A Role Playing Games Blog
Dungeonslayers
Dungeonslayers: New adventure and upcoming setting
1January 11, 2010
Recently Christian Kennig released another one-page dungeon for his Dungeonslayers game: “The Queen of Blackriver” is the third adventure in the “Dungeon-2-Go” series and was written by Bob Bretz.
Please note, that the Monster Mash supplement is needed to run this adventure. Both the adventure and the Monster Mash PDF can be downloaded for free from the official DS website (or use the links provided in this post).
Last week, Christian also announced “Valngress – City of Ruins”, an upcoming campaign setting for the Dungeonslayers written by Marcus Bone, the author of the “Into the Breach” supplement:
Announced last summer, the fair copy of "Valngress – City of Ruins" has arrived!
Once again Marcus Bone, author of the DS supplement "Into the Breach", has outdone himself. His City of Ruins promises to be an ideal backdrop for dungeon crawling campaigns, interesting not just for Game Masters of the old-fashioned roleplaying game.
We are presently working out the last kinks so it can go online soon and be raided by your parties.
Get prepared!
Until then – as always – have fun!
If you still haven’t played Dungeonslayers, you really should give it a try. It’s a rules-light fantasy game with a lot of charm that can be easily be used for a beer-and-pretzels game or a more serious campaign!
Best & Worst of Gaming 2009 [Part 3]
1January 5, 2010
If you haven’t already, you should have a look at Part 1 and Part 2 of my Best & Worst of Gaming 2009 series.
Best Adventure
The best adventure of 2009 was not one, but many! If you have followed my blog you may have read about Michael Shorten’s and Philippe-Antoine Ménard’s One Page Dungeon Contest. They looked for the best one-page dungeons and on July 31st they released the One Page Dungeon Codex 2009 which contained all winners and the runner-ups, but also several blog articles about the history of the One Page Dungeon Template and how to use it. Definitely my pick for best adventure in 2009! And the fact, that my contest entry was one of the runner-ups had nothing to do with that decision… honestly!
Best Free Product
For me the best free product of 2008 was Christian Kennig’s Dungeonslayers game, because of the rules-light system and it’s great community support. For the German edition of the game you can not only download the free core rules, but also four rules supplements (which add optional rules, new equipment and new spells to the game) and over twelve one page dungeons. Aside from that there are several accessories like printable floor plans, various sheets, monster cards, a GM screen and many more free goodies. If you are looking for a great free fantasy game which is not an OD&D clone, you should have a look at Dungeonslayers.
Best Production Values
The production values of roleplaying games have improved tremendously over the years but the product line that impressed me most recently was Alpha Omega by Mind Storm Labs. The original core book had been printed back in December 2007, but the creature book called “The Encountered Vol. 1” has just been released last year, so I think the Alpha Omega game line is still eligible for this category. Like the core book, the Alpha Omega creature book is a hardcover book with horizontal format, full-color glossy paper and gorgeous artwork. If you have the chance to leaf through a copy of one of the Alpha Omega books at a FLGS, you should do so.
Close seconds in this category were the recently released Rogue Trader RPG and Paizo’s Pathfinder RPG (but haven’t we praised Paizo often enough already?).
Best Trend
The best trend of 2009 was probably the renewed interest in old-school gaming. I am sure this trend started even earlier, but last year it became much more noticeable if you ask me. Swords & Wizardry won an Silver ENnie, Grey Area Games released the awesome pseudo retro-clone X-Plorers and even Green Ronin’s latest game, the Dragon Age RPG, is very much reminiscent of old-school games and even comes in a boxed set to boot.
This concludes Part 3 of the series. I will cover the remaining categories in the fourth and final post, so stay tuned!
Dungeonslayers: Tomb of the Witchking
1December 22, 2009
Some days ago the 2nd “Dungeon-2-Go” for the Dungeonslayers RPG has been released. While the German version had been available for some time now, Andreas Bösche, Sana D. and Moritz Mehlem finished the English translation just a few days ago.
Following a map they found – or perhaps just by chance – the players find a cave containing the tomb of the witch king Vundraziel, whose disciples followed him into the grave.
The 1-paged PDF is a full adventure for your Dungeonslayers campaign and can be played with characters of level 5 to 8. You can download Tomb of the Witchking at the Dungeonslayers download page. Enjoy!
Dungeonslayers 3.5 released
0October 19, 2009
Quite some time ago, Christian Kennig has updated his “”old-fashioned roleplaying game” Dungeonslayers to version 3.5. Aside from a new character sheet, the latest version of DS contains some bugfixes and minor updates. Don’t fear, DS 3.5 is fully compatible to DS 3.0!
Today Christan finally uploaded the English translation to the Dungeonslayers site, so English-speaking fans of the free RPG may finally enjoy the updated version! The 20-paged PDF can be downloaded here.
What’s on the horizon?
0September 9, 2009
Today I want to give you an update on what’s brewing at Stargazer’s World right now. Just today I finished the first draft of a rather long post (1771 words so far) that will go live as a guest post on Philippe Ménard’s blog in a few days. We decided that the topic would make a great post for his blog and perhaps it helps to convince some of his readers to check out my blog too. 
