Thursday, April 20, 2017

First Dungeoncrawler playtest!


Hey all!

As promised, here is a bit more from the first playtest of the new Dungeoncrawler playtest!

So, as I said, we took two heroes... I took a human mage, and my buddy took a human warrior.


The first room in the dungeon was a small room, with a few orcs and a few goblins in it.  (Ignore the treasure piles above, they were acting as door placeholders.)


We fought bravely... the warrior tanked the fights as best he could, although a few orcs and goblins made it to the wizard, whose fireball spells did some damage.


Soon the enemies were cut down, and we checked out our loot... a few crappy helmets, but the Ring of Combat was an amazing early-game find!


We continued through the hallways of the dungeon for a bit, with no enemies in sight...


... until we came to another small room a few armored orcs in it!  This was a BEAST of a fight; the mage's fireball spell was KEY in killing the orcs, but they did a bunch of damage.  Their 2d6 worth of armor, combined with the warrior being only armed with a short sword, make this fight tough.


We moved on through the dungeon after we defeated the creatures, turning left into a large room with a big statue in the middle... and smack dab into a HUGE horde of orcs and goblins, with an ogre in support!


Again we let the warrior tank the fight, as the wizard was already hurt from the last fights.  The wizard blasted away with a new magic scroll he had found, a Lighting scroll, which allowed him to hit several opponents at once... focusing on the ogre really beat the massive creature up, and eventually the party was able to bring down their foes.


Our intrepid heroes pick through the loot!


We proceeded on, going through a door on the opposite wall (which isn't in the photos above for some reason?) and bam... another horrible encounter.  This time we had orcs and goblins coming from behind, and more from the front!


Here we panicked a bit... we fled backwards, as the wizard fired off a few shots with his newly-acquired bow... the idea was to get away from the open space and into a more confined space, where the warrior could do most of the heavy lifting.  And the bad guys swamped us, knocking down both heroes health, the ogre in particular hitting hard.


Again the wizard proved hugely helpful, using his lighting spell to blast life off of several guys, and the warrior finished them off!


Soon the ogres and most of the orcs were dead, and there were just the goblins to deal with... and somehow our heroes made it through!


We then went north a bit, finding another empty small room, and then down a corridor... where two more ogres were waiting, and the scurry of feet in the darkness behind us turned out to be some orcs!


The heroes retreated, trying to find a good place to fight from...


... and the ogres leapt on the warrior, beating on him with their clubs.  The wizards lighting scroll did a bunch of damage before burning out, and the warrior was able to survive and finish off the two ogres.


That left the orcs to deal with, who the heroes managed to dispatch as well!


We called the game at that point, having made some significant modifications to the rules and some big changes to several aspects of it.  Taken overall, however, the game REALLY really worked; it was fun and exciting and incredibly well balanced, while being SERIOUSLY intuitive!

Here are our characters at the end... the warrior had a leather helm, a shield, and some plate mail, along with a short sword and a pair of scrolls (fireball and healing) he was holding on to... the wizard had his bow, a newly-found scroll of lighting (the equipment deck was poorly shuffled and still all in one deck, resulting in a LOT of good gear being found when it shouldn't have... but whatever, we were just testing:) ), his ring of combat, and some leather armor and a leather helmet.


So that's it!  I'll have more as we work on the game!

Thanks for coming by!

1 comment:

Joe Procopio said...

Would love to know more about the rules you're developing! Good dungeon crawl rules are so scarce, and it's my favorite "genre." Any chance of you sharing some of the rules at some point?