Two-page Dungeon Crawl
Posted: November 18th, 2014, 6:01 pmI figure it is about time to let you guys rip this apart. It's not completely done, but if I waited until then it would never be shown to anyone! This version is a little different to what I plan for the final release, since it uses mostly HQ dice references instead of D6, so there are probably a few areas where bits don't make sense because of that. See attachment
The Why
I hope to explain why I created this. First, it was just tidying up HeroQuest rules. A lot of it was untidy, such as the equipment rules being unfinished – players could carry as much stuff as they liked, instantly switching from a powerful sword to a powerful bow. There was a lack of variety when it came to player types and equipment range. Mind points seemed as important as Body points, but were actually almost never used in the game. Since the game was out of print and I didn’t have a copy, I had to get together everything in the game from various places in order to play – the rules and quests were on the Hasbro website in pdf form, so I printed them out. I created tiles of the rooms instead of making a board, so I could have a much wider variety of quests and use them for other games. I constructed papercraft furniture. The models I had for the heroes didn’t quite fit the design, and there were obvious problems with the originals anyway. I managed to gather enough equivalents for the monsters from Warhammer armies and Blood Bowl teams.
After a few games, I reworked the worst parts of the rules for use in my normal games of HeroQuest. This led me to several HQ fan sites where they discussed what made the game good and what the spiritual successor was for people today. The latter was a bit sad – there was almost nothing commercially available at the same level of being easy to learn and play. Neither HQ nor these rules are some kind of tactical game with meaningful decisions on every turn like you may have with more complicated games like Legend of Drizzt or Descent, but they are easy-to-play games with some luck and roleplay. Recreating a playable copy of HQ is also not a simple task, with the board, tokens, and cards, it is a lot of stuff; it’s not something you could expect people to do if they just want a simple dungeon crawl game. So what was stopping me from writing one to fill this void? All I needed to do was redo the rules to remove the remainder of the rough edges that I hadn’t touched yet. It took less than two pages, but each change took it another step beyond being just another HQ update.
The main rules are two pages. The tables for each genre are two pages (but could be entirely replaced by cards). I’ve bundled a few other things, so I don’t think it is a stretch to call it the Two Page Dungeon Crawl.
Movement – Roll and move games tend to be frowned upon, and with good reason; it makes luck the biggest deciding factor in a game and takes strategy away from the players. I gave each character fixed movement and made the opponents unpredictable instead. This makes much more sense from a player perspective.
Characters – Five generic character types rather than the four characters that nearly always became weirdly different from their origins (a barbarian wearing armour?). Race/species no longer matters. Got rid of Mind points – so rarely used. The warrior is the only one who can still handle himself in combat when unarmed.
Equipment – Players have to consider what they want to use and carry. Added new stuff to allow different combinations, removed need for cards (although they can be used, easier to keep track of equipment that way).
Actions – Wanted to make it a bit faster when it came to searches; having separate search for treasure, traps, and secret doors, just slowed the game down. Made movement one of the actions so characters could do other productive things when they aren’t moving around. It also means that the character that kills the last monster in the room can search.
Replaced Cards With Tables – The cards were fine, but were just one more thing that needed to be made. Printing out a couple of pages is so much easier than making decks of cards. All of the tables can just as easily be turned into a deck of cards if you want to.
The Why
I hope to explain why I created this. First, it was just tidying up HeroQuest rules. A lot of it was untidy, such as the equipment rules being unfinished – players could carry as much stuff as they liked, instantly switching from a powerful sword to a powerful bow. There was a lack of variety when it came to player types and equipment range. Mind points seemed as important as Body points, but were actually almost never used in the game. Since the game was out of print and I didn’t have a copy, I had to get together everything in the game from various places in order to play – the rules and quests were on the Hasbro website in pdf form, so I printed them out. I created tiles of the rooms instead of making a board, so I could have a much wider variety of quests and use them for other games. I constructed papercraft furniture. The models I had for the heroes didn’t quite fit the design, and there were obvious problems with the originals anyway. I managed to gather enough equivalents for the monsters from Warhammer armies and Blood Bowl teams.
After a few games, I reworked the worst parts of the rules for use in my normal games of HeroQuest. This led me to several HQ fan sites where they discussed what made the game good and what the spiritual successor was for people today. The latter was a bit sad – there was almost nothing commercially available at the same level of being easy to learn and play. Neither HQ nor these rules are some kind of tactical game with meaningful decisions on every turn like you may have with more complicated games like Legend of Drizzt or Descent, but they are easy-to-play games with some luck and roleplay. Recreating a playable copy of HQ is also not a simple task, with the board, tokens, and cards, it is a lot of stuff; it’s not something you could expect people to do if they just want a simple dungeon crawl game. So what was stopping me from writing one to fill this void? All I needed to do was redo the rules to remove the remainder of the rough edges that I hadn’t touched yet. It took less than two pages, but each change took it another step beyond being just another HQ update.
The main rules are two pages. The tables for each genre are two pages (but could be entirely replaced by cards). I’ve bundled a few other things, so I don’t think it is a stretch to call it the Two Page Dungeon Crawl.
Movement – Roll and move games tend to be frowned upon, and with good reason; it makes luck the biggest deciding factor in a game and takes strategy away from the players. I gave each character fixed movement and made the opponents unpredictable instead. This makes much more sense from a player perspective.
Characters – Five generic character types rather than the four characters that nearly always became weirdly different from their origins (a barbarian wearing armour?). Race/species no longer matters. Got rid of Mind points – so rarely used. The warrior is the only one who can still handle himself in combat when unarmed.
Equipment – Players have to consider what they want to use and carry. Added new stuff to allow different combinations, removed need for cards (although they can be used, easier to keep track of equipment that way).
Actions – Wanted to make it a bit faster when it came to searches; having separate search for treasure, traps, and secret doors, just slowed the game down. Made movement one of the actions so characters could do other productive things when they aren’t moving around. It also means that the character that kills the last monster in the room can search.
Replaced Cards With Tables – The cards were fine, but were just one more thing that needed to be made. Printing out a couple of pages is so much easier than making decks of cards. All of the tables can just as easily be turned into a deck of cards if you want to.