Welcome to the Deathtrap: Square Dungeon

Showing posts with label Square Dungeon. Show all posts

Friday, May 24, 2024

How We Lost Faction Play, and Why it is Valuable

When I was a kid, I taught myself to play Dungeons & Dragons from the Red Box. I have a lot of praise for the design of the Mentzer Basic set: It was the first version of Dungeons & Dragons with a really clear how-to play guide, as well as two introductory adventures played solo in a way that was pretty familiar to a Choose Your Own Adventure addict like me. Castle Mistemere was a pretty clever design as well, giving you the first floor of the dungeon, a map of the second, and mostly a question mark for the third, it eased the Dungeon Master into learning how to play their role; perhaps not as well as Keep on the Borderland, had but it gave you a more methodical approach.

There was one way adventure with Aleena at the beginning of the book was deeply flawed, however. As a tutorial it was great, even as a piece of fiction it was pretty good. You got attached to Aleena, and then her death broke your heart, especially if you were 6 year old boy at the time...

...But, it also set up the idea that you were going to be playing the hero in a high fantasy narrative. You had an evil sorcerer, on the run, and, if you carried on with the PC you started with, were hunting them. You had a friend to avenge. Castle Mistemere reinforced that by suggesting that Bargle will be placed somewhere in the lower levels of the dungeon as a mastermind.

This is great Dungeons & Dragons; don't get me wrong. But, unlike Keep in the Borderland, you don't start as a mercenary looking for a quick score. Nor do you start as an escaped prisoner, or a castaway. From the beginning, the introductory adventure and castle Mistemere create the kind of plot are that we now associate with the kind of ""trad" play that was soon thereafter refined by Tracy Hickman in Ravenloft and the Dragonlance saga. In other words, it was a heroic journey, not a sandbox adventure,

Happy New Year

Happy New Year!

My family holiday was full to brimming with gaming, and gaming-adjacent activities, and I hope yours was, too.

I took my children to Medieval Times to watch some falconry, jousting, and games of horsemanship. We had an amazing time The show this year was a lot more theatrical than the one I saw 15 years ago - it felt just a little too put on to me. But certainly good entertainment that inspired my son to run back to his Basic Fantasy RPG books.

We run a hybrid game quite often where we handle actual action dicelessly using Square Dungeon, but keep track of stats, XP, etc. using Basic Fantasy in order to help him learn the ropes of planning and running a good game. His last two sessions have done me proud, as they involved a lot more back-story, and let me solve my problems using wit, tactics, and negotiation rather than just being slug-fests.

Welcome to the Deathtrap Year 2 in Review

Two years of W2tDT already?! Wow, the time has really flown! I am still enjoying this passion project of mine.

Big Projects

The Cyclopedia

I built a database of helpful OSR rules I call the Deathtrap Rules Cyclopedia that is updated very sporadically.

Crawling the Purple Isles

In the autumn of 2021, I started a project inspired by Tale of the Manticore: I am running a solo game of BECMI D&D with a few mods from The Dozen Dooms set in The Islands of the Purple-Haunted Putrescence. I've been blogging lurid, pulpy fiction based on it on another blog. I call it Crawling the Purple Isles.

This is a series that is definitely not safe for work. However, I use it to share tips and observations on solo gaming, campaign design, and DMing as I go.

Campaign Worlds

I have built three campaign worlds with detailed primer documents and discussed them as part of a series on world-building

The Aldrune setting is designed for Medieval Romance and is set by default to use Castles & Crusades, although any AD&D or expanded OD&D system will work with practically no conversion. I may yet try transitioning to Lion & Dragon one I finally get my hands on its corebook.

The setting is has incredibly detailed religions and pantheons in order to create a world and captures the transition between Paganism and Christianity in Europe and the transition between the middle ages and the early modern period at the same time. I use it for my home game.

Xen is more of a surreal sword and sorcery setting with a lot of Science Fiction accents. I am currently running two parallel campaigns in it using strict time tracking and I'm considering trying to run using actual one-to-one time. I'm also currently recruiting for a third campaign run in parallel to the other two. Xen draws heavily on Barsoom, the Dying Earth and Final Fantasy.

