Four Against Darkness - Beginnings

I recently started adventuring against the darkness.  I never would have considered this game if not for DM Jim's videos (Tabletop Engineer) over on YouTube.  I was never a fan of Hack, NetHack, or Dungeon Hack and this is basically a clone of that with dice.  But DM Jim was on to something...

Four Against Darkness is not a miniatures game, yet.

The mechanics are so simple and generating a random dungeon is surprisingly fun.  With a few small modifications, the player is challenged not only by the dungeon, but also with a story telling element both written and visually.

The Table

Map, dungeon generation guides, character sheet (4 on one), some six sided dice, and a miniatures combat arena.

The Map

Using a laminated dungeon terrain mat, you can draw your dungeon as you randomly generate it from the tables and dice rolls. Here I'm using one of the Paizo Pathfinder Flip-Mats and held down with sticky tack.  My dungeon doors add a nice 3D component to the game and you can do something similar if you own a game like HeroQuest.

I push around a single pawn representing my party and populate the map with furniture for any permanent fixtures like fountains, shrines, armory, etc.  At the conclusion of this quest I dropped the monster miniatures on this map to make a nice picture / record of the adventure.

The Arena

I built a miniatures display diorama /book end a few years ago and I'm using it here both to visually display marching order and represent combat.  I have miniatures for most of the monster's appearing in the first book and reasonable proxies for everything else.  It takes a little extra time but the result is very satisfying. Above, the heroes are ambushed in a room by a group of orcs.

Narrative Changes

I do not like randomly entering a dungeon to grind and gain experience points (in fact I abhor the ubiquitous leveling systems synonymous with RPGs). So I have decided that I will roll the "final boss" in advance and put together a story.  This story is a mission or situation with real stakeholders, and piecing together why certain elements are present in the dungeon to tell a cohesive story can be a lot of fun.  Having rolled the final boss in advance, the only thing left to do is to modify the boss / weird monster encounters such that the FIRST thing you do is check to see if it is the final boss.  If it is, then you place the pre-rolled boss instead of a random monster.  You can have some more fun with this as well if you encounter the same type of monster elsewhere in the dungeon as a monster or wandering monster.

Conclusions

I'm having fun with Four Against Darkness.