Rubik Meets Ruins: Inside Lazlo’s Cube Crypt

There are two things I never expected to go together for a campaign: an old-school dungeon crawl and a Rubik's Cube. But that's the spark for Lazlo's Cubed Crypt, a soon-closing Backerkit campaign.

Nathan Doyle is the soul behind the Cube, a longtime player of D&D since D&D who turned a rather unique concept for a Rubik's Cube into a sellable product.

The Cube came to exist during one of Doyle's local games when he saw a map designed by Dyson Logos that was a dungeon that looked a lot like a cube. One of his fellow players was into Rubik's Cubes, so he found a printer to convert this map into a Rubik's Cube. The Cube eventually ends up online and is praised by thousands of players who tell Doyle to "Shut up and take my money!"

From there, he decides to make the Cube into a mass-produced artifact, complete with a level-12 D&D one-shot themed around the Cube:

"Lazlo the Lavish was once a particularly silver-tongued advisor to many nobles and royal courts. For decades, he amassed power and favors before attempting to wrest control of several nations for himself. After starting several civil wars, he became a lich and utilized his powers of enchantment and necromancy to keep the turmoil going indefinitely. He was eventually defeated, but he will return as his phylactery was never found. Centuries have passed, and rumors abound that Lazlo has been found with his phylactery resting in the same crypt."

The core of the one-shot is the Cube, which players will find in the story within the crypt. They'll have to solve the Cube if they want to survive Laszlo's private dimension, where he lurks. DMs can run the campaign without the Cube, but the Cube is what makes this unique.

The cube "actually changes the dynamic of [the one shot], because if you play it from a more traditional [Old School Renaissance aka OSR] standpoint, where the Dungeon Master describes the rooms to the players, and they have to make their own map, because the map is mapped to a three-dimensional plane," Doyle told TTRPG Insider. "It cannot be mapped properly on a two-dimensional plane, and it will start to grow into itself, so the map itself defies logic if done traditionally. Figuring that out is then part of the adventure for the players, if they're not actually using the Cube itself."

Doyle notes that the dungeon itself heavily relies on OSR design principles since it requires players and DMs to draw both on the theatre of the mind for exploration and on drawn maps if they wish to succeed. While one could attempt to generate or print the maps, it distracts from the adventure's focus on the dungeon crawl itself. Players will undoubtedly be able to roleplay, but the puzzle elements and the combat are the core of the adventure.

Laszlo's is an intriguing concept on paper that turns an iconic toy into an adventure that old-school players and those who love a good puzzle played out with friends in person will adore. Doyle claims the dungeon is replayable, especially once he and his team release the other sets of adventures to accompany the game. He’s also had to change it so that the tiles on the cube are appropriately color-coded, allowing Rubik’s aficionados the ability to understand and fix the puzzle based on reflex and color alone.

We’ll be curious to see how well it turns into an adventure.

Thanks to Doyle for chatting with us! You can learn more about the Cube and the campaign on Backerkit. The campaign will close on May 22.