I haven't been able to game for a long while now, and when I stumbled across this .pdf the first time, I talked myself out of it, dismissing it as a last act of gaming desperation.

I am so glad I set aside my shame and pride!

This .pdf was so worth it. I am getting through dungeon after dungeon, have a character who started at 1st, and though having more than a few brushes with death, is now 5th and counting after only 10 or so hours of play, and I am getting very familiar with the game mechanics and character optimization.

The gist of the text is this: you (and other players, as long as nobody GMs) generate characters, a settlement in which to start, an urban encounter or two, and then get on the road to the dungeon. You establish a dungeon 'objective' (rescue, item retrieval, feature destruction, eradication, discovery, and the open ended 'epic' objective), create a starting point, and then roll your way through rooms and (mostly) corridors, evading traps, slaying monsters, getting loot, and finally completing your objective. If you want to pursue another objective in the same dungeon, all you have to do is generate a stairway down, and, voila! you're ready to go again.

After completing the adventure (or campaign, if you fulfill all 6 objectives) you can travel back to the original settlement, or to a new, bigger city with more loot to give.

There you have it, and now, a bit of critique. Things could be a little more streamlined to avoid so much bouncing back and forth through the file (although it's short enough I could just print it out, I suppose), and there do seem to be a boatload of corridors on my dungeon maps (maybe corridors should be 1-5 on the d20 dungeon generation chart instead of 1-7), but it's pretty great, all in all.

The main reason this gets 4 instead of 5 stars is that I am playing PFRPG and not 3.X, and it does take a little fiddling to bounce back and forth across editions. That said, at least I can game again without having a whole weekend set aside.

A final note, even if you have a GM, a group of players, and a bunch of time on your hands, you might pick this up just to run your PC through some tests. I found out how NOT to play a paladin real quick!

Thanks ERP!

I love it! I don't have time to play with a group with one child and one on the way, and a wife not into roleplaying. It gives you a good base and has you reference and roll on tables from all 3 of the core books. I can just play a little whenever I have some spare time to satisfy my gaming urges.