Xen uses a lightly tweaked version of Swords & Wizardry, with elements from my Oversix System. It is focused on diagetical ("rulings over rules") play over heavy use of dice.

The Golden Heresy is a setting I started as a doodle here on the blog. It is a sword-and-planet setting where a legion of plane-hopping spies break into fantasy worlds and destroy the barriers of reality so that their master and his legions can invade with heavily-armed starcraft and slay the local gods to free the people from the lies of false deities. It is a setting built with hopping multiple worlds in mind.

Also designed with Swords & Wizardry in mind, The Golden Heresy draws heavily on D&D3.5e psionics, Planescape, and Gamma World.

Adventures

I have moved away from pamphlet adventures to longer format adventures.

In the Summer, I released Maze of the Screaming Heads: a metaphor for RPG Twitter, the PCs must navigate a maze of samey chambers where it is easy to get lost while insane undead heads shout, scream, and rave at each other, threatening to drive the characters violently insane. Escape requires facing a blob if toxic sludge, sifting truth from fiction in the heads' ravings, or making a deal with a demon price.

More recently, I participated in the OSR Supplement Jam on Itch.io, where I released The Queen of Decay for Low Fantasy Gaming using the custom ruleset for Stephen Smith's World of Wierth setting. Based on a discussion of the bizarre cover for The Princess Bride by Ted CoConis, it is a psychedelic adventure across a hallucinogenic swamp to save a princess for she is driven insane by a Necromancer that is forcing her to read the dreams of undead cultists.

Playing TTRPGS with Children: Downsides

Image by Urh Kočar from Pixabay

When I decided on doing a series of articles about playing role-playing games with children, I felt it was important to look into some of the negatives.

Lots of people will write about this topic and not dare have a negative thing to say; and I find that strange. It is easy to see downsides to including kids in your hobby. Including behaviors you would never put up with in an adult player. I feel that it is important to cover some of the things that you need to watch for when playing games with kids.

Cha'alt: Rated G?!

Last summer when I was developing Square Dungeon with my oldest son, he became absolutely insatiable for more adventure. Once I had exhausted the plot of Sproggiwood, the video game he had initially asked me to turn into a role-playing scenario, and completely exhausted a home-brewed sequel with a plot twice the length of the original, and run several randomized dungeons created with DonJon just to keep him going, I found myself, for the first time since I started playing while playing Dungeons & Dragons 36 years ago, running out of ideas.

At the time, however, I was doing the first few reviews for this blog. I had just finished reading The Islands of Purple-Haunted Putrescence, and was really taken with it s crazy fusion of Science fiction and fantasy. Not mention it s concept of certain places being a Nexus for things to wash up once get lost in time space.

So, I decided to steal elements of "Purple" to open up the idea of a transplanter adventure for my son.

The Kid GM

Engraving by W. A. Cranston

My oldest son is an exceptionally creative soul. And a sensitive one. I might describe him as the epitome of the Artistic Temperament t. When something catches his attention, he learns about it voraciously, represents it in his art, and wants to ask questions about it, tell stories about it, and share facts about it with everyone he sees.

Currently, the colossal squid is his major obsession. I seriously doubt there is a relative, classmate, or educator that gets in front of my boy who doesn't know everything there is to know about the colossal squid. Before that it was volcanoes. And before that butterflies. And before that Final Fantasy games.

One of the ways that he started expressing his interest was to ask me to tell him a "Dungeons & Dragons story" about the topic of the month.

Because I have to walk him to school everyday, which is a 2 km hike there and back (8km walk g a day for me!) , we have lots of time to have these little scenarios so long as we have a rules light game in front of us. To that end, I created a simple diceless system we could play almost anywhere: Square Dungeon. And games using it were, before the second lockdown, a daily practice.

