Dungeon Robbers from Outer Space!!!
Added 2022-12-13 22:59:49 +0000 UTCDungeon Robbers from Outer Space has a cover! And it’s finished too!
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/417034/Dungeon-Robbers-from-Outer-Space
Lulu version, staplebound and full colour:
Lulu version, staplebound and black & white:
Let me tell you the story behind this game:
A while back, I started writing a game called Zone Stalkers. It was supposed to combine zone exploration with late-Victorian mysteries, but eventually grew to also encompass the 20th century. I put it away unfinished for reasons but then I pulled it out again during the pandemic, and ran a few dungeons with it. Long story short, it didn’t really work. The basic rules were fine (and I’ve continued tweaking them through this whole process), but the gameplay loop wasn’t quite where I wanted it to be.
After this initial campaign, I switched focus and used the basic rules to write another game I called The Inhuman Underworld. Instead of emulating zone fiction, the protagonists of this game are monster gangsters. We played a short campaign and I had the same problem: once again, the gameplay loop wasn’t what I wanted. But this time I had another problem as well: this game isn’t different enough from The Company of Monsters. If I were to write playable monster types for both games, the actual rules for their abilities won’t be different enough to justify them being separate books. Since 2018, I’ve had a great deal of difficulty working on The Company of Monsters, but I’ve been making progress so far this year, and it basically encompasses everything that I wanted to include in The Inhuman Underworld. In other words, these don’t need to be different games.
So I went with the only option left for these rules that I could see working: just ditch the stuff that didn’t work and only use the stuff that did. I decided that if the players’ characters are alien astronauts exploring the “primitive” planets of published fantasy adventures, they can just beam up and down between sessions and be restored, leaving the mapcrawling part of play to fill up each session. I’ve been running B2: Keep on the Borderlands with Dungeon Robbers from Outer Space, and it’s been great fun.
These rules are how I run old school games nowadays, and it feels like the long evolution that started with B/X and continued through two editions of The Nightmares Underneath might have reached something close to an end point—a stable rules system I don’t feel the need to constantly tweak and muck around with.
