the dungeon does not get easier. you get harder to kill.
A turn-based roguelike dungeon crawler in which failure is the only progression. Twenty floors, permadeath, no experience points, no levelling. You start with a Rusted Shiv, Padded Rags and Worn Sandals, and the only thing that survives your death is what you learned by dying.
Python + Pygame, standard library only. No art assets — every creature, wall, potion and trap is drawn procedurally at runtime with polygons (supersampled and downscaled for anti-aliasing, then cached). A rat looks like a rat; the angry rat and the plague rat look like different animals, because on floor 2 the difference matters.
pip install pygame
python run_deathward.py
On Windows the launcher is usually py -3.13 run_deathward.py. Needs Python 3.11+
and nothing else outside the standard library.
You cannot see what you do not understand.
- A monster you have never been killed by is drawn as a
?— no name, no health bar, no readable intent. It still hits exactly as hard. - A trap you have never triggered is drawn as clean floor. It still fires.
- A potion you have never identified is a colour. This game a deep crimson flask might be regeneration and a viscous green one venom — but the looks are dealt fresh every new game, so what you learned last time is no map to this time. You simply do not know yet, and the day you learn it is the day one of them kills you.
A death teaches you about the thing that killed you, or it teaches you nothing, and any lesson is never a thing you already knew. The ladder is short: what death itself does, the first time → the rule of what killed you → its tell → its counter. When that is exhausted, the death teaches nothing. A lesson you did not earn from the thing that killed you is not a lesson.
The instant a fact lands, the dungeon renders more of itself: the brute's wind-up appears as a red square on the tile it is about to crush, the spitter's firing line is painted down the corridor, the kobold's break for the door is flagged, and the chest that is not a chest starts breathing.
Traps are found one at a time. Springing the dart trap by the stairs marks that trap on your map forever — through every death, for the rest of the game. It tells you nothing about the dart trap in the treasury. Every trap in this dungeon is paid for individually. (Killing also teaches, but slowly: a corpse gives you a monster's rule on the 1st kill, its tell on the 3rd, its counter on the 8th. A single death gives you the next one immediately. Dying is the fast teacher; that is the whole thesis, stated as a number.)
Knowledge is information, never power. This is enforced, not asserted: the test suite runs the same seed with the same keystrokes against an empty Kodex and a complete one and requires the two dungeons to be bit-identical. Monsters do not get weaker. You stop being surprised.
The dungeon is a place. Its stone is cut once per game: floor 4's rooms and corridors are the same rooms and corridors every time you walk back in, and the map you drew with your feet is never forgotten. What is living in them — the monsters, the loot, the chests — is dealt fresh on every respawn. The map is memorised; the danger is not.
Your corpse keeps your gold, exactly where you fell. Die on floor 4 with 200 gold and a Flame Brand, and floor 4 of your next run has your body on that same tile, still holding all of it. Every run you lose is a cache you leave for the next one.
Each slot answers a different question, so an upgrade is a decision and not just a bigger number.
| what it changes | |
|---|---|
| weapon | how you kill — spread, cleave, crit, stun, burn, lifesteal |
| armour | what you survive — a flat subtraction from every hit, so it is a swarm answer, not a boss answer. And it costs you speed. |
| boots | how you move — and speed is turns, and turns are the only real resource in a roguelike |
Full Plate turns a plague rat's whole damage range into zero and makes you visibly slower. Windwalkers buy you a free action every few turns. Padded Soles are too light to depress a pressure plate. A wraith ignores armour entirely, which means the plate you are so proud of is dead weight the moment one appears.
The ordinary rungs are a sidegrade, not a ladder: armour and boots spend from the same speed budget, so Full Plate with Plate Boots is +6 defense at −30 speed, while Mail with Leather Boots is +3 at nothing. Which one is better is a question about the floor you are on, not a number you can rank. From floor 8 the dungeon starts putting magical pieces down — one identity each, never just a bigger number: armour that sets its attacker alight, boots that blink you clear, a cuirass that returns damage, a cloak that simply stops the mundane dead from seeing you at all. Deep ordinary armour can also come masterwork, carrying a +1 or +2 it keeps forever.
Invisibility is not a timer you spend, it is a posture you hold. It lasts until you act: walking, waiting and taking the stairs keep you hidden, while attacking, looting, using an item or springing a trap all give you away instantly. So being invisible is not a free hit — it is a question about whether you are willing to stop being invisible.
It comes from a potion or scroll (untimed, held until you act), from Fadecloak (which flares every few times you are struck), or from Nightcloak, which is permanent and simply re-cloaks you once nothing is hunting you any more.
And it only fools the living. Wraiths and poltergeists walk through walls and see straight through you, so the deep floors are exactly where the trick stops working.
Closing the window mid-run suspends it — the floor, your pack, your wounds, the
map — and ENTER on the title picks it back up where you stood. Dying discards the
suspended run, because dying is not a thing you get to undo. That is the only
asymmetry: you may stop playing, you may not stop dying.
Thirty-six consumables — 18 potions and 18 scrolls — sorted into three rarity tiers. Common ones turn up from the first floor; uncommon ones start seeping in around the mid floors; rare ones only surface deep. So the shape of what you can find is itself a depth gauge.
