Dungeonstack A to Z: Dark Stairwell

I guess it's time that I finally got to the heart of the game of Dungeonstack.  Here's a room card...where the action happens:

A few things to note on this one:

First, that border.  Using a brick pattern of some sort as the border on room cards is really growing on me, and I kinda like this one.  I think it could look nice on the table once the cards are trimmed...

Second, on the rules(!):  Dungeonstack is based on my experiments with The Stack Hack, a solo, card-based dungeon crawl modeled on The Black Hack's rules.  With apologies to anyone who might be disappointed by my abandoning TBH as a base (although really, you'll be able to play things just about as easily using David Black's excellent ruleset), I'm switching things up to make the game more generally OSR-accessible (with special nods to the simpler versions of Swords & Wizardry).

In a nutshell, when a hero moves into a new room (with possible directions indicated by the arrows on the cards), cards are turned over from the top of the Dungeonstack (deck) until a room card is revealed.  Any items turned over can be found in the room.  Any monsters are there for an encounter.  And...as I'll get to in the next couple of days...any events take place immediately.

A quick aside:  One of the main reasons I settled on "Dungeonstack: April's Quest" for my A to Z topic, rather than "Henchmen & Hirelings: The Quest of Atoz," is that among my card game ideas, this one lends itself really well to solo playtesting.  Since, for the most part (and while I'd like to develop some competitive rules), it's about solo play, after all!  I'd like to think this will help me actually produce something complete and worthwhile in the long run...!

And finally...you may notice that "darkvision" is mentioned in the rules text for the Dark Stairwell.  That's connected to the fact that a convention of Dungeonstack is that all rooms are assumed to be sufficiently lit...except in cases like this.  Overall, that seemed like a simple enough allowance to eliminate a fair amount of rules complexity and tedium in what will hopefully be a quick-playing game.

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So, there we are...a room!  I hope you'll join me tomorrow when I fit another very simple item into the 'stack...!

Playtesting The Stack Hack (Part 2)

Or, The Continuing Adventures of Sir Mulligan

Here is (finally) the result of my initial playtest of card-based dungeoneering for The Black Hack.  The first post can be found here, but to quickly summarize:

(1)  I took a stack of CCG cards - mostly locations from Tomb Raider and monsters from Magic: The Gathering - and shuffled them together to form a "dungeon."

(2)  I made a simple, level 3 character (Sir Mulligan) to send into the dungeon (attempting to obtain the Vitality Salve).

(3)  I saw what happened.

Here's how it went (with apologies for my low-quality pics!)...

Sir Mulligan entered the first room (an Open Cavern) to find no enemies waiting for him.  He did, however, find a mystical grub (that would be a Butod from the Survivor CCG) and ate it to gain +1 to STR for the day.  Good start.

Mulligan could continue in any of three directions.  He headed north only to hit a Dead End.

Luckily, the room was empty, so there were no hindrances to heading back into the Open Cavern and moving east.

The Narrow Crossing found there was a bit more dangerous.  Drawn before the room card...

Four minotaurs would be tough to face.  However, there was a random event before combat - some destruction at the hands of the storm god Keranos...

This Intervention dealt 3d8 damage to Mulligan; a pretty good roll led to losing just 8 total, which wiped out his armor for the time being.  It also killed three of the minotaurs, leaving just a single (weakened) Mogis's Chosen to fend off:

Now, most of the minotaurs in the dungeon have haste, which I decided would give Mulligan disadvantage on initiative rolls.  Not the case with Mogis's Chosen, however!  Mulligan was able to take care of him with a single action and continue moving east.

(At this point, it occurred to me that I should use a token of some sort to mark Mulligan's current location.)

Mulligan entered a Hidden Corner, only to find...

That's pretty blurry, I know...it's two items, the Claw of the Cave Bear (boosts damage) and a Refreshing Elixir (restores health), guarded by the standard minotaur grunt, a Younghorn:

The Elixir indicates that another card is to be drawn before we take actions.  If it's another room, I'll shuffle it back in.  It could be another item or enemy, though...

...and it turns out to be the Vitality Salve!  This was the goal of Mulligan's quest, so he faced off with the Younghorn, and...

...actually defeated him pretty easily.  Mulligan didn't even take any more damage, in fact, and so he gathered up his loot...

...and headed back to the entrance.

Mulligan brought the Salve to his fallen comrade, as instructed.  He still has an Elixir and Claw of the Cave Bear to aid him on his next adventure.

What I Learned

This first test was actually pretty fun(!) but ended up being way too easy.  I know that the nature of this exercise is going to keep the difficulty variance rather high, though, so it'll take some experimentation to see how common this outcome is.

Also, it didn't occur to me until after the event that maybe a saving throw should be possible for events like the Intervention of Keranos.  Whether that should be for PCs only...or for all creatures...I'll have to think about (and welcome any outside thoughts!).

Sir Mulligan should be adventuring again soon...

Playtesting The Stack Hack

Or, Introducing...the Adventures of Sir Mulligan

I was able to take a few minutes recently to get in some quick playtesting of the card-based dungeoneering idea that I mentioned I'd like to try for The Black Hack...the adventure card game type thing that I've codenamed The Stack Hack.

It was really just a little proof-of-concept exercise, to start things at a very basic level and see how I can build them.

I rolled up a quick character and advanced him to Level 3 (seemed like a good level for the enemies I had in mind)...

The Defender is just a Warrior variant that I'm using...simplified from the TBH version (which may not be necessary, but I'm trying to do this as simply as possible...).  Basically, the Warrior loses the healing surge and drops to a d8 hit die in exchange for frontloading some HP.

