For much of my life, my alter egos have spent their time tromping about dungeons in search of fabled artifacts and glorious adventure. It's the setting of some of my fondest imagined memories.
That is, I'm sure, what moved me to try my hand at creating my own miniatures game, Dungeon Delve.
My approach to this endeavor is to design a set of core mechanics that can be used for a multitude of scenarios. For the play test version I have developed a scenario in which parties of adventurers explore the crypt of a long-dead despot name Thule. The intention is to try to marry some of the best aspects of miniatures skirmish gaming with the exploration of an unknown "dungeon" setting more typical of traditional role playing games, such as Dungeons & Dragons. A key goal in my core game design is to create an experience in which players are in competition with each other but nobody needs to play the role of game master/referee. I've tried to design an experience where, to some degree, each player fills both roles. In addition to each player controlling their own little adventuring party, they are also responsible for playing their opponent's encounters in the crypt. This hopefully eliminates problems with vanilla AI for the monsters; an actual player controlling an opponent's monster encounters makes them less predictable and, frankly, smarter and more strategic in their actions. The challenge to such a design approach is finding mechanics that strike the delicate balance between loosely pre-programmed encounters/events (monsters, traps, interactions with items in rooms, etc. ) against the need for enough randomness and discretion to sustain re-playability and keep the game from feeling like it's "on rails" leading in only one direction.
To that end, rooms are randomly generated within certain parameters (size, 'terrain,' decor/features, encounters/monsters, etc.) for adventurers to explore. Those explorations, though, can have a variety of outcomes, so that choosing to take a drink from a fountain in one play-through of the game can have very different results in the next game if that same room feature is even encountered.
All of these variables are expressly thematic, which is to say that all of the encounters, rooms and their decor, wandering monsters, traps, etc. are of a piece, and something one might logically experience in an ancient crypt. And all of the details are suffused with the backstory of this character, Lord Thule, who is buried in this scenario's crypt. The intention is that eventually other adventures can be written with different objectives using the game's core rules/mechanics (e.g., a hill giant's keep, a mad king's prison, etc.), but until I settle on those mechanics, Lord Thule's crypt is the stomping grounds for foreseeable play testing.
I've written up a full overview of the game's design and a battle report on my blog, Scrum in Miniature, with over 90 cool photos by my wife. Check it out here:
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Below are a few choice photos:
While exploring the corridors, Stank Shank of the Shank Gang stumbles upon a wandering monster, a couple of Querulous Trolls. The player's opponent reads the top text to the player having the encounter, but keeps the rest of the card's text to himself (especially special attacks like projectile vomiting and any treasure). The Shank Gang eventually killed the Trolls with a series of flame-based spell attacks. The mundane item roll gave them a holy symbol, which has applications under certain circumstances in the game (exorcisms, for example).
These are the custom dice I made to determine all of a new room's features (prompting the drawing of cards for encounters, etc.). The dice here indicate that the room is 8" north/south, 6" east/west with two doors that are broken (and thus must be cleared), a special room feature (drawn from the proper deck), and an encounter (drawn from the encounter deck). Roll these six dice, draw a couple of cards, and you have a randomly generated (but thematically coherent) room!
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Part of developing the narrative for the scenario involves discovering "Major Encounter" rooms (there are four total in this scenario). Lots of undead revelers on this room's beds…
"A retro fun fest!" is how one of the players described the evening's game, which was exactly what I was going for. The whole endeavor has been inspired by my desire to recapture some of the mildly transgressive thrills and old-school gonzo flavor that characterized my very first encounters with D&D in the late 1970s.
Again, many more notes and photos to be found at the blog post at Scrum in Miniature:
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