Dungeons?

Desmond, a friend of mine has been collecting the Dungeons & Dragons miniatures for a while now. You know the ones, the pre-painted plastic ones. Really, they're pretty awesome. Well, years and years ago, we used to play a lot of D&D but have really not played it in a long, long time (although he has much more recently than I). We tried playing some of the D20 system that comes with the miniatures, but something just wasn't there for us with the game system.

We're both fans of the Two Hour Wargames (THW) rule systems, having played the All Things Zombies (ATZ) system. The reaction stuff is very cool. The coolest part is that you can play solitaire or cooperative...yeah, cooperative. Hey, that is fun. While I love bashing my opponent's troops from time to time (or, more likely, having mine bashed by the opponent), I do like a good cooperative game too.

At Colorado Military Historians, we have played a lot of ATZ games lately. In fact, Binhan is wrapping up a zombie campaign in which we have been playing several linked-scenarios. Tons of fun. I love zombies, that is a lot of the fun for me, but also the cooperative nature of the games provides a lot of the fun for us all.

Anyway, why not play some dungeon delving games using that system? Well, THW has a free set of rules on this system for medieval melee games called Chain Reaction - Swordplay. They also sell a set of Ancient/Medieval wargames rules called Warrior Heroes: Armies and Adventures. So, we bought a copy to check out. Well, it was darn near perfect for what we wanted...it even had some charts built in for random dungeon exploration!

Of course, the random dungeon stuff was not exactly as we imagined (gee, what ever is?). And the game was very light on magic and monsters. So, we have been creating our own variant add-on to the rules (for our personal use only, and the add-on obviously requires the purchase of the rule set - I think it is important to support THW! Ed's rules - and I have bought several different sets - have provided me with a lot of fun times!). We're using the D&D miniatures and have converted many monsters and magic stuff from the D&D stuff we own to work within the THW system. And, most importantly, we have had fun cruising through some dungeons, battling monsters, and (hopefully) improving our characters.

Below are a couple of images. As you can see, this has also created the opportunity to create some simple dungeon terrain tiles. We hope to acquire some dungeon furnishings as we go on too. If any CMH members are interesting in a fun, challenging, cooperative game, let me know!