Pyramid #3/98: Welcome to Dungeon Fantasy

[dripton]

Very short review:

The two things I think DF clearly needs more of are monsters and adventures. There's only one published full-length adventure, and three monster books plus the monsters in DF2. (But one of the monster books is all Goo, which would be cool if it were one of 27 monster books, but not so much if it's one of three.)

This Pyramid issue has two short adventures, and 15 monsters. So, huge win. Even if you don't run the adventures, just seeing dungeon maps with hexes instead of squares makes me happy. Avoiding spoilers, Matt Riggsby's adventure is a good one-shot or campaign-starter for a group of PCs who might not really know each other yet, who meet in an inn. And David Pulver's has a nautical theme, for those who like sea caves and pirates.

It's also got an article for DF GMs from Peter Dell'Orto. The theme of the article is: control your game by deciding what subset of the DF rules to allow. Make decisions on what you want to allow, rather than just allowing everything by default. You might make different decisions that he does, but at least think about it. DF is already a simplified subset of GURPS, but this is about simplifying even more. I think that's a good idea, but kind of obvious. (At least if you're a GM who believes in Rule 0.)

And there's an article for new players (and maybe GMs who have new players) from Steven Marsh. It's very basic advice: have a character sheet and know what's on it. If you don't know all your character's powers, print them out, so you don't need to dig around in books during the game. Have paper and take notes during the game. This article seemed very basic to me, but it might help someone.

Overall, I give this issue an A+ for DF, because it has 2 adventures and 15 monsters. And an A for general fantasy, because you can probably still use some of the monsters, and maybe the inn and dungeon maps. If you don't play fantasy, there's probably nothing in this issue for you.