The Quiet Below

Roadmap

Here is the brief description of what is already somewhat there and what is planned for future:

• Career progression — Guild ranks, contracts, regional boards

• Procedural world — Regions, towns, dungeons, markets, travel

• Tactical combat — Weapons, enemy AI, techniques, status effects

• Dungeons & endgame — Multi-floor dungeons, Palace victory

• Gear & crafting — Upgrades, recipes, weapon mastery

Coming next or in progress

• Smarter enemies — Distinct roles, more mutations, telegraphed behaviors

• Career record — Run stats, reputation, contract chains

• Memorable world — Town identities, named NPCs, rumors, consequences (still testing)

Long-term 

• More content — Gear, recipes, weapon techniques

• Replayability (subject to change) — Run modifiers, more meaningful character backgrounds

• Controller support 

• Localization

About the Game

The Quiet Below is a turn-based, ASCII roguelike RPG with a dark-fantasy heart. You are not the chosen one. You are a freelance adventurer with a guild badge, a little gold, and just enough nerve to take work that saner people refuse.

The world is procedurally generated from a single seed: six regions, each with towns, dungeons, resource nodes, wandering merchants, and an old darkness waiting below. Your life is contracts. Your power is your gear.

Core Gameplay

Guild life — Start at a guild town, take regional contracts, earn rank XP, and climb from D to S through promotion quests.

Contracts and travel — Suppression, scouting, and delivery contracts send you across the overworld and into specific dungeons. Walk to save gold, pay for a faster road, or gather regional materials along the way.

The surface — Buy supplies, repair and upgrade gear, sell loot on the consignment market, craft potions and items, rest at the inn, and decide which contract is worth the risk.

The depths — Dungeons have several procedural floors with doors, fog of war, and shortcuts. Scout ahead, sneak past unaware enemies, open caches, and survive the champion on floor five. Claim enough heart cores and the Palace in the capital offers an ending.

Combat — Turn-based melee and ranged combat with weapon mechanics: cleave, backstab, lifesteal, thorns, bleed, burn, and thrust. Noise and awareness matter — enemies hunt by sight and sound, and you can slip past them while they are unaware. Master a weapon class to unlock techniques: cleaves, parries, volleys, poison strikes, piercing bolts, and more, each on its own cooldown.

Enemies — Foes come in grades and archetypes with distinct AI: aggressive, coward, ranged, pack, patrol, defender, charger, and support. Packs howl, surround, and retreat together. Mutations twist them further — volatile, mirror, stone skin, vampiric, phasing, corrosive, and more — so no two dungeons feel quite the same.

Economy — Local markets have their own demand. Dumping ore crashes its price; selling the right gear at the right time pays for your next delve.

ASCII, console-first — All visuals are ASCII. Clarity before decoration. No pixel art, no 3D — just a clean terminal-style view into the dark.