The Return of the Great Dungeon

Well, that was one heck of summer hiatus. Back in early March I finally turned in the big project I had been working on last year. It's tentatively scheduled for publication later this year. I don’t want to jinx anything by saying too much just yet, but I will say that writing this book was an engrossing and ultimately enjoyable endeavor.

The one downside: working on such a massive project ate up much of the limited bandwidth I have for gaming. So I didn’t run any new games, and the one game I was playing in finished in July. I didn’t paint any miniatures and of course this blog laid fallow in the interim.

Since turning in the project I’ve tried to make up for lost time. Back in February I ran a group through the Tournament of Pigs over a long weekend. This is a nice boxed set with many high quality components. The premise is the players take “the role of commoners trapped in a medieval game show competition.” The tone is tongue-in-cheek and the action is wild and pretty much non-stop.

The Tournament was designed with the Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG in mind. I’ve long wanted to check out DCC, a gonzo, old-school system with a heavy metal/sword-and-sorcery aesthetic. One of DCC’s signature features is the Funnel, wherein players create several zero-level characters that are then run through a mechanical meat grinder: the survivors emerge as the starting first level characters. The Funnel is an interesting game mechanic: it emphasizes the high lethality of the system, while producing a PC background a little like the lifepath system from Traveller, including the old school “death in character generation” option. The Tournament of Pigs is a literal funnel of up to twelve different events, ranging from conventional gladiatorial combat to races and talent competitions.

The Tournament has been ported to the 5e D&D system, which is the version I used. Rules for zero level 5e characters seem to work pretty well. The adventure appears to work best with larger groups, with each player running four different characters. Although the rules recommended a maximum of eight players, at different times we had as many as ten, but the Tournament still seemed to work fine even with a slightly larger group.

I had a blast running the Tournament and the players seemed to have a good time as well. The different events are varied, inventive, and completely demented. I would encourage prospective DMs and players to fully embrace the zany tone in order to get the most value out of the experience. It was the perfect weekend one-shot for a large group, and has gotten me interested in looking at more products for DCC.

In the last couple of months I’ve also started running a weekly group through the Dancing Hut of Baba Yaga, a loose 5e update of the classic AD&D 1e adventure by Roger Moore, which appeared in the pages of Dragon 84 (March 1984). I subscribed to the magazine at the time and received this issue in the mail, and have hankered to run this “no-holds-barred challenge for high-level AD&D characters” ever since.

The players for this adventure all participated in a weekly 3.5e D&D game from 2005–2009 that was intended to be my D&D bucket list, including conversions of classics like Keep on the Borderlands, Isle of Dread, White Plume Mountain, Against the Giants, Descent into the Depths of the Earth, Vault of the Drow, and Kingdom of the Ghouls. The players converted their old characters from that campaign to 13th-level 5e versions. We’ve only had a few sessions so far but it’s been nice to get the old band back together.

Finally, I’ve started painting miniatures again after a long pause. I was so busy running and playing in D&D games during COVID that I never had time to pick up the paints. (And since most of the games were virtual anyway, what was the point?)

But I finally took the plunge and bought an airbrush. I had built up an extremely daunting backlog of very cool, but very large miniatures going back to the Reaper Bones 3 Kickstarter. Painting the titanic Gale Force 9 Demogorgon miniature really broke me. I also really want to paint the Type U Armed Packet model from the 2nd Dynasty Kickstarter, and I just didn’t see being able to do a decent job on a starship with brushwork. 

An airbrush was a significant investment, and I’m still very low on the learning curve, but I can already see the benefits. It’s certainly helped break up my logjam. If the only thing I do with the airbrush is priming, base coats, and varnishing, it should greatly speed up my production cycle. I can now base coat a simple model in 5 or 10 minutes that might have taken me an hour or more. I’m trying to build up my skills enough to finally tackle my own private Everest: the Reaper Tiamat Ma’al Drakar the Dragon Tyrant model.