Actually I am a bit excited since it’s the first guest post I have written for another blog. And ChattyDM is one of the people who helped me a lot since I joined the RPG Bloggers Network last year. His posts and good advice over Twitter or IM always helped me to get over the deepest of slumps.
In the meantime I am reading several RPG books I purchased recently. Alas some of my offline activities are getting into the way. It doesn’t help that I am now actually an elected local politician. I have been in politics for over ten years but it’s the first time I got a parliamentary seat in our town parliament! Yay!
But back to the RPG books I mentioned. I still have to read Eclipse Phase, the new game from Catalyst Game Labs. I got the PDF as soon as it was on RPGNow and printed it out. Alas I haven’t had that much time to read it, yet, probably because I then picked up a copy of Fantasy Craft soon thereafter . Fantasy Craft is a pretty cool d20 fantasy game that was created by the guys behind Spy Craft. If you want to read more about this cool game, you should check out "Life and Times of a Philipine Gamer". But rest assured that I will write reviews of both games when I have finished reading them.
I also got both the hardcover version of Vampire: The Dark Ages and Hunter: The Reckoning from a German blogger’s "Garage Sale" for just a few Euros, so expect some first looks of those games, too. Both books are probably out of print and at least Hunter has a successor called Hunter: The Vigil that sounds pretty interesting. And even if you don’t want to run games using the old World of Darkness rules, you still can use both books as inspiration for campaigns using the new WoD line for example. Hunter (the old or the new version) also sounds like the perfect world for the horror solo game I wanted to run for some time now…
I also started working on a translation of my Dungeonslayers supplement "Fireworks" to English. The booklet contains not only rules for firearms, cannons and explosives for Dungeonslayers but also introduces a completely new class. I don’t know when the translation will be done (this usually takes a lot longer than you think) but expect some previews as soon as I have something to show off.
I am also working on a secret layout project that is way past the initial deadline. Hmm, perhaps I should make this project top priority then…
Aside from all that I also would like to work on a Swords & Wizardry campaign based on the later titles of the Ultima series. But since I am already having too many unfinished projects I will probably put this on the back burner for now.
Phew! This post got much longer than I expected. But you now should have a pretty good overview about my current plans for this blog, so stay tuned. And if you have any comments, questions or advice please let me know! Any comment is highly appreciated!
Give Dungeonslayers a 2nd chance
1August 10, 2009
I am pretty sure some of you have already read about Dungeonslayers. In November of last year I first read about the project and wrote a short blog post about it. Then the idea of an English translation developed in within a few weeks we translated Dungeonslayers to English, several other versions followed.
Until then several supplements have been released (both in German and English language) and the DS community is busy working on a massive compendium containing new classes, races and optional rules. Last year nobody would have dreamed that DS would gain an international fan base in such short time and a lot of the fans are extremely productive.
So, why should you give DS a second chance? There are several reasons why you should have another look at this fine game:
Dungeonslayers is totally free
It’s free and is even released under a CC Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike 3.0 license, so you can create your own rules, adventures, etc. based on DS as long as you give proper credit and don’t sell your stuff. I believe this is part of what made DS so appealing to a lot of gamers in the first place- Dungeonslayers is an “old-fashioned RPG”
Dungeonslayers calls itself “old-fashioned”. Although it’s a modern system, it has the feel of a game created in the golden days of roleplaying. Of course it’s not a real “old-school game”, but it’s a good alternative if you prefer an alternative to all the D&D retro-clones. 
Dungeonslayers has a strong community
The DS community is very active and if you need some help with some rules, or if you have an idea for some new things you want to add to the game, you’ll find a lot of dedicated people at the official forums willing to help you out. Most of the new supplements are developed by the community and everyone can freely participate in the discussions- Dungeonslayers can do more than just fantasy
Recently Christian Kenning used parts from my “Fireworks” supplement to run a Western adventure. Of course he had to make some change to character creation to allow Western-style characters , but the rest of the rules worked perfectly in this genre. He even once ran a WW2 adventure with just a few modifications. There are some thoughts in the community about creating DS variants for games inspired by H.P. Lovecraft or some kind of SF Dungeonslayers. The possibilities are endless.
Of course DS is not without its flaws, but it’s a pretty awesome for a free game and if you like some old-fashioned monster-bashing fun, you should give DS another chance. And since it’s pretty rules-light it should be perfect for a short session at you favorite RPG convention.
Dungeonslayers updates
1August 7, 2009
While I was busy with some other projects the Dungeonslayers community was working hard on several new supplements for my favorite “old-fashioned” RPG:
- Into the Breach
This supplement adds optional rules to Dungeonslayer combat. The 4-paged PDF gives new rules for initiative, weapons and armor, and fumbles. “Into the Breach” was created by Marcus Bone from New Zealand. - Dungeonslayers 3.0 to 3.5
Some time ago Christian Kennig, added a few rules and errata to DS 3.0 and released it as DS 3.5. Alas the English translation of DS 3.5 hasn’t been released yet, but in the meantime you can download this 2-sided PDF to introduce the changes into your game. - Creature Works
Another nice addition to the game is Creature Works. The 6-sided PDF contains monster cards that contain the statistics for all monsters from the DS rulebook.
A couple of the older supplements like my own Feuerwerk (Fireworks) haven’t been translated into English. If you want to help with the translation, please check out Michael Garcia’s Dungeonslayers wiki or the official DS forums!
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