Dungeon Squad Extended - A three-page ruleset for adventuring heroes! [Playtest & Feedback appreciated!]


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Dungeon Squad Extended is my new little project, a simple, rules-light roleplaying game. The goal is to keep it to minimum words, minimum math and maximum fun! It's aimed at people who want some quick and easy rules for fantasy roleplaying, and prefer three pages to three hundred.

For those who just want to check out the rules...
DUNGEON SQUAD EXTENDED

Some of you may know of Dungeon Squard, a fantastic little game created by Jason Morningstar. It's only 1500 words or so and works well as a very basic dungeon crawling game. There have been alterations to it already, but I feel most go too far from the basic rules light, maths light system it is designed to be. Advanced Dungeon Squad is no less than 42 pages, and while I can say nothing about it's value as a system, it's not what we're looking for.

However, I felt it lacked, both in that it was literally just useful for dungeon crawling and had no support at all for determining anything else, and in that character advancement was pretty much everyone averaging out without options for specialization, and that it was a bit rough in the wording and left out things like basic combat rules (who acts when, what can you do when you act).

So I cleaned it up a bit, added and altered a few rules, removed the concrete, math heavy wealth system and put in a maths light abstract wealth system, made some implicit things explicit etc.

The result is a 3-page, 2500 word rule system that fills the basic role for a dungeon crawl, and has minimal (but existing) rules support for stuff that isn't really tied into dungeon crawling (such as bluffing etc).

Now, a few things to keep in mind:
- Specific overrides general, as standard in rules sets.
- This is not a system for rules-lawyers, munchkins or cheesers. It is intended for people that want to have fun wacking monsters and telling a story without being burdened by a heavy rules-system; as such, it will not hold up to the scrutiny of legalistic rules lawyers.
- It is not intended for people who have never heard of roleplaying and just pick it up in a vacuum, because that doesn't happen. There's no reason to include a "what is roleplaying?" section because most people who encounter RPGs - and especially fringe RPGs from independent writers - already know the basics of what they are.

Other than that, I'd be very happy if you check it out, and if you like it, try it out, if you don't, please tell me why!

I'm grateful for any feedback at all; typos, rules that look weird or unnecessary, important parts left out - but of course, playtest reports are the most powerful feedback possible!

Future plans:
If this works out well, and it functions well in our group (we've used Dungeon Squad in several one-nighters and it's been fun), I might make two supplements that I think would fit nicely, adding a little more depth and content. The basic idea is that each will have 3 pages.
Dungeon Squad Enlarged - 1 page monsters, 1 page rules for social interaction, adventuring etc, 1/2 page traps, 1/2 page special locations.
Dungeon Squad Empowered - 1 page magic items (both Stuff and Bling), 1.5 pages of a new rule of Special Ability, which each character gets a single, and 1/2 page of new spells.

In addition, as soon as I have a version I think is solid enough to call a 1.0, I'll translate the game into Swedish (my native language), so if there's any Swedes out there, go for it! :)
(Also, if anyone lives in/near gothenburg I'd be interested in playing with you)

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