The Wyrd Lands

 What happens if you take non-adventurers and send them to a dungeon. In this post I am going to send four foodies on a fact-finding mission to The Keep on the Borderlnds and the Caves of Chaos. They might drink an Ogre's wine and sample Hobgoblin hors d'oeuvre.  This comes out of my last post where I decided that my problem with dungeons is that actually I don't like playing as adventurers. It also comes out of discussions on the FKR server about where do you find dungeon-like adventures that are not "grimdark".  I felt that if you take a different perspective on a dungeon you can find them to be far less miserable than they at first seem.  This is a semi-tongue-in-cheek experiment and is in no way an attack on Keep on the Borderlands (though there are a couple of funny things in this module).  Why the Keep on the Borderlands? In my last post I talked about the idea that dungeons are coloured by the assumption that the people going into them are adventurers. T...

I am not a big fan of "dungeon" style adventures. But why is this? I write and play games in the FKR-sphere which, with its links to OSR/NSR, is a space heavily influenced by dungeons ( Dungeon23 anyone?) but I still have always found them a little "off".  This post is about my personal taste, and is not about good/bad dungeon design. I am not going to write, 'I didn't like dungeons until I read/played/ran this one and now I am a convert'. Nor am I defining dungeon - whatever you feel the term to mean, is probably pretty close to what I mean. Instead, I am going to reflect on my feelings as a player in a series of games I played in Dead Planet .  As a player in this adventure, I found myself feeling like one of three things: a tourist, a problem-solver and a survivor. The first two tie in to my personal difficulties with dungeons, the third helps me to understand why I have that difficulty.  The Tourist/problem-solver One of the things I felt in playing...