A turn-based combat RPG built around three intertwined risk systems: a parry-chain action economy, a dynamic Morale resource that swings outcomes inside a single fight, and a persistent Madness track that bleeds risk across an entire run.
Maddening Delve is a difficult turn-based RPG built around buildcrafting, parrying, and large enemy variety. The player starts with the weakest version of each available class and fights against unfair odds. Heroes are lost as the player learns how to beat the Delve, and that loss is the teaching signal.
Eventually the player can keep high-level characters alive long enough to bring resources back to Little Blackstone, the hub, where those resources upgrade infrastructure that strengthens the next generation of heroes. Death funds the win condition.
The design problem I set for myself: build a combat encounter that punishes the player honestly, communicates the cost of every choice, and still leaves multiple legitimate solutions on the table. The systems below are how I solved it.
Rank-based positioning, parry windows, action economy with primary and secondary actions, Hero Actions and Villain Actions as once-per-fight escalations.
Spell slots, consumables, Morale swings, persistent Madness, and parry-chain commitments make every action a budget decision against the next fight.
Thirteen classes, class-locked weapon and armor families, ten stacking enchantment paths, and stat caps that force trade-offs over additive power creep.
Each character takes a primary action (one skill — which may target multiple enemies, multiple ranks, or multiple allies depending on the skill) and a secondary action (one consumable from inventory). Initiative is Speed-based. Enemy units have one or two skills and use them every turn; AI uses secondary actions when conditional logic permits.
The 5% hit floor is a deliberate accessibility decision. Late-game builds that solve for accuracy and luck become genuinely consistent, which gives players a tangible reward for system mastery without ever fully removing variance from early encounters.
Parry is the player's one window of active input inside an otherwise turn-based loop. When an enemy attacks, the player can press the parry button within a timing window to reduce the damage. A clean parry reduces damage by 10% of the character's Defense stat, and parries can reduce damage to zero.
The defining wrinkle is the parry chain: enemies can also parry incoming player attacks (10–25% chance scaling with enemy difficulty). When an enemy parries the player, a counter-window opens. The player can press parry again to "parry the parry" and deliver a double-damage riposte. The system rewards engagement on both sides of the exchange and turns enemy resistance into a player verb instead of a wall.
Boss fights have parry rates specific to each boss, encoded as part of the encounter brief so that mini-bosses telegraph their tells differently from full bosses.
Morale is a party-wide stat that swings on a twenty-one-point scale from −10 to +10 and persists for the duration of a Delve run. It is not a slow-build resource — it is meant to swing frequently inside a single fight but not constantly. Every point above or below zero adds a buff or debuff to critical hit rate, Luck, and Resistance.
Twenty distinct in-fight events drive Morale changes. Crits, kills, and successful Madness checks push it up. Heroes taking heavy damage, wounded states, failed Madness checks, and enemy crits push it down. A discovered Easter Egg grants the entire party +2 instantly.
| Event | Morale Change |
|---|---|
| Critical hit landed | +1 |
| Enemy defeated | +1 |
| Max heal applied to any PC | +1 |
| Easter Egg or secret discovered | +2 party-wide |
| PC succeeds Last Stand | +2 |
| PC succeeds Madness check (becomes Madness Controlled) | +3 |
| Hero takes a Wound (50%+ HP single hit) | −1 |
| PC takes 5 turns of DoT consecutively | −1 |
| Enemy crit landed on party | −2 |
| PC fails Madness check (becomes Maddened) | −3 |
| PC dies | −2 party-wide |
Madness is a 0–100 affliction tracked per hero across the entire Delve run. It does not reset between fights. Every parried maddened attack deals madness affliction damage, and the apparatus — a UI element that lives with each hero — monitors and visualizes the slow corruption.
At threshold 50, the hero hits a 50/50 chance of early Madness trigger on any incoming check. At 100, the hero is permanently lost — gone from the roster, not just from the fight. The mechanic creates compounding pressure that survives every encounter, so a player who limps through five fights with their cleric at Madness 80 is making a real strategic choice about whether to push deeper or evacuate.
Madness can also be applied to enemies — the Holy enchantment deals +25% damage to any unit with Madness above 50, which makes turning enemies into the very thing the player fears a viable build path.
Fourteen status effects across DoT, Control, Debuff, and Buff categories. Each effect has an explicit type, duration, removal path, and a unique symbol on the UI. Stacks are bounded per-effect so a player cannot trivialize an encounter by spamming a single application path.
| Effect | Type | Hook | Removed By |
|---|---|---|---|
| Burn | DoT | 1d6 / turn, 3 turns | Fire/water skill or consumable |
| Bleed | DoT | 1d4 / turn, 4 turns, stacks | Healer skill or consumable |
| Poison | DoT | 1d4 / turn per stack, 5 turns, 5 stack cap | Antidote / healer |
| Charmed | Control | Attacks own party for 2 turns | Damage from own party breaks early |
| Petrified | Control | Triple damage taken, no actions | Specific healer skills only |
| Exhaustion | Debuff | −10% Speed/Dodge per stack · 10 stacks = death | Hub rest or consumable |
| Madness | Special | Permanent Madness Threshold increase | Cannot be cleared mid-Delve |
Ten enchantment families that can be synthesized at the hub and locked onto one weapon or armor piece. Each family has a discrete math hook and a counterplay path. Enchantments don't stack on a single item, which forces the player to commit a build to a damage type rather than buying their way out of every encounter.
| Enchant | Trigger | Math |
|---|---|---|
| Fire | On hit | 1d6 Burn DoT, 3 turns, stacks to 3 |
| Ice | On hit | 50% chance: −25% target Speed, 2 turns |
| Lightning | On hit | 50% of hit damage to one adjacent rank |
| Holy | On hit | +25% damage vs. units with Madness > 50 |
| Void | On hit | −10% target Resistance, 2 turns · sets up status combos |
| Gravity | On hit | 35% chance: displace target back one rank |
| Soul | On kill | Restore 5% wielder max HP |
| Ruin | On crit | +150 flat damage on top of crit |
Hero Actions are unlocked through completing a secret main quest for each level — each level requires a different class, so the unlock chain pulls the player through the full class roster across a campaign. Once unlocked, the action is a one-time-per-Delve trigger that resolves on a 1–100 roll across twenty discrete outcomes.
The outcome table is weighted intentionally: Devine Intervention (1) destroys the enemy party outright but lives at a single point. Heroic Intervention (100) is the inverse moment — a hero not in the current party arrives, deals massive damage, and leaves. Middle outcomes (40–84) cluster around durable mid-fight swings: 50% damage waves, max defense for the remainder of the fight, full-resistance lockouts.
Enemies get the parallel system: Villain Actions, once per fight, encoded per enemy. This gives encounter designers a shared vocabulary on both sides of the table — a player who's seen what a Villain Action looks like for a Storm Knight knows roughly when to bank their Hero Action and when to spend it.
The combat design document (last updated 5/16/2026) is the canonical reference for every system above. The current draft covers, in order: