I recently joined the Enter The Nerdom podcast to discuss Dungeons & Dragons, the movie Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, and all things tabletop roleplaying games (listen to the episode here or at your favorite podcast service).

This week, I’m back on, running them through an “old-school” style dungeon crawl using two fantastic resources:

  • Ben Milton’s Knave
  • Directsun Games’ Puzzle Dungeon: The Seers Sanctum

Hosts Chad Cook, Stan Moroncini, and Watson Bradshaw are joined by Dan Mason, with yours truly as the Dungeon Master! Here’s a little teaser about the session.

Behind the Screen

As you heard in the previous episode, I ran a session zero on-air, learning the players wanted an old-school experience. Although we brought up a willingness to play the fabled Basic/Expert edition of D&D (fondly known as B/X, lovingly updated in Necrotic Gnome’s Old-School Essentials), the players’ universal familiarity with 5th Edition made me think a unified dice rolling mechanic would make a simplee on-ramp. We have a limited space and time to play, so keeping things simple made me turn to Ben Milton’s Knave. It ticks all the boxes: built on B/X math, but with a unified dice rolling mechanic. Plus it uses player-facing defense rolls, too, so that helps keep everyone engaged outside of their turn in combat.

(It’s also handy because I tend to use an old-school take on the Forgotten Realms as my setting of choice these days, so this makes conversion of some materials a little easier, like monsters and NPCs.)

I chose Puzzle Dungeon: The Seers Sanctum as the adventure for two reasons. The first is because it’s only slightly bigger than the “Five Room Dungeon” archetype perfect for one-shot scenarios (popularized and brought to my attention by the amazing Johnn Four of RoleplayingTips.com). The second is because each of the players expressed that they resonate with cultural touchpoints in video games like Legend of Zelda, and Puzzle Dungeon is first and foremost an attempt at translating Zelda-style dungeon puzzles to the D&D milieu. I think it’s highly successful at that, so it’s a no-brainer.

I’ll point out that I’m going to make a couple minor tweaks, both to the Knave rules and the Puzzle Dungeon adventure. I’ll discuss those in a separate post, over the actual play episode of Enter The Nerdom drops!

Stay tuned!

Gaming Goodness

Pick up the games involved below:

Ben Milton’s Knave: we used the 1st edition version – PDF here, print here – but you should check out the Kickstarter for the 2nd edition here and get notifications to become a late backer/get a preorder. My hacks that I’ve added to it will someday be available, likely under the name of Treasures Just Beyond. Keep your eyes peeled!

Directsun Games’ Puzzle Dungeon: The Seers Sanctum: get the PDF here, and note while the print version is currently sold out, you can check here for when it comes back.