Dungeonscrawl: The Palace of the Briar Prince
A downloadable game
Dungeonscrawl is an OSR game in the vein of Into The Odd which comes with a full system for generating your own random dungeon by drawing rooms on index cards and playing through them. Also has a big drawing of an elf!
Download
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Comments
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I ran this game with my family a few times and it was a bunch of fun. My precocious 7 yr old especially loved it. The rules and story are pretty streamlined, but there's a lot of flexibility and variety. And the visuals on the cards really helped my kids engage with the game. It took me ~3-5min to make each room card though, and it required a fair bit of imagination to make the motifs work, but I really like the concept.
Some notes:
* I let my players pick their class and assign their stats for better theming. We also made tradeoffs for customization (eg: sacrifice some max HP and strength to become an agile flying fairy or unlock a dark magic attack)
* Don't make your players kill every "enemy" they encounter. The system allows for negotiation, intimidation, evasion, etc. My players wound up taming a firefox with meat from another enemy, and recovered a stolen relic to placate some trolls.
* I'm not sure how much damage the players are supposed to take from attacks. 1HP seems too little (esp. if you have a priest or just rolled good stats). I'm trying 1 for lesser/standard enemies and 1d4 for elites.
* The game took ~90 minutes for 3 players to get through ~6-8 rooms. Combat can get repetitive, so make sure there are non-fighting actions to take during the battle (using terrain/traps to advantage, looking for routes, interacting with the room).
* My kids wanted to pick everything up and look for loot everywhere, so I let them. However, I added tradeoffs like "if you're carrying meat, then beasts will be able to track you easier". I also introduced all sorts of potions and magic items as rewards for exploring and solving problems. Go wild!
Happy Gaming!
Can't find the download, what's going on?
Ah! Yes. I hadn't put the PDF in there. It's uploaded now.
Thanks! just downloaded and read it.
I'm a bit confused about the rooms mechanic. I get that each player gets index cards and has a Motif (btw is it ok to have two players with the same motif?) but what do they do with the index cards? it's not really specified... do they actually draw the room? if they do - than should they know what's in it before? by rolling the standard or special table?
The line "Roll twice on the standard table below and combine them before you draw a card" makes me think you roll only when the GM draws the card. But how can you draw a room without knowing what's in there or how many exits are there?
Is the process like - the player draws the scenery, when the DM draws he rolls for what's in it and adds the elements and exists to the card and then reveals it?
Does the player who drew the card explain describe what we are seeing when the card is revealed? because we might not understand what the drawing is meant to signify.
I liked the general feel of the system, and in general I love you one-pager concept, I've been making some one-pagers of my own in inspiration of yours - you are awesome! keep it up :)
I found the same thing, my interpretation is:
One other thing I picked up is you want to roll under your stay, but if you have help you add an extra dice and take the higher number, which I think is a mistake.
I have a session today, I'd love to give this a shot because it looks like so much fun!