October Release : Banshees and Ghouls and Spirits (Oh My!) -- Can you survive the Whispergaol?

That's right, October is spooky season, and this month we've got NO tricks, and ALL treats! This update brings a brand-new dungeon, the ability to play on your phone or tablet, a party that chimes in with ideas, and a whole pile of fixes. Let's dig in.

Enter the Whispergaol... if you dare

Heavy, iron-bound doors guard the entrance. Step past them and you'll start to hear it: a faint murmur of voices, whispering just out of earshot. Nobody's quite sure where it's coming from, and that's exactly how the Whispergaol got its name.

Ready to find out? Once your party hits 5th level and you've wrapped up the earlier quests, pay a visit to Jeremiah Piddleskew, the jeweler in Haven. He'll point you toward the Silvermine entrance, and from there it's a short walk up the path north.

Play Dungeons Deep anywhere

You can now play from your phone or tablet! We've built layouts that actually fit the screen in your hand, so the Game Master, your party and the map all come along wherever you go. Dungeon crawl on the couch, on the bus, or in line for coffee.

Your party has ideas now

Your characters will now speak up on their own as they think of things. Your barbarian might shout "Charge the goblins!" and it's up to you: approve it with a single tap, or let it pass and carry on with your own plan.

More turns, less worrying

Two big changes here:

• Champion is now unlimited. Our top monthly package has no turn cap at all. Play as much as you like.
• Unused turns roll over. On every plan, any turns you don't use this month carry over to the next one automatically. No more use-it-or-lose-it.

Fixes and improvements

We also spent some time polishing things up:

• Resting now restores your once-a-day powers and consumables, even when you're deep inside a dungeon.
• Hold Talk and you'll see your words appear as you speak.
• Your text or voice setting now follows you to every device.
• Hover over any fighter to see their class, level, health and active effects.
• Pets and summoned companions now take their own turns, so fights never stall waiting on them.

Plus a bunch of smaller fixes and improvements all across the game.

A word from the dungeon builder

The Whispergaol is our very first 5th level dungeon, and that's a big deal for us. It's a full step up in power, which means a lot of new stuff: unique monsters, unique encounters, tougher puzzles and riddles, a few traps, and a whole new tier of loot. We're talking more powerful magic items than anything you've found so far.

Building it also pushed us to try some new things behind the scenes, so here's a peek at what went into it.

Story meets dungeon crawl

I'm always looking for the sweet spot between a good story and a good old-fashioned dungeon crawl, and the Whispergaol was a chance to lean into both.

This place has a history. There's a backstory behind what happened here, why the prison is in the state it's in, and what you can do to set things right. That story ties directly into the loot you'll find and the bosses you'll face, so the more you dig into it, the more everything clicks together.

I also mixed in a handful of encounters that aren't about combat at all: puzzles to solve and interesting characters to talk to. Not everything here is solved with the pointy end of a sword.

That said, don't worry. For those of you who just want to kick down the door and start swinging, there's still plenty of hacking and slashing to go around.

A brand-new look: the haunted prison

The Whispergaol also gets its very own art: a complete set of haunted prison battle maps made just for this dungeon. And this time I tried something different with how they fit together.

Instead of the usual straight-line path from room to room, the maps are laid out to be much more open-ended. It's not a maze, but you can head in whatever direction you like, and exploring feels a lot more interesting than just following a single corridor to the end.

That freedom created a fun challenge on our side, though. If I don't know which way you're going to go, I also don't know what order you'll tackle things in. So I needed a quest that lets you choose your own adventure: collecting the pieces and completing the tasks in whatever order you happen to find them, classic Rod of Seven Parts style.

To pull that off, we expanded the quest system itself. The best part? That new flexibility isn't just for the Whispergaol. Now that it's built, I can use it in more areas going forward, so expect more of this kind of open-ended questing down the road.

Doors, reimagined

You might also notice that doors work a little differently this time. We've added a new door icon to the interface, so doors are now much easier to spot and interact with, separate from the map art underneath.

Here's why. Until now, we had two kinds of doors. There was the generic dungeon door, which had to look the same no matter where it was placed. And there was the custom door, drawn to look great in one specific spot and usable nowhere else in the game.

Custom doors look fantastic, but they don't scale. Earlier areas needed one or two of them at most. The haunted prison, on the other hand, has rooms with four or five custom doors each, across somewhere between a dozen and two dozen rooms. That adds up to a mountain of art very quickly.

The new door icon solves that. It shows you at a glance whether a door is open or closed, and you just click it to interact. We can still use custom doors, open doorways and eye-catching art where they really matter, but we no longer have to hand-craft every single door in every single room. That should make a big difference in how quickly we can get new dungeons into your hands.

We want your feedback

Here's a fun confession: the loot drops in this dungeon are randomized, so even I don't know exactly what you'll walk away with on your run. Between that and the jump to 5th level, we're facing balance questions we've never had to tackle before, and that's where you come in.

As you play through, we'd love to hear what you think:

• Monsters: Too tough? Too much of a pushover?
• Encounters: Did they feel challenging, or did you breeze right through?
• Gold: Did you get too little? Or too much? (Ha. As if anyone would ever admit I gave them too much.)
• Magic items: Are they powerful enough? Interesting enough? Is there a good spread across all the different classes and character types?

This is new territory for us too, and every bit of feedback helps us make the Whispergaol, and every dungeon after it, better.

See you in the dark

That's a wrap on October! A new dungeon, a new tier of power, play on the go, a chattier party, more turns and a smarter quest system under the hood. It's been a big month, and we're just getting started.

So gather your party, sharpen your blades, and head north past the Silvermine. The Whispergaol is waiting, and those whispers aren't going to investigate themselves.

Happy adventuring!