Greetings from a factory where gnomes make magical gavels.

Bill Cavalier, also known as the Dungeon Bastard, runs a RPG advice column – specifically he appears in videos, talks about gaming and these videos often involve shouting. What is the appeal of watching an internet video where some arrogant, profane, twitchy dude in dubious headgear rattles on about gaming and stuff...

Right. Anyway, Mr. Cavalier ran a successful Kickstart project to produce and publish what he called the World's Worst Dungeon Crawl – a game module that by design employs every tired and worn out cliché of canned gaming adventures. The goal appears to be to push the limits of badness until the badness loops around back into awesome.

Well, that remains to be seen. On this bitter pill of a show, we have covered Forest Oracle, Fourth Edition Forgotten Realms and Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand – all aggressively bad gaming material. Hell, I even was reading my way through FATAL until my eyes started to bleed. Grumpy RPG Reviews backed Mr. Cavalier's Kickstarter project just to get a copy for this show. The PDF of "World's Worst Dungeon Crawl" is open on this North Central Positronics laptop and we will be diving right in.
Do your worst, Dungeon Bastard.

(sign card: "16.8 seconds later")

(bit done like sequence from Blair Witch/w subtitles)

I'm so sorry and I just want to apologize to the mothers of everyone in my gaming group and for that matter I want to apologize to the mothers of everyone I've ever met. I was very naive – you would think a 140 year old man like me would know better. It was my idea to use the module and now I'm scared to roll my dice. This module...

I should probably read past the introduction before I make any more judgment calls. I need some whiskey...

(sign card: "168 hours later")

I am feeling much better now.

On the technical side, Dungeon Bastard released the World's Worst Dungeon as a PDF, it is 50 pages long and includes two actual adventures.
One is the "Flaming Deathpits of the Minotaur Mage: Descent into Doomfire." The additional adventure in the same PDF is "Forbidden Crypt-Halls of the Sorcerer King Jeff: Necropolis of Anger." The Dungeon Bastard ran the "Flaming Deathpits" at GenCon 2013. The PDF is full color and presents text in an easy to read font and in a standard, clear two-column format – kudos for that, Dungeon Bastard. The art, by Mr. Cavalier and Margaret Frey, is well suited to the tone of the module – it is wonky but a lot of fun.  

In story terms, "Flaming Deathpits" is basic; the players run pre-generated characters locked in a dungeon who the king frees to go recue the local princess whom an evil wizard kidnapped. This adventure includes three sections, "Decent into Doomfire," "the Labyrinth of Ultra Mega Homicidal Doom Terror" and "Final Showdown."

By the way, my college dorm was also called "Labyrinth of Ultra Mega Homocidal Doom Terror" – that was actually its formal name, its nickname was Arneson Hall.

In any case, "Flaming Deathpits" hits all the clichés you might expect from a module designed to hit all the clichés; bad names, transparent plots by NPCs, bad riddle contests, pitch perfect pre-generated characters and narrative text so cheesy it had to come from a Wisconsin cheddar mine. This show will not spoil the material – we do not steal someone else's bad jokes on this show, we use our own bad jokes. "Flaming Deathpits" is home to many wonderfully bad jokes. "Forbidden Crypt-Halls" is also good and home to many fine moments, albeit not quite as good as "Flaming Deathpits." Concluding the module is a set of pre-generated character for use in Deathpits. These include a perfectly cliché hobbit, an ogre with back problems and a metal head with a battleaxe.

The module nominally employs Dungeons and Dragons mechanics, but here they have been hacked and simplified, making the game mechanics serve the game and players rather than the other way.  

Speaking of the mechanics, Dungeon Bastard includes several hacks, including a badass track and shame points. The badass track is feature that allows a character to pop back up from something that should lay them out in combat – the kind of thing that happens in action movies all the time.

Moderating the badass track thematically are shame points – shame point are awarded by the game master, are mostly arbitrary and get awarded for things that are not badass and detract from the game. Fiddling with your cell phone during the game gets you a shame point, as does rolling the wrong dice, talking to a NPC you should be murdering and eating the last slice of pizza. When you earn a shame point you roll a d20 and if you roll below your current rating, your character dies from being a lameoid. However, another player may take the shame point for you, at which point you owe him or her a massive favor. This bit, where one character can take on shame for another means the module does not depend on dick moves.

There are, broadly speaking, three types of parodies; accidental parodies, bad parodies and good parodies. An accidental parody is... whatever Congress is doing this week, a bad parody is a flick like "Meet the Spartans" and a good parody is "Young Frankenstein." World's Worst Dungeon Crawl, Flaming Deathpits in particular, is a good parody, executed by people who not only know how to game, but understand gaming. It is one thing to memorize a mechanical gaming system; it is another to grok gaming.

To whit, you have to understand gaming to make a module this bad and this good.

You might really enjoy quadratic equations but that is not much of an icebreaker at most social events. Likewise, a long time gamer might have the game mechanics of a half dozen systems memorized – however, someone new to the hobby will find most mechanical systems intimidating. The simplification of the system Mr. Cavalier employs here, even with the hack, nicely avoids this and it is all very engaging. We will et back to this point in a moment.

We game to have fun, even if fun is a broad term – the angst engines of White Wolf are one kind of fun and the games of Hackmaster are a different kind of fun. The point being, we get together to run the games, we engage in this adventures together for fun together. "Descent into Doomfire" provides a joyous chance to get together and have fun in an uproarious parody module.

People enjoy movies like "Young Frankenstein" because it is a joyous parody, which celebrates the source material even as it enjoys it laughs.
Someone unfamiliar with those wonderful old Universal horror movies might become interested in them after watching "Young Frankenstien" because even if they do not get all the references in the movie, they get enough amid the comedy to become interested in those old movies. Likewise, the World's Worst Dungeon Crawl can serve as an introduction to gaming for people who have not engaged in the hobby, assuming the game master knows what they are doing. Let the newbies select their pre-generated character based upon the quotes and go on from that point.

In the end, I give the World's Worst Dungeon a 20 on a d20 roll.

The World's Worst Dungeon Crawl is a damn fine adventure module – take that Mr. Bastard!

(use gun like a gavel)

Great review. I will have to check this one out.

Where may I purchase one?

Quote from: AaronBrown99;730331Where may I purchase one?

Ditto! I must have this!

I look forward to hearing another review; after this one, it doesn't sound like my cup of tea.  It sounds like it's steered straight through 'clever-dumb' right into 'asinine'.

I enjoyed your review.  

Got to talk to the Dungeon Bastard after his panel/lecture/talk or whatever it was at GameHole Con last fall.  Looks like he nailed the Worst Dungeon!

VS