[Tabletop Gaming] A Little Dungeon Diving

I hope there's no dragon in there ...

Once in a while what you really want is just a quick dungeon dive. Just an excuse to put on the old fantasy outfit, pick up a sword or a bow or a handy magic spell book, grab a couple of friends, and march off into the great unknown.

Or the great hole in the ground.

Luckily for me, THW produced a game specifically for that, 2 Hour Dungeon Crawl.

It's pretty much exactly what it says on the tin, a dungeon crawl in a box – procedurally generated, using the same rough mechanics as their more fully fledged Warrior Heroes but even more minimalist and geared to doing one thing and one thing only.

I'm going to try and make use of my already extant tools in Tabletop Simulator to try and do the most quick and dirty table set up possible. Which means I'm going to have to find some suitable artwork for tokens, edit it particularly quickly, get it into the game, and do it all on the fly.

It should be awesome.

Getting Off the Ground

Here's where we're starting.

All I've done is to select the forest environment from TS so that we can have the outdoor lighting and feeling that elves could drop in on us at any moment. I've grabbed a bowl to put dice in and drop in a few Ako dice because I like them. And there are a few blank 3 x 5 cards because I have yet to play a game where 3 x 5 cards weren't absolutely necessary to my survival.

Time to without the book and figure out what I need to do to put together a character.

A Star is Born

Just as in 5150, we need to create a new character – a Star! Stars get certain advantages which, unsurprisingly, are much the same between system platforms. They have the ability to reduce damage inherently, they have free will so that they are not completely governed by the actions of tables, and that they get a bonus for charging into melee.

That might sound a little odd, but as a Player Character, you're probably going to be charging into melee a lot. Unless I player wizard. A hairy wizard.

First, male or female? I'm not feeling particularly PC today (gaming pun) so our protag is going to be a guy.

What Race? Well, being a Feral Vampire seems like a lot of fun but today we're being traditional. Straight-up human will do, thank you very much.

Attributes? We get them from our Race list, apparently, so let's go chug on back to the rear of the text where such things hide.

We get a Human Attribute of Resolute: Always score a minimum of 1 success when in melee which should be a massive help. Humans seem to be good at hitting things, for which I'm thankful.

Profession? Interestingly, I have the choice of dual-profession-ing. That suits my particular kind of perversion, so I'm going to be a Caster/Knight. A terrifying creature of the blackest of sorcery and cold iron! And if I get lucky and scavenge some random food drops in the dungeon, I'll become a gourmand, too!

No, wait, that's my Skyrim character. Still, it'll do here, too.

Profession Attributes are pretty easy to find in the tables, and being dual-profession, I get two:

• Caster - Cast Spells: The ability to cast Damage, Dazzle, and Defend
  spells.

• Knight - Swordsman: When win a melee, the Knight can roll twice for damage, taking the best result.

We've already got the makings of a strategy here. Dazzle spells, a charge bonus for being Human, and increased melee damage? Stunlock, baby!

Reputation? Again, hearkening back to 5150, Rep runs 3+, but unlike in a lot of the other titles, Rep beyond 6 not only exists, it's badass, because 6s are not automatic failures here. Avoid Rep 7 demons and dragons ...

As usual for Stars, we start at Rep 5, though because we're dual-professioned it's more Caster 5/Knight 4.

Weapons? We're a Star, so we can pick anything off the list we like.I'm feeling cunning so we're going to hide our sorcerous abilities behind the guise of just being another knightly sell-sword, so a one-handed sword is definitely going to be the right tool.

Armor? Leather, Chainmail, or Plate are the things on offer here. Casters typically just have leather, but we're being sneaky. Knights wear Plate and carry a shield, so we shall too! (This might come back to bite me in my shiny metal ass, but that's life in the big dungeon.)

AC 6 plate and a one-handed shield are going to at least keep us alive. I hope. The shield gives us an extra +1d6 on the Melee Combat Table, which with our other bonuses should help make up for the slightly lower Rep we have as a Knight.

Let's get this on the table.

It took two cards, but it was worth it. Now to find the right art to represent him!

This will do for our purposes. It being line art is excellent, because a quick wash through Photoshop and we can remove all that surrounding white space and leave only the figure.

Oops. We have a slight problem. Importing it as a Figurine without any modification turns out to be a little bit small. Scaling up the whole thing actually ends up scaling up the base – which we don't want. I'm going to double the size of the original image and let's see if that makes a difference.

Well, that's interesting. Doubled the size in pixels and it came out looking exactly the same.

We have learned something this day!

Fine, we'll go with this.

Getting the Band Back Together

People don't usually go down into the dungeon by themselves. For one, who's going to carry out all the fat loot? For another, who's going to stand in front of you blocking the skeletons while you dig through the fat loot?

Some things are necessary.

As a human, we can recruit humans, elves, and dwarves. We can have as many as we want, up to our Rep. They will all be Grants, and none of the Grunts can have a Rep equal to or higher than our own.

So, with five Grunts in the band, we'll just go play around on the Race tables until we figure out who they are.

I'm feeling pretty twisted, so we'll get three other humans and a couple of elves. Bugger the dwarves, always on about their architecture this and their underground beard-wives that. Screw those guys.

I'll just work the tables and dice for a bit until we get the lot.

Name/Race | Profession | Rep | Armor | Weapon
:---------|:----------:|:---:|------:
Aefwurd/Human | Warrior | 4 | 2 & Sh | 2xS / SP
Lyssa/Human | Warrior | 4 | 2 & Sh | 2xS / SP
Anette/Human | Soldier | 3 | 4 & Sh | SP/S
Arda/Elf | Shooter | 4 | 4 | CB
Era/Elf | Shooter | 3 | 4 | CB

Human - Resolute: Always score a minimum of 1 success when in melee.

Elf - Slippery: If lose a melee, the winner counts the Impact at 1 less.

Warrior - Fanatic: Counts +2 successes when taking the Charge into Melee Test.

Soldier - Duty: Always count as pass 2d6 when taking the Charge
into Melee Table.

Marksman: Able to use any Missile Weapon without penalty.

We got a little bit unlucky with a couple of newbies in the group, but someone has to go first looking for traps I suppose. The tables are set up to give each of the races a very specific kind of feel and I didn't roll particularly well outside of those styles, so we have a nice, solid front row with warriors packing double swords and a spear, a soldier with slightly better armor who likes to go spear and board, and a couple of elf shooters with compound bows.

Maybe we'll live?

There we go, Figurines for all of the band which are pretty close to the stats which they were generated with. I decided that the Soldiers would get the choice of either double swords or a spear, which helped differentiate them, but trying to find the particular type of bow that looked decent with the figure for the elves was just too much work.

(Making your own figurines is made considerably easier by the fact that you can search Google for "clipart" imagery, which is exactly what you want.)

The End of the Beginning

That gets all of the band prep out of the way.

Next time, we'll work on battle boards on which fights will take place and a few pieces of dungeon terrain before we really get to dive in and start getting murdered mercilessly by horrible creatures!