A consumable's identity holds for the whole game but is unknown until you learn it — a scroll is a rune of wax, a potion is a colour of liquid — and the way you find out what one does is to use it or to die holding it. Which look hides which effect is shuffled every new game, so the crimson flask that healed you last game may be the one that poisons you in this one; identifying is work you redo each run. Some potions are gifts (healing, regeneration, vigor, heroism) and some are traps (poison, weakness, confusion). Once you have identified a bad potion, you can stop drinking it and start coating your blade with it — a venom potion you would never swallow becomes poison on every swing. Scrolls bend the dungeon instead of the body: mapping, teleport, hold monster, banishment (pick a monster type and it is gone from the floor), enchantment that permanently upgrades a piece of gear, and more.
Everything you have learned lives in the Kodex (K), now split into six tabs —
Monsters · Traps · Scrolls · Potions · Gear · Lore — that you flick through with
1–6 or the arrow keys, each showing how much of that category you have uncovered.
Gear earns its own entries the way monsters do: a weapon, armour or boots you have
picked up or worn shows its stats and trait; one you have never held reads as a
sealed, unknown slot.
A running message log sits on a strip below the map; L opens the full,
scrollable history of the current game, newest first. The log is wiped when you start
a brand-new game.
Monsters — twelve of them plus the boss, each built around a tactic rather than a stat:
- angry rats — floor 1 only, the one thing down here you can simply hit
- plague rats — floor 2+, faster and sicker, and they come in numbers: arithmetic, so never fight them in the open
- kobolds — consequences: a wounded one runs for help
- bile spitters — geometry: break the straight line
- brutes — tempo: step off the wind-up
- wraiths — they walk through walls and ignore armour
- mimics — the chest opens you
- orcs — pack hunters with keen eyesight; one spotting you alerts them all, and they hunt as a group and regroup when scattered — but lose sight of you and they lose interest
- flickers — deep-floor blinkers, hard to pin down
- beholders — deep-floor: freeze you solid on one turn, then follow up with a ray on the next; weak alone, lethal when they hold you still in a crowd
- stone golems — deep-floor: slow to anger but once they have your scent they are almost as fast as you and never, ever stop tracking you
- poltergeists — deep-floor haunts
- The Warden — at the bottom, floor 20; not a new lesson, the exam
Floor 1 is the tutorial the dungeon does not admit to having: angry rats, thin spawns, a marked entrance you always start and restart from, and exactly one guaranteed gear upgrade, placed as far from the gate as the level allows — a reward for exploring rather than a handout at the door.
Traps — dart, spike pit, gas vent, alarm rune (no damage at all; it simply tells the entire floor where you are) and the fire glyph, which hurts monsters exactly as much as it hurts you. Once you can see a glyph, it stops being an obstacle and becomes a weapon.
Treasure — gold, chests, gear upgrades, and hoard rooms that are visibly richer and guarded in proportion. From floor 5 down a vendor may hold a floor, more likely the deeper you go, dealing in potions and scrolls — and buying them back. It does not stock gear: every weapon, armour and boot in the game is found, never bought. The dungeon puts its gold where its teeth are.
| key | |
|---|---|
WASD / arrows |
move / attack (bump) |
QEZC or numpad |
diagonals (C is down-right, not the kodex) |
SPACE / . |
wait a turn |
G |
take all — gold, gear, chests, your own corpse |
1–9 |
take a numbered item when standing on loot; otherwise drink/read from the pack |
> / ENTER |
descend (standing on the stairs) |
SHIFT + dir |
leap (Boots of Blinking) |
K |
kodex (1–6 / arrows switch tabs) |
L |
message log (scrollable, newest first) |
? |
help |
N (title) |
NEW GAME — erases the Kodex, your dead, everything (asks first) |
ENTER (title) |
CONTINUE — resumes your suspended run if you have one, else starts a fresh one; either way you keep the Kodex and your dead |
python -m deathward.tests
869 tests, including the two load-bearing proofs: a death teaches you about the thing that killed you or it teaches you nothing, and never repeats a lesson; and blind-vs-omniscient runs of the same seed produce identical dungeons. Plus: the stairs are reachable on every floor across many seeds, the Warden is never walled into a pillar, nothing spawns in your face, an undiscovered trap still fires, finding one trap never reveals its twin, a Scroll of Mapping reveals stone and never loot, plate shrugs off a rat while a wraith ignores plate, a bad potion coats your blade, the Kodex sorts every fact into the right tab, the map survives death, and your corpse comes back with your gold.
run_deathward.py entry point
deathward/
config.py constants, palette and every tuning number
game.py main loop, state machine (death -> autopsy -> new run)
world.py turn economy, combat, consequences of curiosity
dungeon.py generation, hoards, boss arena, field of view
monsters.py twelve monsters plus the Warden, each built around one tactic
traps.py five traps; invisible until YOU spring that one
items.py the gear triad, and the 36 consumables (looks shuffled per game)
player.py the hero, buffs, blade-coating, enchantments
vendor.py the deep-floor merchant
codex.py the Kodex: knowledge tree + every-death-teaches guarantee
webstore.py where the save lives: a file on disk, localStorage in the browser
sprites.py procedural polygon art (no asset files)
keyrepeat.py hold-to-walk
cheats.py Ctrl-chord test shortcuts
fontcache.py the monospace font: real Consolas native, bundled DejaVu on the web
render.py drawing; what is drawn is a function of what is known
ui.py HUD, title, autopsy, kodex browser, log, victory
tests.py the proofs
deathward_save.json your kodex, your dead, your gold (created on first run)
Copyright (C) 2026 Dale Cook
DEATHWARD is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
It is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program (see the LICENSE file). If not, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.