Dungeon Crawl for Barrage Test Game

Some of my gaming friends and I got together yesterday for a whole day of gaming, 8 hours straight.  It was a lot of fun, but I'm posting about a part of the day which was spent test playing my dungeon crawl game for the upcoming Barrage convention at the end of September.  I'm sure glad I got a chance to test play it.  Most of it went very smoothly, but I did learn a couple of things about better ways to do initiative so that everyone is more engaged in the game, which is a real plus obviously.


Here are some shots of the game in progress.

It started off with a bang!  The first room was occupied by 5 skeletons.  Baptism by fire!

As usual, I was good about taking pictures at the beginning of the game, but not so great later.  The party found a magical pool in this room that provided them with one potion of attack I believe (improved the fighting ability of one of them for one round of combat).  Obviously they are preparing to go through the closed door to the right.

This later on, but I had it so that somewhere in roughly the middle of the dungeon they would come to a "special room."  This particular room is an underground river (very deep) that is home to a Kraken.  Luckily, the first hero into the room made her Observation roll so she could see the Kraken in the water before she had to move into the room (meaning that I placed its head on the tile).  The party had to decide whether to try and move past the Kraken (they could not kill it) or turn back.  The problem with turning back is that they have limited resources in the game (food, water, torches, etc.) so depending on how far they would have to backtrack to get to an unexplored door or opening in a room, they may have to try and cross.  They didn't have to go back very far so they just avoided the Kraken.

You can see here that they went back to the previous room and went through the closed door on the right to eventually end up in this room.  Had to fight a Naga but they did get a scroll as treasure.  The problem is that this room has no exits.  So they had two choices.  Again, backtrack to a previously cleared room that had an unexplored opening or door, or see if there is a secret door in this room.  The way the rules work they get one chance to find it.  The Wizard cast a "Find" spell and was successful.  Secret door located!

They can place the tiles however they like so they decided for ease that the secret door was in the back of the room.  This turning hallway happened to be the next tile.  They found another potion (little white thing on the right in the corner).

This is the final room (actually two tiles, the hallway with the alcoves and the room behind are revealed at the same time).  I won't go into the story but the two statues really matter and that is the troll (hence the name of the place, it's called "Trollstone Catacombs").  The party was successful and at the back of the room there you can see the treasure pile, or 401K as the players like to call it.  They retired and lived long, happy lives after living through the Trollstone Catacombs.


Again, the playtest was very successful.  Took less than 2 hours, played smoothly, and a couple of significant problems were revealed that I can now fix for the Barrage convention game to make it better.