Dungeon Day!

 

Dungeon Day!

    For the annual day-after Christmas game this year, we did an old fashioned Dungeon Crawl!

The idea was simple, we were going to use the big lava dragon model Eric bought from GenCon like twelve years ago.  Everything else evolved from that. Sometimes you start at the end and work backwards.

    I had developed a good tile system for my TheDeep: Mine tiles that would work just as well for dungeons, so sent that along to Eric.  He would create 6 tiles, I would create 6 tiles and the center board. Players would be in two parties on either side of the table and go through their 6 tiles, working to the center where they would meet and cooperate against the final Big Bad Guy, the dragon!

   Here’s just a few construction pictures.  That lava table baffled me for a good long while, specifically how to get the flimsy plastic sheets to have enough rigidity to work. Yard Sign holders and acrylic rod turned out to be the answer if you were wondering.

  I was also creating and writing the rules for this, along with a whole boatload of cards for characters, equipment, and treasure.  

    Here we have a silly little tour of the tiles I created.  It’s a group of photos I sent to Eric to show what I had finished.

And an overhead of the final layout.

This is the game table set-up and ready for play! Rooms were revealed only when they were entered.

It's so exciting!

   And it begins!  Treasure chests like the one up there in the corner were in every other room, and contained not only treasure (coins, health potions, etc) but better weapons! 

  Small chests with only treasure and no weapons were in the in-between rooms.

   Every room had a host of creatures to fight, then at some point a "boss monster" would arrive in the room. If you recognize that Boss, and know what forces he lead, you're awesome. We can be friends.

I don't have a blow-by-blow for this, so I'll just put some photos of the players working through the rooms here.

  Players killed would Re-Spawn in the center of the previous room, so there was a time penalty, and they had to purchase any weapons or items they wanted to keep, which gave the a reason and use for collecting Gold.  The mummy room killed my party a lot. A lot.

   And here the players from both sides have reached the center room, a sort of horrific vestibule for the final confrontation.  You can also see Eric's dungeon tiles on the right side there.

   Sadly, I do not have a photo of it where you can see it well, but that stone block there in the center of the room, with the torches leading to it, is a door. It's an Infinity Mirror, so when you look into it it just seems to go on forever.  Worked out pretty well.

   And then it was onto the final room, the Lave Table!

I kind of impressed myself with this, it really came out looking pretty good.

Again, I don't have a blow-by-blow, so some photos of the final battle are below!

  You can sort of see the Infinity door up there on the left.  That's where it led to, so I just reused it on the new table.

The Dragon spawned/summoned fire or lava creatures so the players had more to battle than just the one foe.

  He's hard to notice, but the translucent miniature on the clear base in front of the dragon lit up really well!

  In the end, the Dragon was defeated, and everyone had a really good time with it!

Note: after playing on this table for a while, the green christmas lights took on a pretty epic new level of green-ness.