Five Torches Deep: Old-School Dungeon Crawling with 5e Bones

Somewhere between the chrome-and-polish of modern 5th Edition D&D and the graph-paper brutality of 1981's B/X Dungeons & Dragons, there is a narrow corridor lit by guttering torchlight. The walls are damp. Your rations are running low. Your sword has a notch in the blade from that critical miss on the second floor. You have three torches left, and the map says there are six rooms between you and the exit.

This is Five Torches Deep, and it wants to kill your character.

Published in 2019 by Sigil Stone Publishing — the work of Jessica and Ben Dutter — Five Torches Deep is a 49-page RPG that strips the 5e engine down to its load-bearing walls and rebuilds it as an old-school dungeon crawler. It is small, intentional, and savage, and it occupies a unique position in the 5e ecosystem as the game for people who think 5e is too forgiving and the OSR is too unfamiliar.

The OSR-Meets-5e Philosophy

The Old-School Renaissance (OSR) is a broad movement in tabletop RPGs that valorizes the design principles of early D&D: player skill over character builds, resource management over combat optimization, high lethality, procedural dungeon exploration, and the fundamental premise that the dungeon is trying to kill you and your survival is not guaranteed.

5e, by contrast, is built around heroic competence. Characters are durable, combat is tactical but rarely fatal, and the system assumes that players will succeed at most challenges. The death spiral is gentle. Healing is abundant. A first-level character in 5e is significantly more capable than a first-level character in Basic D&D.

Five Torches Deep argues that you do not have to choose. It takes the core resolution mechanic of 5e — the d20 roll, ability modifiers, proficiency bonus, advantage/disadvantage — and wraps it in OSR design philosophy. The result is a game that feels familiar to 5e players but plays like a game from 1983.

Four Classes, No Nonsense

Five Torches Deep offers four classes: Warrior, Thief, Zealot, and Mage. That is it. No fourteen-class smorgasbord, no multiclassing matrix, no agonizing over subclass options at Session Zero.

Each class is deliberately simple at first level and gains an archetype specialization at level 3, which introduces variants of classic D&D classes. The Warrior can become a Barbarian or Paladin. The Zealot can become a Druid. The Mage can become a Warlock. But these archetypes are sketched in broad strokes, not the detailed feature chains of 5e subclasses. The game caps at level 9, focusing the entire experience on the low-to-mid tier where dungeon crawling is most tense.

Class restrictions based on race return from old-school D&D. Not every race can play every class, and minimum ability score requirements gate access to certain options. This is a deliberate design choice that will alienate some players and delight others. Five Torches Deep is not trying to be everything to everyone — it is trying to be one very specific thing, and it commits fully.

Load, Supply, and Durability

If Five Torches Deep has a design thesis, it is this: what you carry matters more than what you can do. The game's resource management systems are its mechanical heart, and they transform every decision into a calculation of risk and reward.

Load replaces standard 5e encumbrance with a simple, playable system. You can carry items equal to your Strength score in Load units, where one unit is approximately five pounds or an object the size of a human head. Heavy armor costs 5 Load. Light armor costs 2. Weapons cost 1 per hand required. Everything else is managed as 1-Load stacks. This is clean enough to track in play and punishing enough to force hard choices. You cannot carry everything. You must decide what matters.

Supply is an abstraction over consumable gear — rations, torches, ammunition, spell components, and miscellaneous adventuring equipment. You carry Supply points equal to your Intelligence score, and you spend them to replenish expendables. Run out of Supply, and you are eating in the dark, fighting with your bare hands, and casting spells without material components. Supply can be recovered through foraging checks or purchased in town at roughly 1 gold per point.

Durability ensures that even the gear you keep will eventually fail. Roll a natural 1 on an attack, and your weapon loses a point of durability. Get hit with a natural 20, and your armor degrades. Equipment can be repaired by spending Supply and making a check, but the repair is not guaranteed. Over the course of a dungeon delve, your best sword will develop nicks, your shield will crack, and your armor will loosen at the joints. This mechanical entropy creates a constant, low-grade tension that no amount of hit points can relieve.

Dungeon Crawling as Procedure

Five Torches Deep structures dungeon exploration around Travel Turns — one-hour blocks of in-game time that govern torch duration, wandering monster checks, and resource consumption. Torches last 1 to 3 turns. Every turn spent in the dungeon costs resources. Every door opened risks an encounter. The dungeon is a clock, and it is always ticking.

This procedural approach to exploration is borrowed directly from the OSR tradition, where dungeon crawling is not a series of encounters connected by hallways but a resource management puzzle where the dungeon itself is the primary antagonist. How deep do you go? When do you turn back? Do you spend a turn searching for secret doors, knowing it costs a torch and risks a wandering monster? These are the questions that Five Torches Deep makes mechanical, and they are the questions that define the OSR experience.

Experience points in Five Torches Deep are tied to treasure recovered and returned to a safe haven, not to monsters killed. This changes the incentive structure fundamentally. The optimal strategy is not to fight everything — it is to grab the gold and get out alive. Combat is a tax on your resources, not a reward for your efforts. Every fight you can avoid is a fight you win.

Haphazard Magic

Magic in Five Torches Deep is unreliable. Spells can go wrong. The Mage class has access to a limited spell list, and casting is governed by mechanics that introduce risk and unpredictability. This is a far cry from 5e's reliable, resource-based spellcasting, where a wizard can cast shield with perfect confidence that it will work exactly as described.

The unreliability of magic serves the game's larger design goals. In a world where your sword can break and your torches can run out, magic should not be a guaranteed solution. It should be powerful, rare, and dangerous — something you turn to when the situation is desperate, knowing that it might make things worse.

Who This Is For

Five Torches Deep is for the 5e player who has read about the OSR and wants to try it without learning an entirely new system. It is for the DM who wants to run a dungeon crawl where the players are genuinely afraid of the dark. It is for the group that wants a campaign where a successful expedition means coming back alive with enough gold to buy new torches for the next one.

It is not for groups that want heroic fantasy, epic storylines, or character builds with dozens of moving parts. It is not for players who expect their characters to survive past level 3 without careful play. It is 49 pages of focused, opinionated game design that knows exactly what it wants to be.

For DMs interested in running a Five Torches Deep campaign alongside their regular 5e games, Lorekeeper's campaign management tools can handle both — tracking the lethal, resource-scarce expeditions of FTD alongside the more expansive narratives of standard 5e play. The contrast between the two styles, run at the same table or alternating sessions, can be illuminating. Nothing makes you appreciate your 5e character's comfortable hit point pool quite like watching your Five Torches Deep thief die in a pit trap because you forgot to bring a ten-foot pole.