Slashing Dragon set himself a rather interesting challenge in the month or so prior to his attending the recent HoBLotH event:

…I wanted to create a program that would emulate an environment for people to explore in real life.

My initial design was for a round space with 5 interconnected rooms, the program would generate a room layout telling the party what rooms they could move to, and it would be seamless (no levels). I also thought a lot on the best way to represent it, even wondering if I should use some sort of devices on each room for player input, and some kind of lights to represent the room exits.

The idea continued evolving, in the end I went for something much more practical: a bigger open space where the party could move in the four cardinal directions from room to room, and there would be a mobile app handled by a Game Master, which would guide the group through the dungeon.

And after testing his ideas with some friends, Slash brought this new dungeon simulator — which he opted to name EXODUS — with him to Austin, Texas:

I continued working on it, flew to Austin for the event and ran 4 games there. Happily, the players liked it quite a bit and even on-site I continued doing some tweaks. In between flights and some time after coming back home, I polished the user experience so anyone could use it.

During the event, I was able to test both full party sessions and also one on one (2 players), even did a test without Game Master (i.e. the Game Master acting as Dungeon Dweller). It worked pretty nice.

EXODUS is available for Android; an iOS version is evidently in the works as well. There’s also a manual for it, in case you’re curious how to make it work for your LARP group. There’s also a landing page for EXODUS at the Slashware Interactive website.