My friends Kevin and Wally got together with me last Monday (Jan 15) for a tabletop dungeon crawl in my game-loft. We were all off work thanks to the Martin Luther King Day holiday here in the USA.
I had been hankering for some good old monster-bashing, treasure-taking, skirmish fighting fun, and an opportunity to break out some of my dungeon terrain which hadn’t been used in a while. Since I wanted something with fairly simple rules that could be tweaked a bit (more on that in a bit) and supported whatever fantasy figures we felt like throwing onto the table, I decided to break out Song of Blades & Heroes (and it’s supplement for dungeon crawling, Song of Gold & Darkness).
Our scenario was a straightforward 3-way “Grab the Loot & Escape” scenario, with each of us controlling an 8-10 character raiding party costed around 390 points. I wrote down the stats/abilities for each party’s characters on 3×5 index cards.
Kevin’s group comprised a Goblin Leader (Big Chief Flitch), two Goblin Wolfriders (Captain Gribbly and Lt. Bladelicker), an Ogre (Thonk), 2 Goblin Archers, 2 Goblin Nightrunners, and 2 Orcs.
My party was led by a Human Wizard (Greylock the Mysterious), along with a Paladin (Sir Fengold), a Dwarf Thief (Chubb Plasternotch), an Elf Archer (Hornbottom), a Lizardman (Barzax the Steadfast), and 3 Human Archers.
Wally controlled an undead/chaos contingent lead by the most unholy Lich (Bishop Le Ghast) accompanied by 3 Skeletons, a Hobgoblin (Wretchbort), Harpy (Old Miz), Chaos Hero (Lord Tholdur), and Hell Hound (Sparky).
I used all of my square/rectangular dungeon rooms & corridors to build out the bulk of the dungeon. That was mainly because I wanted to create a balanced layout where the 3 parties entered from different edges, and converged at a central hallway leading towards the main Treasure Room. For the most-part it worked well, although post-game we discussed a small tweak we would make for next time we do this.
The wrinkle that I introduced was to create a deck of “Dungeon Cards” that included surprise things on them such as Traps, Wandering Monsters, Treasure (both regular and magical), and a few random events. I created 20 cards and added 10 blank cards to the mix to create a 30-card deck.
I then sprinkled red-skull markers throughout the dungeon in various rooms and corridors. When a party encountered that location and reached the skull, we flipped over the top card from the Dungeon Deck to see what happened. Oftentimes, chaos ensued. But it was fun and kept things lively, even if it ultimately proved to be the undoing of some of our parties.
My guys encounted a wandering Troll. Sir Fengold and Chubb Plasternotch dispatched him, but not until he was transfixed and held fast by a giant Spider Web cast by Greylock the Mysterious.
Wally split his group in two, hoping to divide and conquer. The entire adventure didn’t go well for the Dead Guys. For starters, some of the group got trapped in a swampy region of the dungeon by a Magically Locked Door. Bishop Le Ghast had to backtrack to unlock it for them, wasting valuable time and angering the decrepit Lich.
But even worse, the clanking armor of the Skeleton minions alerted a nearby warband of Orcs to arise from their afternoon meal of man-flesh and attack the boney intruders. A whopping 5 Orcs poured into the corridor, blocking the skellies advance towards the Main Hallway. For the rest of the adventure, the hapless Skeletons traded blows with the greenskins, failing to clear them out of the way. Even a burst of hell-fire from old Sparky didn’t help very much.
Meanwhile, my Wizard and Hornbottom the Elf advanced down the hallway, stumbling up the pitch black stairs into the Treasure Room. They grabbed two large bags of gold, climbed out the side-door and crept down into the twisting cavern passage that led to a large dark cavern, filled with murky water. Little did they know that the next flip of a Dungeon Card would trigger the appearance of Scarmark, a snarling red dragon. Run!!! But it was too late, the enormous beast breathed it’s fiery breath, incinerating Greylock the Mysterious. Hornbottom fled past the crispy remains of his partner and hot-footed it towards the outside wall of the Treasure Room.
While the other two parties were chest-deep in misery, the pesky Goblins continued their greedy raid, stealing 2 large chests of loot and escaping with it out of the dungeon. It was there that we called it — a Goblin victory, having escaped with 2 treasures after 3+ hours of dungeon hacking & raiding.
It has been about 5 years or so since we last played SOBH. It’s an easy game to pick up and play (only 2 stats for each character: Quality and Combat), and the push-your-luck mechanics of rolling 1-2-3 dice to perform actions is easy enough to explain. However, if you don’t play it regularly, there’s a lot of consulting the rulebook to look up Special Abilities. There was so much that we forgot. I don’t mind this too much, since it’s fairly common in fantasy/sci-fi games (especially skirmishes) and it’s what really gives this game its fantasy flavor.
Two things that annoy me about SOBH: (1) it’s easy to fail activations after activating just one guy (or zero guys!), leaving you with nothing to do for a turn; (2) combat isn’t as decisive as I wish it would be, especially in a simple skirmish game. Fights between opponents can drag on far too long with constant fall-down, get-up, fall-down, get-up-again cycles.
I think the next time we play SOBH, I would introduce two house-rules:
First, I would give each player 3-4 “Hero Points”. These are beads/tokens which you can spend over the course of the game to turn a failed activation die-roll into a Success, or add +2 to your Combat roll — your choice how to spend them.
Second, I would change the “Fall Down” result in combat to a “Wound”. Instead of falling down, the character is Wounded. If that character suffers a second Wound, he’s Killed. That makes combat deadlier and eliminates those neverending fall down, get up, fall down, get up, fall down cycles that frequently occur, especially when weaker characters are facing off against each other. It wouldn’t apply to creatures with the TOUGH attribute (like Trolls or Dragons), they work okay as-is.
It was really great to play our first game of 2024. I just celebrated my 60th birthday on January 18, so this was sort of a Birthday Week game for me. Looking forward to getting together again, hopefully soon.
Happy New Year to everyone. Hope the start to your year has been great.
Tiny Painted Heroes 