Fame & Fear: Dungeon Architect

Heroes want glory. You have bills to pay.

Fame & Fear: Dungeon Architect is a single-player fantasy management sandbox. Build a dungeon full of monsters, traps and treasure, open inns and attract adventurers willing to pay to get in.

Admission is paid up front. Getting home isn't included.

Build a dungeon worth the risk

Dig out rooms and corridors, place doors, and choose floors, lighting and decorations. Mix and match different themes, place your monsters and give your bosses a spot worthy of their worst intentions.

Layout matters: treasure can draw visitors down a particular route, and a trap can help a monster land its attacks. Filling a room with danger won't do much good if nobody sets foot in it.

Plan at night. Face the consequences by day.

Prepare your dungeon at night and use the Predicted Flow Heatmap to spot promising routes and areas that might stay empty. It's a forecast, not a promise: adventurers have needs and plans of their own. Select them during a visit to see where they're going and why.

When things need a little nudge, use your Keeper's Orders. Use Lure to make an area more appealing; Overcharge to boost a trap's next activation at the cost of a longer cooldown; and Seal to temporarily close a passage without cutting off essential escape routes. You have three uses in total per day. Blowing all three on the first curious visitor is an option. Not necessarily a good one.

At the end of the day, check the report: damage, object usage, revenue and observations based on what actually happened. Then get back to building. Maybe that trap was a great idea, just in the wrong corridor.

An inn between two traps is still an inn

Set your admission price, furnish the rooms, hire staff and offer services to your visitors. Basic furniture and staff are available from Rank F; beds and guest rooms unlock at Rank C. You can use furniture from different themes without sticking to a single matching set.

Keep an eye on expenses, maintenance and your cash reserves: an overpriced ticket can turn people away, and those who do enter might want to spend some money at the inn too. Some adventurers come back, bringing memories of their last visit with them.

It's good to have a regular customer. Especially one you've already tried to kill.

Someone has to make it out alive

A dungeon without danger doesn't give visitors much of a story to tell. One without survivors has a different problem: nobody left to tell it.

Balance fame, fear and survival to keep adventurers coming. Over time, your dungeon's lethality, trap usage and the success of your services can influence how well prepared incoming groups are, who's in them and how much money they bring.

And then there's the Kingdom. Let fear get out of hand and you might receive an official visit. The kind with weapons, not clipboards.

From Rank F to Legendary Dungeon

Grow your dungeon from Rank F all the way to SS, tackle objectives and see what new content awaits before paying for a promotion.

At Rank SS, you can take on the Kingdom's Grand Expedition, an optional challenge with three days to prepare. Complete it to earn the title of Legendary Dungeon.

There's no mandatory finale: the sandbox continues, whether you take on the challenge or not. There's always another room to sort out.

Good ideas deserve a blueprint

Save your rooms as blueprints, reuse them in other playthroughs and share them through the Steam Workshop.

Designed a particularly unpleasant welcome? It would be a shame to keep it to yourself.