The Realm Below
Dungeon Break is set in the Undermaze — a vast, ever-shifting network of ancient tunnels, collapsed temples, and forgotten vaults buried beneath a world that has long since moved on. Nobody built the Undermaze. It grew. Layer by layer, century by century, as civilisations rose and fell and their ruins sank deeper into the earth.
The Undermaze is not empty. It breathes. Traps reset. Walls shift. Creatures that have never seen daylight patrol corridors that weren't there yesterday. And somewhere in the deepest levels, something old is waking up.
How It Started
Three months ago, a survey team drilling for geothermal energy broke through into a chamber that shouldn't exist. The drill footage went dark. The team didn't come back. What came back instead was a signal — a repeating sequence of tones that no one could decode, broadcast from somewhere two kilometres underground.
The Undermaze had been found. Or rather, it had let itself be found. Now the entrance is sealed, monitored, and very much open to those willing to go in. The question isn't whether you can survive. The question is what you'll find when you do.
Who Goes In
Runners are the people who enter the Undermaze voluntarily. Some are treasure hunters. Some are researchers. Some are just people who heard the signal and couldn't stop thinking about it. They go in teams of two to four, equipped with whatever they can carry, and they have one rule: get out before the Maze resets.
The reset happens every 90 minutes. The walls move. The traps rearm. Anything left inside when the reset completes stays inside permanently. No Runner has ever been inside during a full reset and come back to describe it.
What You Find
The Undermaze is full of artefacts — objects that don't belong to any known civilisation, that predate every archaeological record, that do things they shouldn't be able to do. Runners who make it back bring them out. The artefacts are catalogued, studied, and traded.
Each artefact has been encoded into a physical card — a record of what was found, where, and what it does. The card collection is the living history of every run ever completed. Some cards are common. Some are extraordinarily rare. A few have only ever been found once.
What Waits
The Undermaze has guardians. They are not animals, not machines, and not ghosts — though they share qualities with all three. They respond to movement, to light, to the sound of voices. They do not pursue. They intercept. They seem to know where you're going before you do.
The deeper you go, the older the guardians. The ones on the lower levels have been down there long enough that they've forgotten what they were guarding. They guard everything now. They guard the dark itself.
The Question
The signal is still broadcasting. Researchers have decoded fragments — coordinates, dates, a sequence of names. None of the names match any known person. The coordinates point to a room on level seven that no Runner has ever reached.
The signal has been broadcasting for longer than the drill team has been missing. It was broadcasting before the breach. It was broadcasting before the survey began. Someone — or something — knew the Undermaze was going to be found. And they left a message for whoever found it.