Square Dungeon is a diceless, rules-light
Adventure Game I designed so that I could
play with my little guy any time. PWYW on DTRPG

The Kid GMs Square Dungeon

Around early December an interesting shift occurred. Rather than asking me to tell him a scenario, he instead asked if he could tell me a story in our game. He wanted to see how someone might deal with a volcanic eruption, and so decided to put me in a TTRPG scenario in which I am a person having to deal with one.

Introducing Square Dungeon

When my oldest son was just toddler, I developed an interest in roguelike video games. I didn't have the time to put in for a sprawling epic A-RPG game like Fallout 4 anymore. I needed something I could take in small doses. When Humble Bundle offered a bundle with nearly a dozen rogue like games for an Android tablet, I jumped on it.. most of them I only played for a few hours, but the one that had real staying power for me is a game called Sproggiwood.

This game is elegantly simple. Each round you can make one move, be it step one square on their game board like environment, make one attack, or use one special ability. Then every monster moves or takes one action in response. Different monsters move and act in different ways. The game has a hit point economy rather like an OSR D&D game: a character can't take too many hits. You have to choose your place and timing very carefully, or you will end up dead. It's a game about stacking advantages and using your abilities strategically to defeat enemies who can kill you in one or two shots.

As your character survives and counters, they open up new abilities that don't just let you handle weaker enemies more efficiently, but are absolutely necessary to survive the boss monsters of the dungeon. I suspect anyone who enjoys both playing chess and playing old school Dungeons & Dragons based games will find sproggy would appealing.

I have put dozens of hours into this game, and have yet to get tired of it after 3 years of periodic play.

When my son began watching me play it over my shoulder a little over a year ago, he instantly became obsessed with it. I let him try it a few times, but it is a little too difficult for him, despite its cutesy visual design and deceptive simplicity.

Eventually, he started asking me to instead tell him "Sproggiwood stories like my D&D stories." Meaning, in translation, he wanted me to take its setting and something akin to its gameplay and translate them into a role-playing scenario for him so that he could vicariously enjoy the story.

Screenshot of Sproggiwood

At the time that we were doing this, we were also on the road, and adapting it to a tabletop role playing game that I already had would be tricky for lack of time. And, difficult to do when we were in the car, as would be dice rolling .

So, instead of doing that, I created a new, ultralight, diceless game that I could play with him. I called it "Square Dungeon."

Square Dungeon is too simple for my usual style of play, but for entertaining my kid when we have no dice to play with? It is perfect. In fact it has become part of a daily ritual for me. When we aren't locked down, I have a 40 minute walk to get my son to school. During that time, if we aren't talking about some important historical event, answering some wonder he has about the wildlife we occasionally see, or I'm not repeating a favorite fable or fairy tale to him, we will play a short TTRPG scenario.

The simplicity of the system has allowed him to quickly create his own TTRPG scenarios that range from deep sea exploration, to search and rescue missions, to classic fantasy.

When I created it, I didn't expect a campaign to come out of it but, we played through the entire plot of Sproggiwood reduced to a series of five room dungeons.

And when that was done, he was still hungry for more. And so I wrote a sequel plot. And then, when that wasn't enough, I created a story of interdimensional invasion inspired by Venger Satanis' Islands of the Purple-Haunted Putrescence, which I had just finished reviewing.

By the time he completed that scenario, he was still asking for more, and so I used elements from Cha'alt sanitized for kids gaming. Then finally, as we were heavily mixing fantasy and science fiction anyway, I stole the plot for Ratchet and Clank: A Crack in Time, and tied it back into both a wizard character I had introduced in some of the sequel adventures, and the time God Raako from the original Sproggiwood plot.

And even did a redux early this spring involving an alien invasion where I based the villains on the fix-it-force from the cartoon Chico Bon-Bon: Monkey with a Toolbelt but they had driven me nuts with by watching 20 times through.

I suspect, all told, I have put something to the tune of 200 hours of play into this system.

I have decided to share it with you, as a part of my series on playing with children. Here it is, finally on paper as a pamphlet game inspired by some of my friends in the Brazilian OSR scene: