Product Review: Dungeon Squad

Author’s note: this little gem of a free game was published more than five years ago, but this writer just learned about it last week. For those Gentle Readers who already know about this game, I offer apologies. For those who, like me, haven’t yet heard about Dungeon Squad, keep reading; the download is well worth the effort.

Dungeon Squad is hardly a new game, but it certainly isn’t as well-known as it should be; it is reviewed here for that reason.

In the spirit veteran gamers will remember from the Moldvay Basic Set, the rules for this free role-playing game (RPG) are short, with “short” being defined as five pages, including a sample character sheet.

The precis describing the rules - which can be downloaded by clicking here - reads:

Dungeon Squad is a role-playing game designed expressly for young players with short attention spans who demand action and fun. There is a lot of die rolling and some amusing shopping and number-crunching. Characters can be generated in 3 seconds.

The author, Jason Morningstar, is not joking.

Daffy Duck as ‘The Wizard’

This one is a keeper.

Five things a D&D group can learn from a corporate board meeting

There are plenty of things I really enjoy about my day job as a senior manager at a publishing company. One thing I don’t like so much is the mandatory, weekly operating committee meeting, at which our company’s department heads provide lengthy reports to the chief executive and chief operating officers.

During a slow period of last week’s meeting, I browsed over some of the agenda items and came to the conclusion that thinking through some of the concepts described there may provide a benefit to a group of D&D players, with regard to how their characters operate and succeed in the game world. Of course, this is purely a metagame exercise; characters obviously wouldn’t discuss their life circumstances in these terms. Players, however, may find some benefit in viewing their heroes through the lens about to be presented, both for in-game circumstances like recruiting allies or amassing enough treasure to finance a project, and for external considerations, like whether or not a given feat is giving optimal in-game results.

When D&D is the wrong tool for the job

There are times when the Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) game isn’t the most effective tool for the job, even when the job is creating a backstory for a D&D adventure or campaign.

While working on a few non-player character (NPC) anecdotes to add flavor to my next D&D campaign, I was presented with something of a conundrum. I wanted to retell a story of a skirmish-level battle, but most of the participants weren’t standard D&D heroes with classes, levels and powers as explained in the rules. Instead, the protagonists were town watchmen, some militiamen, a guard captain and a fighter with a bit of ecclesiastical training, all people whose abilities are outshined by even a first level D&D character. Without wanting to reduce the combat to a meaningless tussle between minion-type monsters or to draw up a battle story from scratch, I resorted to an infrequently used weapon in my D&D arsenal: a different game system.

Missing some D&D players? Try these six rarely-used alternatives

For most of us, gaming is a hobby, meaning that actual life responsibilities can and often do take precedence over playing games. It is to be expected, then, that one or more players may not be able to attend a regularly scheduled D&D session for such reasons, leaving those in attendance questioning how best to proceed. Fortunately, having one or more missing players doesn’t mean that those players able to attend are relegated to the most common or, for campaign purposes, inane solutions to player absenteeism such as watching fantasy films, playing a different tabletop game or turning on a video game console. Neither does having absent players make it necessary to run the player characters (PCs) of missing players in their absence.

The challenge is finding a way to enrich the ongoing D&D campaign for those present - without cheating attending players out of the role-playing fun the missing players would have brought, or exposing the PCs normally controlled by missing players to harm. After all, no one wants to hear that their favorite character was killed in action while they were away at a family function. This challenge – as it is with all  challenges – conceals an opportunity, and this post will discuss how a well-prepared Dungeon Master (DM) can capitalize on that opportunity to provide a game experience relevant to the current campaign, even if the evening’s session doesn’t move the central campaign story forward.

Write a gripping mystery adventure in four steps

Mystery and crime-solving adventures have always presented a fascinating alternative to typical fantasy role-playing game (RPG) fare, while also presenting a formidable design challenge for the Dungeon Master (DM). At first glance, it is apparent that the mystery fiction author has a pronounced advantage over the RPG adventure designer; the former has control over the actions of all characters involved in the story, while the latter only has control over the non-player character (NPC) criminals and neutrals. As a result, the challenge behind writing a mystery adventure involves how the DM can bring the protagonists (in this case, the heroes) to a solution to a crime at an engaging pace and appropriate difficulty while having no control over the primary characters whatsoever.

The solution to this problem dates back to 1928.