WFRP General: Is there a place for dungeon crawls in WFRP?

One thing that many of the most outspoken hardcore WFRP fans have in common is a disdain for the classic dungeon crawl, as popularised by the world’s most played role-playing game; Dungeons & Dragons. I came to think about this the other day when I was preparing for Tuesday game night, where I’m going to run something called Dungeon Delve for the current edition of D&D. I was also reading some old posts from the FFG forums, and one of them concerned the dungeon crawl as a viable adventure experience for WFRP. Or rather, the non viability of the dungeon crawl in the game.

My stance on topic in relation to WFRP is this:

People should not apply a straight jacket to their creativity. I enjoy playing D&D, and have seen a lot of top notch dungeon crawl products, both from WotC and from third parties using the d20 system. A dungeon crawl is merely a format for an adventure. What an author puts into the crawl determines the quality of the product. The format itself is no guarantee for lack of quality, or the opposite. So it is possible to do a good dungeon crawl, even in WFRP, and for it to have the right tone and content.

But then again, we run dungeon crawls using D&D, not WFRP. Why’s that? I hear you ask. If a dungeon crawl is a viable adventure format for WFRP, why not play dungeon crawls in WFRP? I guess it’s down to playing to each game’s strengths. D&D is best at dungeons crawls, WFRP is best at … whatever it is I’m doing with it. Right now it seems to be some sort of social intrigue and backstabbing spy novel kinda thing going on.

But I maintain the notion that there is a place for a dungeon crawl in WFRP, even in a city like Altdorf. Or rather, particularly in a city like Altdorf. If the tone is right, if the proper design takes into account the good parts of WFRP, if the NPCs are good, and if the motivation for the expedition and the dungeon itself are good and proper, there is no reason why a dungeon crawl couldn’t work.

Sure, write a standard dungeon crawl and it will be horrid for WFRP. But then again, a boring crawl is a boring crawl, be it D&D or WFRP. My benchmark for crawls that I can’t work with at all is Tomb of Horrors, an adventure deemed to be one of the best ever by lots of people. I hate it.

And if we look at the adventures available for any edition of WFRP, we find quite a lot of dungeon crawls, good and bad. These are conveniently overlooked and forgotten when talking about the marvelous The Enemy Within campaign (sans Something Rotten in Kislev and Empire in Flames, usually). We also find a strong D&D influences in many adventures, mostly in the Doomstones series (it being an AD&D compatible adventure with the serial numbers filed off from the start), but also the maligned Castle Drachenfels. Not the proudest moments in the history of WFRP, in my opinion.

But the two adventures that have taken the most flack online are of course two WFRPv2 entries; Karak Azgal and Lure of the Lich Lord. Not because they are any worse than the Doomstones series or Castle Drachenfels, but mostly because they defy the common conception of WFRP as a game focused heavily on social interaction, a conception which conveniently leaves out earlier v1 forays into the dungeon.

So WFRP2 is just following in the footsteps of WFRPv1 in the quest of finding out what is good for WFRP; both as a commercial venture and as a game with a distinct personality and compelling adventures. I believe the game is better served with a mix of adventures, or rather a mix of different formats in the adventures, like in the seminal Shadows over Bogenhafen, one of the best adventures for any role-playing game and genre. And there was a dungeon crawl in there.

As Shadows over Bogenhafen shows us, good design is good design, and I think that it would be very possible to create a Ravenloft for WFRP; a dungeon crawl so good it transcends the format, and becomes something even greater. Come to think of it, WFRP is ideally suited to create the most challenging dungeon crawl the world has ever seen. But the question is, who would want to create it, when even the thought of dungeons in WFRP send shivers down quite a few of the fans?

Who would be brave enough to go all out and deliver the ultimate WFRP dungeon crawl? And more importantly, what should such an adventure look like?

/Magnus

FAL General: Dungeon of Doom II (UPDATED)

At this very moment I am running the popular dungeon delve Dungeon of Doom at the Stockholm Spelkonvent, in Stockholm, Sweden, together with my friends. We’ve printed a map 2 meters by 2,40 meters, created by the talented Dante Algstrand and based on WotC dungeon tiles. You can catch a glimpse of it in the pictures below!

We’re using the D&D 4e rules, and the players get to pick a PC at random, and then go into our dungeon facing overwhelming odds. PCs are killed left to right, and the players love it!

UPDATE: The Dungeon of Doom is a simple and very popular concept. I had the idea several years ago and together a group of friends put together a killer dungeon for D&D 3e. We had maps, kill markers, overwhelming monsters, adversarial dungeon mastering, and low level PCs. And dropin. Anyone could play, and it took about 15 minutes for their PC to get whacked. And people lined up in droves and droves.

The freewheeling manner of play, one of the basic philosophies behind my own gaming style, is a real draw. And it seems to work equally well for D&D 4e. We’re running into some things that slow down play, such as Analysis Paralysis, but a firm DM hand brings things up to speed when things get bogged down.

We have one DM, one rules assistant and one player coach. One huge map, minis for the PCs and minis for the monsters. Dice, rulebooks and stuff like that. We’ve laminated the character sheets, so players can write on them with dry erase markers.

Works like a charm!

/Magnus

FAL News: Paizo to release Pathfinder RPG

Paizo, known primarily for being the last company to publish Dragon and Dungeon under license from Wizards of the Coast, has made an interesting move in the light of the development of the Open Game License, and the changes to that strategy for Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition.

The short of it is that Paizo will release the Pathfinder RPG, which ties into their line of Pathfinder adventure paths. More information can be found here!

The key element of this move by Paizo is of course the fact that the Pathfinder RPG will be a direct competitor to D&D. Given the quality of Pazio’s past products, it will be very interesting to see how this influences WotC strategy. If Pathfinder becomes a relevant and sucessful alternative to the new D&D, and this in turn means that other publishers stay with the OGL instead of going to the new GSL, it might create an obstacle for WotC to rope in some players wanting to stay with 3.5 rather than adopt 4.0.

More on this tomorrow!

/Magnus