Gen Con was a great show for Paizo, as usual, but this year had a new addition to our booth presence. It all started with a little contest around the office to determine who could design the most deadly dungeon chamber. While this idea was all well and good, we would need some "test" subjects to run through our gauntlet of pain, and thus the idea of running a delve at Gen Con was born.
Using the fabulous Master Maze 3D dungeon terrain pieces produced by Dwarven Forge, along with our Critical Hit Deck, Combat Pad, and item cards, we set out to murder as many unsuspecting visitors to our corner of the booth, and murder we did. Of course, we also gave out some great prizes to those who managed to succeed, including free production, discounts at the booth, and even some real swords.
Every unfortunate soul who met his end in the depths of Tirana's death trap became a red dot on our oversized delve maps, as a warning to others. Of course, that didn't seem to help much, as by the end of the show there were 255 red dots on the maps. Considering that we ran roughly 1000 players through the delve, a 1-in-4 death rate is pretty respectable (mental note: make next year deadlier). Of course, part of the fun was figuring out whose rooms caused the most deaths. Phil Lacefield's rooms certainly had the most kills as a whole, but no individual room had more kills than Publisher Erik Mona's doom-filled Vrock chamber. Congrats to Erik for having the least compassion toward poor player characters.
If you missed out on the delve, never fear. Many of its chambers were used as inspiration for GameMastery Module D2: Seven Swords of Sin, which should be hitting your store shelves any day now.