To make the rooms of the dungeon, I grabbed a handful of the "vanilla" (nothing special to them other than maybe being a save point) location cards from the Tomb Raider CCG:

Then, I pulled some monsters from the one Magic: The Gathering challenge deck that I got from the Theros block.  The challenge decks are complete decks that essentially "play themselves" according to a set of rules, allowing you to play solo against them or team up with friends.  I have the Battle the Horde deck, which pits you against an army of minotaurs, like this guy:

The challenge decks are really a play on the casual MTG variant known as Horde Magic; this group of minotaurs seemed like a great place to get some ready-made, standardized enemies.  To fit TBH, I decided that I would treat the minotaurs' Power values (3 for the Goreseeker) as their HD when they attack Sir Mulligan, and their Toughness (2 for the Goreseeker) as HD when Mulligan attacks them.  (Just about any MTG creature ought to be useable this way.)  I decided that the Haste ability (which in MTG means a creature can act a turn earlier) would give Sir Mulligan disadvantage when rolling initiative vs. them.

Ten total minotaurs, in five varieties (with a majority being the very basic Minotaur Younghorn) sounded like a good place to start.

There were a couple of other alterations made to streamline for the card game.  I'd like to deal with damage to monsters in terms of d8's only.  That is, rather than rolling for damage, I'll just treat a monster with 2 HD of toughness as going down after two hits from my character (a reason to have variant classes that only deal damage in multiples of d8, by the way...).  I would ignore armor values for monsters and simplify the mental math of damage dice by just doubling the value of their power HD and using a die of that many sides.  So, for example, the 3-power Goreseeker above will deal d6 damage.  I won't have any monsters over 6 HD in power for this adventure, anyway, so it'll max out at a d12 for now.

So...what else should be in the dungeon?  This card from the Battle the Horde deck seemed like a good target:

The quest would be for Sir Mulligan to invade the lair of the minotaurs and retrieve the Vitality Salve in order to revive a fallen comrade.  I decided that if the Salve came up in the first two rooms, it would get shuffled back into the dungeon deck to find later.

I filled out the dungeon with a few health boosts, including this one from the MTG deck...

...and added in a "magic item" that might be fun to come across (this one's a number booster from the Tomb Raider CCG):

Finally, I grabbed two "event" type card from Battle the Horde to be a extra surprises that MIGHT occur.  Here's one of them:

(That "3 damage" from Keranos, God of Storms, would actually be 3d8...easy to track for the minotaurs and something that would have a pretty big impact on Sir Mulligan.)

So, with everything gathered, I sleeved all the cards and shuffled them together to form the dungeon deck.  This first run would have 31 total cards...14 rooms, 10 monsters, 2 events, and 5 items (including the target of the scenario).  A few practice shuffles demonstrated that the proportions might be decent.  The plan was, when moving into a new dungeon room, to turn over cards from the top of the deck until a new room card was hit.  This room would be placed in position, and everything turned over before reaching it would be what was found in the room.

Ah...so how did it work out?  This is already running kind of long, isn't it...?  I'll get the results posted soon...

More TBHacking...

Continuing with my brainstorming on The Black Hack...

I'm a BIG fan of card games.  They're what brought me into the hardcore gaming hobby, and there's still very little in the world of gaming that I enjoy as much as getting in a few rounds of Magic or playing a game of Bohnanza with the family.  I've long looked for a good way to blend my love of OSR roleplaying with my love for slinging cardboard.  The simplicity of characters in TBH (especially the lack of a need for stat modifiers) has triggered a hope that the key lies therein.

I know the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game is pretty popular these days, and I'll look at its setup for some inspiration, but a bigger influence comes from a less likely source:

Believe it or not, the old Tomb Raider CCG is a really good game!  It can be played solitaire (here's a pic of a completed solo game)...

...and includes exactly the sort of cards you'd expect from a tomb delve dungeon crawl based card game:

(These Tomb Raider pics were all snagged from BoardGameGeek, by the way!)

Basically, you have adventurers, the places they go, the stuff they use, the stuff they face, and the things that happen along the way.  All of this seems like it could fit nicely into a TBH shell!

Now, it may be evident from my Underground Elemental Beastfighting posts that I also enjoy laying out playing cards.  It's fun.  It's relaxing.  And it seems like a great way to build this thing I'm working on from the ground up.  Here's what a PC might look like:

Level and name at the top, damage and HP at the bottom corners of the picture, abilities and stats below.  Equipment and spells prepared can easily be handled by separate cards.

I'm also using some alternatives to the original three D&D (and their related TBH) classes.  So far, I'm going with Defender, Caster, and Healer...all of which are conveniently designed such that if you take the average of their damage and HP values, you get nice multiples of five...which will be really convenient when it comes to damage counters.

There's a lot that's still up in the air about how dungeons will unfold, so I'm experimenting a bit.  I think I could enjoy the rather roguelike experience of letting the setting be revealed room by room with cards like this:

...BUT I'm still iffy on a lot of questions that naturally emerge...like how many separate decks need to be involved.  It'd be outstanding if a dungeon could be found in a single deck, so I may need to play around with letting each card have a room, a monster, AND an item.

(That dungeon artwork, as I'm sure you already know if you're familiar with his work, is by the incomparable Dyson Logos, specifically a tiny portion of his map for the Orcus Pit.  Check out his stuff...you won't be disappointed!)

I'll post more here at the blog as this idea moves along.  I'm just glad to get the first few steps of TBH idea #1 out of my head and onto the digital page!

Oh yeah, one more thing...I mocked up a cardback, too:

I do like the ring of "the Stack Hack," so that's at least the working title...