Fungeon - The Blank White Cards of Hack & Slash Dungeon Romps

I just discovered Fungeon today*. It's a GM-less hack and slash dungeon romp, where the players build the dungeon as they explore.I'd done something similar (but dreadfully more complex) several years back, which we lovingly called Forge Knight Quest (as it used parts from Dwarven Forge dungeon tiles, the Mage Knight miniatures game, and Warhammer Quest). We played that till till someone broke their nose.** Eventually, it sprouted Forge Knight Quest Dark, which allowed "programmable" monster behavior inspired by Simulator Bots in the Nintendo 64 game Perfect Dark. Basically, it just liberally mixed bits of all the above games in an attempt to make a semi-random GM-less dungeon-romp minis game. We'd also played a bit of D&D minis, and a game that blended all the WotC minis systems (D&D, StarWars and even Axis & Allies using the Godzilla-ish conversion rules they'd put up at wizards.com), plus a bit of Heroscape thrown in for good measure. What can I say? I like minis, but I also like cooperative games.

Fungeon is kinda like that, except it's more like an RPG, not minis-based, and is a lot more rules-light. So it's got a bit in common with the Rune RPG, too, only a lot lighter. It's also kinda reminiscent of Blank White Cards, since you're making a joint map and encounters on paper (and on the fly). Strikes me as a lot of fun, and I might give it a shot after we've moved into the new apartment.


*: When a forumite talked (joked?) about converting Scion to Fungeon's mechanics - a very odd concept. He wrote it straight-faced with no apparent irony, but what a strange idea.

**: I mean that literally. In the midst of the game, she realized she'd left something out in the car, so she went downstairs to get it. Walking back to the elevator she fell and broke her nose. She went to the hospital, and for some reason we never played the game again. It'd been a regular weekly game for a couple months before that. Go fig.

Stupid Fiddly Scion

I just found ANOTHER thing I'm doing wrong - correction, I just had another thing I'm doing wrong in Scion embarrassingly pointed out on the forum. Stupid combat wheel and tick system. Stupid bouncy Defense Values. Stupid vague Knacks. Stupid contradictory rules.

I can run 7th Sea, with all it's little idiosyncracies. I house-ruled the heck out of the damage system when I GM'd, but I first played under the book rules, and learned them inside-and-out. I could GM with no warning, just 10 minutes prep time, without looking anything up but specific sorcery descriptions and the details of a few swordsmen knacks.

I can run D&D 3.0, and knew it well enough to pass the RPGA Herald test pretty easily. I'm not on top of every little detail of 3.5 (I'm aware of Swift Actions, for example, but couldn't tell you whether something you named is a Swift or Free action) but I had 3.0 down pat when I was last GMing it. I haven't done so in years, but feel I could get back up to speed given 3 to 5 hours and a player's handbook.

When GMing the LARP, I knew all the intricacies of the so-called "Gehenna Edition" of Laws of the Night. I'd identified all the contradictions, and knew which version I supported in my chronicle. I mastered that system, so no one could challenge me. I made a big list of the rules I felt were imporant enough for all my players to know, which ones were relevant only to specific characters, and which ones were obscure enough that it was okay for just me to understand them.

Amber of course, is entirely committed to memory, and could be run on a desert island without paper or the books. Not that that's saying much - a trained hellhound could memorize the rules, such as there are, of Amber. Ironically, I don't have memorized the "Bergstrom Method" that I wrote up and which used to be huge on the net back in the days when Amber sites were huge on the net. (That was before Phage Press sold the game to Guardians of Order, who then folded.) I worked it out, and then only had to actually use it once.

I houseruled Continuum really heavily. I never gave the real combat rules their day in court, 'cause I could see how much the the existing frag chart and A/B/C/D hit location system were going to tick me off. I made the Sweep system work for my needs, and wrote up a ton of player aids to teach it to myself.

I can run Cyberpunk 2020! The Friday Night Firefight system is an incredibly complicated (supposedly also the most realistic, but that's a laugh) number-crunchy system. I can make it sing! I have a couple little house rules I use, but if you're not using "weird" weapons (volt pistols, paintball guns, PA suits, etc), I can run it without a rulebook, no prep time, with a single character sheet as my only reference.

