{"id":338,"date":"2008-12-19T10:35:47","date_gmt":"2008-12-19T08:35:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/isabout.wordpress.com\/?p=338"},"modified":"2020-01-02T20:25:31","modified_gmt":"2020-01-02T20:25:31","slug":"bull-dungeoneering","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.arkenstonepublishing.net\/isabout\/2008\/12\/19\/bull-dungeoneering\/","title":{"rendered":"Bull Dungeoneering"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mazes & Minotaurs<\/a>, as the name implies, is a D&D -derivative roleplaying game published a while back. I remember reading it several months ago when I was bored – it has the feel of a ’70s rpg polished to fit modern standards in terms of terminological clarity, rules logic and such. The most amusing part of the game is that it is a Gygaxic take on Greek myth, as opposed to the medievalism of D&D. The game has the same goofy setting bits that make it a bit difficult to relate to at times (like making centaurs a PC race, not my cup of tea), but it also has lots of Greek flavour; I especially liked the Noble as a character class, that should make for some interesting roleplaying.<\/p>\n

It’s not the game I want to discuss here, though, but the recently released adventure\/campaign (I guess it’s not a campaign in traditional terms, but I know I rarely play this long games nowadays myself) Tomb of the Bull King<\/a>. It’s an amazing, over 200 page long dungeon adventure, and seems to be the among best adventures in its genre that I’ve ever read. I simply can’t figure out what drives these guys – all the hundreds of pages of material for M&M are free, and apparently just created for the larks, or perhaps out of passion for the game.<\/p>\n

Dungeoneering and I<\/h3>\n

Throughout my recent investigation of challenge-based adventure roleplaying<\/a> I’ve been also distantly interested in old ’70s roleplaying; how else, when there are so many similarities between that and this new favourite fantasy adventure mode of mine? There is a sort of cultural reneval of “old school” roleplaying going on in the Internet right now, so new material, and more importantly, new analysis of and advice for using the historical games is now available in unforeseen amounts. It’s heady and exciting stuff in many ways – before the paradigm of story-creation came to roleplaying (I’d mark this down as having happened with Dragonlance in -82, roughly), many of the same values I’m looking for in a challenge-based adventure game were considered a matter of course. Most of these older games are predicated upon a willingness to have the players engage with a GM-prepared challenge environment where the GM’s primary job is to adjucate action and provide logical consequences for choices made. Lots of the same philosophy as the directions I’m taking my recent play, in other words.<\/p>\n

However, there is also a lot in these older games that is difficult for me to swallow and reintroduce to my gaming. (I’m saying “reintroduce” because many of these same procedural elements were already present in my early gaming during the ’90s, even if they were used for different reasons.) The list is so long that I’ll give it bullet points:<\/p>\n