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Dungeon Bash

Drew

Explorer
I recently reviewed the Other Game Company's Dungeon Bash rules, which are basically a well constructed set of random dungeon generation rules with some slight modifications to the D&D base rules. As you can read in my review, I really liked these rules. I made a point to play the game a few times, and it was a tremendous amount of fun.

This neat little game seems to have been overlooked by the ENWorld community, which was part of my motivation for reviewing it. Its now my motivation for plugging it here. Anybody else tried out Dungeon Bash?
 

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I picked it up the other day, though I haven't tried it out yet. For me, it was wasted money. I own 2 copies of Warhammer Quest (to use for dungeon layouts) and have done Dungeon Bash years before it came out. It was cool to see how many things that the designers and 1 did the same way, however.

Overall, it's a good pdf to get if you want to run straight-forward kill monsters and take their stuff type of adventures with little muss or fuss.

Kane
 

I bought it because it does what I was looking for. Random dungeons with out a dungeon master, so everyone can play a character.

But now that I have Iron Heroes I can't wait to see how they run together. With the way that the classes are setup, the only issue that I see is that IH really begs to be run in a more cinimatic way. IE wants more scenery. Tables to jump on and chairs to kick over, pits to jump over, that kinda thing.

Hmm, might have to look closer into some of those random dungeon decoration resources....
 


What Iron Heroes or Dungeon Bash as a PBP?

Iron Heroes would be a sweet reading in a play by post. Given the challenge and stunt rules that it has, play by posts will definantly have help to be interesting. (Those of you GM's that already have/do something like them may not need the help. But for the rest of us, it gives us that nice cushy feeling of playing by the rules, while being to creative for our own good.) But that does mean possibly a bit more interaction between the players and the GM's per combat turn. On the other hand, No more asking where the healing potions are and who used them, so that's a good thing.

Dungeon Bash as a play by post though? Well it provides the basics for a dungeon crawl, including preset intelligence for monster behavior, so any given player could litterally take over GMing the campaign. The major issue would be the "fluff" aspect of campaign. Dungeon Bash's rules have.... Umm....
Come to think of it I might be able to some up the fluff in one sentance:
You are in a dungeon, you have your mission, now get to it!

So it's amazingly light on the campaign fluff, the player in charge would have to add in pretty much all the "fluff". Of course this is a good thing, since you can use it's rules and guides to create games in any setting, FR/Greyhawk/Swordlands.

Both at once, well that would depend on how well the GM can update the environment of the dungeon rooms. Remember that having a torch lined hallway in Iron Heroes could become a tactically important fact, whereas it's a far more background detail in Dungeon Bash, and possibly not even worth mentioning. The playtesters of IH mentioned barrels of oil at one point and how it resulted in a one sided battle at one point. So the rooms "Accessories" would need to be increased some I think.

Of course if the GM wanted to focus on playing, someone with the DB rules could take over pretty quickly. Heck it might even be possible to setup the ultimate round robin GMing situation. Different GM per week with possibly little to no change in how the campaign turns out. And this could happen even in the middle of combat.

I like that idea quite abit actually.:D
 


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