Rowan Tree and Red Thread

Our gaming group has come to the end of a long-running campaign after about four years of play. We wrapped our Tudor Talents game, one of Elizabethan super-spies and superheroes. I hesitate to call the PCs superheroes, as they were definitely not in the heroic mould. Anyway, the campaign wrapped with fighting off not one but two alien invasions and beginning a rapprochement between England and Spain to pave the way for a less volatile 17th Century Europe.

So with that campaign finished we needed something to play last Thursday night, and I pitched a short one-shot game of Dungeon Squad, a game by Jason Morningstar that is available from 1000 monkeys, 1000 typewriters, an excellent collection of free RPGs.

Dungeon Squad is a really simple, easy to learn, rule set designed to provide a dungeon crawl experience for young players without the complexity of Dungeons & Dragons. It was ideally suited to a group looking for a quick game of dungeon delving and bashing things. This was, I believe, sammywol's first dungeon crawl of any sort.

The initial set-up involved the four players, Sam, Pete, Marie and Alex, creating characters. We ended up with

• Leaky the Snurker - Sam's character is primarily an Explorer, which is a polite way of saying she's a Rogue. Which is itself a polite way of saying Leaky's a thief. None of this modern politically correct class names for us.


• Dan - Pete's character is the combat magic user. He's primarily a lightning bolt chucker, with a sideline in sneaking about.


• P'ing - Marie's character is essentially big on thews. She's got a sword called Mr. Sticky, and some skill in healing, which proved useful later on.


• B'ert - Alex's character is also a magic user but one focused on defensive and buffing spells. He's not bad with a sword either.

In this particular instance, both Marie and Pete were not physically present, calling in via Skype (voice only) to join in. This worked surprisingly well, with a chat window allowing dice roll tracking and additional description and communication.

The PCs started off as caravan guards, the morning after a goblin raid. The filthy goblins made off with something vital. The wheels! [1] The team of stalwart adventures must track down the fleeing goblins and retrieve the caravan's wheels if their boss is to make his trip to the next town.

Once it was light, the four characters were on the trail of the goblins and tracked them to an abandoned dwarven mine the caravan boss had described to them.

Outside the mine there was a ruined building, a sort of warehouse, where some goblin were cooking a deer over a fire and playing dice. The adventurers made rolls and crept up on the building to attack from two sides, making quick work of the goblins.

From there the group advanced into the mine, facing two larger goblins who came at them down the main tunnel works. A quick Dazzle spell from Dan, and various thumpings and pokings laid those two hobgoblins out too. P'ing did a bit of healing at this point and B'ert tried on the hobgoblins' armour for size, while Leaky sneaked ahead to explore. She discovered a barricade across the tunnel, manned (or goblinned?) by several of the scrawny, green-skinned blighters. The group caught up and were rewarded with a volley of arrows from the goblins.

Retreating, the group made some preparations, with B'ert ensorcelling P'ing with some magical armour and Dan readying his Dazzle spell to give the goblins pause for the first few moments of the fight. P'ing barrelled forward like a bull and charged right through the barricade, knocking stunned goblins flying. Then the blades flashed and mayhem followed, and the goblins fell before the adventurers' attack, dealing only minor damage to our heroes.

Further up the corridor the group could hear arcane chanting in the goblin tongue, and an eerie light flickered about the passageway, casting twisted shadows.

B'ert and Dan conferred, and B'ert boosted Dan's magic casting with a Luck spell. Dan then managed a rare feat: he threw lightning down the corridor and bounced it off the wall, round a corner and struck home. He was gratified to hear one of the chanting voices gurgle to a stop.

Leaky took to the shadows and crept forward as the others advanced behind her. A gang of goblins charged down the corridor towards the delvers, totally ignoring Leaky hidden in the shadows. The goblin guards advanced on the rest of the party as a goblin sorcerer and his (now two) apprentices took up position in the corridor and resumed their spell casting.

P'ing and B'ert laid into the guards while Dan Dazzled the apprentices, giving the group some time free of their magic barrage. Leaky moved unseen past the apprentices to get close and personal with the sorcerer. She had a little pointy present for the goblin mage.

At this point Dan's luck deserted him and he had some difficulty getting his lightning spell to cast (a string of bad die rolls, I'm afraid), leaving P'ing and B'ert bearing the brunt of the goblin spells and swords. Leaky did her part and stabbed the goblin sorcerer hard in the ribs, interrupting his spell and drawing a satisfying yelp from him. The hardy fellow did not fall however, and Leaky then found himself in a fight for control as the sorcerer tried to turn him to a crisp with a fiery bolt of magic. Magic missiles flew, Leaky's sword danced about and when the magic fire died down only Leaky was left standing.

With a mighty blow P'ing struck down the guard standing in her way, and thrust forward to batter the nearest apprentice half unconscious.B'ert joined him soon after and as B'ert and P'ing finished off their opponents, Dan finally managed to get a spell together and shocked one apprentices so that he lit up like a dwarven firework.

The group searched the bodies, and the chamber the goblins had come from, and counted their loot. Leaky proved smarter than the trap on the sorcerer's locked chest, and the party were happy to find a scroll with a fireball spell (unfortunately incomplete) and the sorcerer's wand, which proved to act as a spell booster. Gold, fine wines - captured from some other unfortunate caravan no doubt - and some thick furs were also uncovered, and P'ing gratefully wrapped herself in the furs, having regretted the absence of solid armour in her previous fights. And, beneath the furs, they uncovered a wheel! Now they had one of the six missing wheels from the caravan

There we left them, down the mine and arguing who would carry the bloody wheel.

[1] Sam lost it completely when we decided it was the wheels that were stolen. The poor woman laughed herself silly.

I was pretty happy with the session. The rules are dead simple but capture much of the fun and rewards of ingenuity that early dungeon crawls provided, the two butt kickers in the group got to kick butt, but all the while all the players got to chew the scenery and pitch in with the problem solving. It was easy to come up with a scenario. I trawled the 'net for some maps, wrote a couple of pages of notes, mostly brief stats for the goblins and their dispositions with the mine, and away we went. The rules themselves are silent on the matter of scenario design, but in 4 pages (plus a page for a character sheet) what could you expect. These are clearly aimed new players, but with a more experienced GM to get things together.

Dungeon Squad is an excellent little game from Jason Morningstar, the author of The Shab-al-Hiri Roach and Drowning and Falling, and regular podcaster with the Durham 3, which I also highly recommend.

This crawl will probably last another session, but after that I'll be looking for another short-run game. Any ideas from the peanut gallery?