Mike Mearls Games
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Cthulhu and Dungeons in D&D 5e
🕑 Added 2025-07-31 12:00:10 +0000 UTCAbout a week ago, a project I led called Cthulhu by Torchlight premiered on D&D Beyond. It's always pretty exciting to see a project release into the world. You can buy the book here.
My knowledge of D&D 5.5 is a little rusty, so I turned to a few experts to help build the product. One of those experts is Treantmonk, whose channel has been a fixture of my YouTube subs for years. He created two videos talking about the subclasses in the product and how we created them:
Treantmonk and I Talk About the Subclasses
So, having sat through my commercial, I wanted to reward you with a sneak peak of a project I randomly started working on just before Cthulhu by Torchlight released. To sharpen my knowledge of the D&D revision, I did a very reasonable thing. I took the SRD and rewrote it. Doing this forced me to learn the system, see how it all fits together, and how it has evolve. The process led to a revelation, one spurred in part by how much Shadowdark I've been running over the past few years: D&D 5e has a rough time with dungeons.
Characters have a multitude of features and spells that trivialize the perils of dungeons. Your character is a weirdo if you don't have darkvision with a 60 foot or greater range. All the stuff I like about Shadowdark just doesn't quite work.
So, I redesigned backgrounds, classes, and species to work better in dungeons. That stuff is still in draft format, but I do have a basic encounter builder you can use for dungeons. It's attached to this post as a PDF.
As this goes live, I'm at Gen Con. If you see me, feel free to say hi!
Comments
Ryan Linderman
Cthulhu by Torchlight looks really cool. But, DND beyond doesn't let you use the subclasses with the 2014 classes, which is a bummer but probably not unexpected
nimbus
YES, but this is not at all new to 5e. D&D is supposed to be focused on dungeon crawling, yet has always, all the way back to 1e, offered spells that trivialize the basics of a dungeon environment from a fairly low level. I've been pointing out forever how insane this is. Capabilities like burrowing, teleportation and similar really need to take into consideration that for the majority of the game's level range you want to be able to constrain the path of the PCs using walls. Even something like food/water creation being available from level 1 negates entire axes of exploration play, which is worth revisiting... 4e as usual was ahead of its time here. I swear, every time I come to your blog I end up concluding that what the world needs right now is not Daggerheart or Shadowdark but a 4e-clone heartbreaker.
Tim
I tend to play humans but the “infravision” and such like spells that trivialize environmental hardships are an issue. Think Dark Sun or a desert campaign and 3e’s endure elements. Luckily that’s not a spell in 5e but it really comes down to the dm and players agreeing to what the enjoy prepping and playing. Not much fun is had when a DM wants to play a 1 or 2e style game with spell component tracking, encumbrance, inventory for food etc and the players not so much, 3 sessions in at best and players start not showing up or cancelling. So with that said Mike, the rules for a odyssey either need to be able to support both styles of play or figure out what style of play your customers want the most - which of course you already know with your extensive background :)