I wrote a published adventure for Rune, for cripes sakes! The game where you are required to purchase every encounter from a stock of points the GM has access to, and painstakingly balance them against the players options and your budget. It's not like anyone could ever accuse me of being math- or rules- illiterate.

So why can't I get Scion to flow error-free? Have I lost some braincells in the last couple years, or is the book just that poorly written? I've houseruled so much, I can't keep it straight any more. I've built a ton of play-aids, easily three time as many as for any other game I've run, and I feel like a few hundred more would be in order. The fiddly little minutia of the Scion rules keep having different implications than my initial read-throughs gave them.

Frequently, I find there'll be some process in Scion with 5 or 6 steps. The book will spell out 4 of the 5 steps in 3 to 5 different parts of the book, but the 5th step (actually, it's usually the second or third step) will only be mentioned once, in one paragraph, on one page, under a header you wouldn't have expected, and completely skipped on the index. There's usually a chart nearby which appears to summarize the various steps but leaves out the one critical detail that occurs here and nowhere else. The system runs fine without step 13b, but then one day you stumble across it and realize that not using it changed the value and power level of 6 different PC powers. What the heck were they thinking? It's not like this is White Wolf's first book!

Yet I love the setting. My storyline rocks, the game is fun, the players are rampaging about the underworld without me ever missing a beat, Hel and Baldur were a riot last session, etc. There's nothing I'd rather be running right now, except maybe a rules-light possibly-tickless fudge-die-rolling version of Scion. *sigh*

Oh, yeah, and it's got vikings!

A friend's post elsewhere reminded me of something I accidentally left off my list of things I liked about the Rune RPG.

• Vikings. By Odin's eye, I can't believe I overlooked them.

They're pretty damn cool. Both in the cinematic action-packed mead-swilling sense, and because of the context of some very neat cultural elements. Rune focuses more on the action and mayhem, of course, then on anything I could really refer to as my heritage.

I can still voice my long hidden love of the subject matter. Thor and Leif Erikson have always had a place in my heart, though I'm sure they'd be happier with that fact if I was the kind of guy who got plastered and sang their glories.

Some elements I really enjoyed

The Rune RPG is a bloody game of viking mayhem. Specifically it's action-packed, horned-helmet-wearing, mead-swilling, Hollywood-inaccuracy-ridden, video-game-stylin', by-the-seat-of-your-pants bloody viking mayhem. It's very different from the style of RPG experience I typically prefer. But I really admire it.


Elements I like in Rune:

Everyone GMs. You trade around GMing duties in a series of mini-adventures and set-piece encounters. In a standard session, every player will GM for an hour or so. As someone who enjoys GMing and also Playing, this is a big plus for me.

Competitive Roleplaying. Here's an RPG that actually declares a winner for the night. A game were you still need to cooperate with the other players, but you are rewarded for actively striving to one-up them. For Gamists and Social Gamers, there's a lot to love in Rune. Narrativists and Method Actors may not respond so well. I most strongly identify with those later categories, and yet I really enjoyed the game.

Tools for balancing scenarios. Rune has a really solid system for balancing encounters. That system works well for combat and less violent encounters. While it doesn't perfectly match my gaming style, I really have to admire the thought that went into that system. If you've ever had to pull your punches as a GM, or didn't and thus ended up with a TPK (total party kill), it'll be worth your time to read over Rune. Game designers and those who enjoy fiddling with mechanics and house-rules will find it an enjoyable (and thought-provoking) read, too.

They published my adventure. Hey, it doesn't hurt. I really liked those other three elements of the game long before Michelle Brown Nephew offered me a chance to see my work in print. I wrote a fun little adventure with goblinoid used car salesmen and mead-soaked undead, which can be found in Enter the Viking.

Here's some in-depth Rune RPG reviews from other folks:
http://www.ogrecave.com/rune/review.shtml
http://www.ogrecave.com/rune/opposing.shtml
http://www.rpgtimes.net/rpgtimes/article.php?article_id=247&origin=archive