D is for Dungeon

Dungeon Adventures, to be exact. What some people call "Dungeon Crawling".You might think: "Dungeons and Dragons" and you'd be partly right. What I've been slanting towards for several years now is some sort of tabletop Dungeon Adventure game. Not quite a full fledged RPG like D&D, or maybe something like D&D that isn't D&D.

I mean, D&D is fine as a concept and I've been following the whole Old School Renaissance D&D retro-clones for a while now. Swords and Wizardry, Labyrinth Lord, Dungeon Crawl Classics, etc. The problem is that I keep coming back to the basic mechanisms of level, and ep, Armour Classes, etc, which I rejected the first time back in the late 70's. (About the first time I played RuneQuest, to be precise). And I'm not interested in full fledged role-playing anyhow. What I want is some sort of fantasy wargame that can be run with continuing characters. A sort of RPG-lite.

Part of what is spurring this on is that, back when the Canadian dollar climbed way up with respect to the US dollar and at the same time Dwarven Forge switched the format of their product, they put all their old stuff on at 40% off.  And I bought up a ton of it. Enough to fill ten foot of wall shelving floor to ceiling. :-)

Ever since then I've been looking for the best system to use it with. I've toyed with Broadsword Adventure, by Rattrap Productions, and even tried to shoe horn a D&D-like magic system onto it. I've also tried Barbarians of Lemuria. I've considered Pendragon and In the Labyrinth/TFT and some of the Two Hour Wargames offerings. Recently I have considered Osprey's new "Ronin" rules. And even more recently I've considered RuneQuest, either 2nd edition or the new 6th edition.

Now I am considering going back and trying Ganesha Games "Song of Blood and Heroes" again. I had tried it for a few games several years ago but found that some aspects were too simplistic and that I immediately started to tinker with it. And then my PC crashed and since it was a PDF it was lost back into the ether. Now I'm thinking that maybe tinkering isn't so bad, as I seem to have to tinker with every rule set. I just have to make sure I get a printed copy this time...