any Horde Creatures in play, nor can you challenge anything. When you move to an unopened room, spawn from the Horde deck.

You can attack Horde creatures directly, but not the Horde Deck itself. You also can target Horde creatures as though they were Players, with the following effects:

-Abilities which draw a card will increase a creature’s Power OR Toughness, Caster’s choice, by the amount of cards drawn until the end of the turn.

-Abilities which discard a card may be used to decrease a creature’s Power by the amount indicated until the end of the turn.

-Abilities which put a card from a library into a graveyard ['Milling'] may be used to decrease a creature’s Toughness by the amount indicated until the end of the turn.

-Searching a Player’s Library for x Cards and removing them will drop the Creature’s Power OR Toughness, caster’s choice,  by a set amount depending on where the cards end up – Sending X cards to the Graveyard will drop them by only 1X, while exiling will drop them by 2X until the end of the turn.

-Abilities which cause the entire Hand to be discarded will drop the target’s Power AND Toughness to 0 until the end of the turn.

An unblocked Attacker's damage must be taken by somebody on the team.

Loot is rewarded to the player that beat the challenge. If that player dies, they may give their loot to the remaining players as they see fit.

Loot spells are exiled as soon as they resolve. Until then, they are held in the player's command zone and can be cited or pitched for challenges. If pitched, they are exiled.

The goal is to find the key and get it to the Ace. The Ace can be challenged for its loot via a roll of 16 on any ONE stat.

If you want to keep going, note which room you are in and re-deal the dungeon, starting in an entrance on that spot. Increase the challenges by +1 for each floor [14/19 on 2nd, 15/20 on 3rd, etc].