Heroes of the Dungeon Crawl - Basic Charts Edition
Around 2006 through 2008, I finally achieved a couple of dreams I had when I was a kid. I got to go to GenCon in Indiana to meet some of the people in the RPG gaming industry that I looked up to. I was also able to participate in content creation for the Basic RPG game that I enjoyed. Ultimately, I wrote my own set of rules for a fantasy RPG I called Heroes of the Dungeon Crawl.
I enjoyed attending Gen Con 2007 in Indianapolis, Indiana. This was over 25 years after reading about this convention, which took place in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin at the time. Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson were both in attendance. I met both of them and got autographs. I even got to meet Frank Mentzer, who penned the BECMI line of Basic through Immortal Dungeons & Dragons.
Basic D&D had always been my preference, because when Tom Moldvay wrote the Red Book, we could play several gaming sessions with just that one book. Add the David "Zeb" Cook penned Expert D&D book, and we were set for a whole campaign. Two books to play for hours and hours.
I hadn't played the game in quite some time when I came back looking for the latest Basic D&D product. It didn't exist. The rules had undergone a big change, including the elimination of the armor class system (THAC0) as I knew it. Because of the open gaming license, Goblinoid Games was able to create Labyrinth Lord, which was pretty much Basic and Expert Dungeons & Dragons in one book
The simplicity of the basic rules couldn't lend itself any easier to getting new people to play the game at the table. To the seasoned gamer, options are nice. You can go through a bunch of pages to design your ideal character in perfect fashion, but a newer gamer might lose interest very quickly if faced with a bunch of rules.
I remember when I was introduced to Basic D&D at the time. It was simple. You had four basic character classes. Humans could be fighters, clerics, magic users and thieves. Or, you could play a dwarf, halfling or elf. It didn't take you long to create a character and start playing, which was a good thing back then. Your characters could die rather quickly when they first started out.
Deciding To Create My Own Game
I didn't want to go through all of the OGL stuff when I created my version of a basic game. What I decided on was abandoning all of the fancy dice made famous by D&D in favor of just six-sided dice. I reasoned that if anybody bought a game book or downloaded it online, they had to have a six-sided dice or two among their board games.
I did a stripped down version of character creation. I kind of drew on the simplicity of Fighting Fantasy and Basic D&D for inspiration in creating this rules set. I even went with zero level characters. That is the say, they don't start out as first level. They have to aspire to earn the first level. Levels had a new terminology. A character started out at zero degree.
In fact, the terminologies were changed to be unique to HotDC. My intent was to create a full rule book. While I was writing the rules and testing them out, I made it to GenCon and met some of the founders of the game. I also faced a realization that cooled me off on creating my full-fledged rule book.
It wasn't likely that anybody was going to come play my game. When you can walk into a store and find the Dungeons and Dragons brand, that's what you are most likely going to play. There were other established options, such as Pathfinder. While these games may be more complex to a new gamer, that's simply what people play. A person not interested in too many rules but interested in fantasy gaming might just as easily play something on their computer.
You can call it defeatist, if you will, but I was cooling off on creating the campaign setting and the rule book for my game. However, I had created the basic mechanics to make playing my version of a role playing game possible. Rather than just abandon everything and not put anything out, I developed the HotDC Basic Charts Edition.
The Basic Charts Edition Has What You Need in 44 Pages
In this book, all the basics of how to play the game are described. There are charts for the early degrees of creatures that you could face. There are incantations for the lower degree characters to cast. It's all in the book.
I crated rules to make the early degrees less lethal, allowing for the role players to create back stories and really play their characters if they so choose. Bandaging became an option so characters could get healed and recover from particularly brutal encounters. This depends on the sort of game a Hero Guide runs at their table. Furthermore, I even created a sample dungeon.
What's interesting is I've since discovered that people have actually bought print on demand a copies and put those books on sale through eBay and Amazon. I didn't sell a bunch of copies, but the fact that I was published at all and sold one copy is a source of pride with me. I'm officially a game designer.
I can remember as a kid, thumbing through the early Basic D&D modules, such as B4 The Lost City, penned by Tom Moldvay. The way that adventure was written, I thought it was so cool. There were so many potential stories just in reading the descriptions of this adventure and the rooms within it. I imagined what it would be like to create an adventure myself.
You can call it defeatist, but I imagined TSR Hobbies at the time getting hundreds of submissions from people who all thought the same thing I did. They were going to create an adventure that people would be playing in Advanced or Basic Dungeons & Dragons. Sadly, most of those gamer's dreams never came true.
What did happen with the Open Gaming License was people were able to return to the earlier expressions of the Dungeons and Dragons rules and create their own adventures. OSRIC helped make that possible, which led to the aforementioned Labyrinth Lord. I did have a hand in helping others create their adventures and was even credited as such.
I never created anything for Labyrinth Lord, which would still be an option if I wanted to do it just for the sake of doing it. However, I did something much cooler, in my opinion. I created another version of a fantasy role-playing game that's simplistic enough to get people to sit down at the table and fling the dice for the first time.
Simplicity Is The Best Way To Get New Players To The Table
Knowing what it's like to play a game like this at a kitchen table, rather than in front of a computer screen, I can say there's nothing like it. I believe that the easier the rules are, the easier a task you have in getting people to sit down and play. Before you know it, you could have your own gaming group.
I don't want to underscore the importance of creating something very basic in rules, but with enough to it to hold people's attention. I think Heroes of the Dungeon Crawl had that potential. The HotDC Basic Charts Edition exists as a 44 page print on demand book as well as a free download. All these years later, it's still available.
