Recently I’ve taken a keen interest in cards as a tool for solo-roleplaying. One of the more interesting acquisitions I’ve made has been Axebane’s Deck of Many Dungeons – which can be thought of as a descendant of the old “Dungeon Geomorphs” concept.
The concept of the Deck is so simple I’m rather shocked to see how few products exist of a similar ilk. Each card contains a room or hallway, with art drawn all the way to the edge of the card so that they can be placed directly adjacent for a seamless layout.
What makes the deck particularly appealing however is the overall form-factor, and the fact that unlike traditional dungeon geomorphs the tool is not limited to the physical layout. In addition to providing a room or hallway, each card has one or two rollable tables.
Entryway cards (Aces) have a table to generate a quest concept. Other cards have tables for monster encounters, treasures, traps, and strange things you might hear or see while adventuring in the dungeon. Even though my eyesight is exactly the best, the text for charts is large and crisp enough that I could read it without needing a magnifier.
Intended Play Vs. Actual Play
The deck comes with an instruction card, an abridged version as follows: Remove Aces (entryways), Kings (Boss Rooms / Stairs Down), and Jokers (bonus rollable tables) from the deck, then shuffle. Choose an entryway to begin the dungeon layout. Then draw a card, place it on the layout, and continue until there are no exits unaccounted for. Finally replace one of the cards in the finished dungeon with a Boss Room / Stairs Down card.
The above process is appropriate if you were trying to quickly generate a dungeon layout for something you were going to be running in a more traditional context – ie, you have a group coming over in an hour and need to throw together a random dungeoncrawl. However as an experiment in solo-play, my approach was different.
In an attempt to create what might be described as “a Solo Pen and Paper Roguelike experience” I rolled up a few characters using an OSR ruleset of my choice (Adventures Dark & Deep, which I will review later as well.) and put a bookmark in the solo-dungeon generation rules hidden away in the back of the original AD&D 1e Dungoen Master’s Guide.
Thus began the adventure of Frirket the Gnome Savant (Specialist Magician Sub-Class), and Dosteg the Dwarven Thief.
My process was to run the adventure one card at a time. I would decide which door my adventurers would open, and then draw a card to see what was behind it. To reduce personal bookkeeping, I considered each card a “Dungeon Turn” to explore in a cautious fashion. Every six turns, I would roll to see if there was a random encounter from my AD&D DM Guide.
The initial experience of playing this out – the physical act of drawing cards, sketching the layout, rolling on the tables, etc – felt fantastic. However after running about six adventures the gap between the intended playstyle and my personal Old-School Roguelike approach were in conflict.
Obstacles to the Analogue ASCII Experience
I want to emphasize the fact that my following observations are not a criticism of the deck itself. The obstacles I outline below reflect the fact I am using the tool for something it was not originally designed to support.
First off – the deck is explicitly intended for use with 5th Edition D&D. There is the obvious issue that your game of choice might not have a bestiary entry for some of the monsters, or that the implied strength of a monster in 5e might not match it’s equivalent in your game of choice.
For me there were two notable areas where I stumbled because of this. Animated Armour seems to appear with some frequency as a low-level monster on the cards, yet rather shockingly I had quite a hard time finding stats for something equivalent in my Old Monster Manuals. My books did contain quite a few variants of “Living Statue” (apparently it was quite the fad) but all of them were far more lethal than the implied threat of the 5e Animated Armour.
The second notable moment was a fantastic encounter with a young black dragon. Second Edition AD&D’s Monstrous Manual had an array of stats given for dragons at various life stages, but none of them are quite comparable to the Wymrlings of 5e. Still, I did my best to fuse the two into something that captured the essence of both modern and classic – and the fight turned out to be one the most memorable, and lucrative experiences for my adventurers.
The 5e Playstyle bleeds into certain other assumptions however. In particular the difficulty of the cards is tied to the level of the characters exploring the dungeon, rather than the ‘Level’ of the Dungeon Itself. This is represented by the various charts (For monsters, quests, traps, etc) usually having some variation of “Roll [Die] + PCs Lvl” as the standard method of dictating what you will find.
Note: I could not find any clarification as to how ‘PCs Lvl’ should be interpreted. Since modern games tend to have the entire group at the same level, I am inclined to assume you would add it once. So if the group has three 5th level characters, you would add +5, rather than +15. During my playtest I assumed the opposite, and used the sum of all player character levels and any hit dice from hirelings/companions, the result was probably a more challenging experience than intended.
While traps usually have some descriptor, secret doors and passages are left to the imagination. This was particularly troubling because old-school games often lack a simple resolution mechanic to search for things like that in abstraction. Charts to suggest a method of opening the door would have been greatly appreciated. I believe the ‘Tome of Adventure Design’ has some relevant tables, but sadly I loaned my copy to a friend years ago and never had it returned.
Finally there is the subject of treasure. Certain cards do include explicit details, such as a marked chest with a chart to determine how many gold coins can be found within, however there are many cards with artwork suggesting chests, corpses, pots, wardrobes, and other containers which might have loot – but nothing is suggested.
If I were going through the intended playstyle – as a GM I would simply have the time to fill in the blanks as I see fit, however in my attempt to create a Pen-And-Paper Roguelike experience I would have benefited from something as simple as “X-in-Y Chance to Contain Treasure.” Interestingly, Treasure Rolls as printed on the cards scale via Dungeon Level, rather than Player Level.
On that note – it’s fascinating to me how difficult it can be to find treasure tables well suited for this playstyle. Everything tends to be focused on either ‘What’s in the Lair/Horde, or What’s on the Body?’ but almost nothing is given for ‘What’s in the box?’ despite treasure chests being so damn iconic.
The Importance of Theme
Axebane’s Deck of Many Dungeons represents a particular type of stylistically generic dungeon, and it does this well enough. As a GM Tool it would be an enjoyable way to game-ify certain aspects of preparation. However in being designed as a GM Tool it leaves a lot of conceptual space for the GM to “Fill In The Gaps” so to speak.
I would really like to explore a similar product concept that is more explicitly designed as an adventure in deck format. I’ve been toying with various ideas in my head, imagining how I might convert some of my hexcrawl or dungeon module books into a card-based format.
Something with more detail in rooms, encounter charts reflecting a particular theme, unique treasures to uncover. That sort of design has less general utility as a GM tool, but I think it would be an interesting way to create an immediately playable experience for the soloist.
Final Thoughts
The deck is – when accepted for what it is – a fantastic product. The art is well drawn, the charts are interesting, and if given the choice to either use the deck or click “Generate” on a random dungeon website, I’ll happily choose the cards any day.
I purchased my copy for $18 from thegamecrafter.com – and I also grabbed the $6 expansion which includes additional cards. The tuck box I received was large enough for both the base set, as well as the expansion which was an unexpected bonus.
Even if you were only to use this deck as a method to generate a random dungeon layout, I personally prefer the relative simplicity of this deck over the more convoluted designs of traditional dungeon geomorph tiles.
In short – I highly recommend this, and I hope the original creator will continue to offer more expansions in the future.
Archive of the Sphinx 