How Do You Play Camp Dungeon Crawl?

If you haven’t heard DriveThruRPG is trying to encourage the next generation of game designers with PocketQuest where designers are to write a complete game in under 20 pages. Having not created a game since starting Jon Brazer Enterprises, I decided it was time I created my own complete game. This brings us to Camp Dungeon Crawl.

What is Camp Dungeon Crawl?

Camp Dungeon Crawl is a game where you and everyone else at the table play camp counselors, trying to train up their campers to be adventuring parties. Your group of campers has an adventuring party, and each other player at the table has their own adventuring party. You create your adventuring party by choosing from 11 different classes. Each class has a different array of skills. You add up the bonuses to each skill for your adventuring party to create your group stats.

Once you have your campers selected, your adventuring party needs dungeons to go through. As a camp counselor, you have to make them from dungeon “segments”—various challenges for your adventuring party. You select segments to create your dungeon. Once everyone has done that, you run your adventurers through the dungeon. If your adventuring party passes a segment, they get a reward to help them with future dungeons. If they fail, an adventurer gets an injury. Take too many injuries and an adventurer dies.

The winner is the group with the most adventurers wins. If there’s a tie, the adventuring party with the fewest injuries wins.

There’s more to it than that, but that’s the basics. We’ll talk more about each part in future blog posts but right now we want to talk about making an adventuring party.

Making Your Adventuring Party

You get to select what kind of adventurers are in your party. You choose from the 11 classes: bard, barbarian, cleric, druid, fighter, monk, paladin, ranger, rogue, sorcerer, and wizard. Each of these classes has strengths and weaknesses. Fighters are exceptional at Offense and Defense but not much else. Rogues excel at Awareness. Clerics and Druid are top-notch at Religion.

So if you take the original four classes—Fighter, Rogue, Cleric, Wizard—you will have a very well-rounded party, but they won’t excel at much. If you take a group that is much more martial-focused—Barbarian, Fighter, Monk, Paladin—your Offense and Defense will be baller and you will have something in all the rest of the skills, but it will be more difficult to pass certain dungeon segments.

Of course, the most important party of any adventuring group is names. You have to name all your adventurers and the adventuring party. You can’t adventure with a fighter who’s name is “Fighter.” You have to give them a name worthy of their quests like Gunther Highbeard or Misty Tanfur.

A very conscious decision on our part was to not have ancestries/races/species/whatever to have a mechanical difference. They exist in the world as we have the adventuring party face off against orcs, kobolds and much more. However, we feel you should be allowed to compose your adventuring party how you feel is best and not choose who composes your adventuring party just to get some bonus. You want your heroes to be orcs? Go right ahead. You want the goblin and kobold party, that’s all you. Gnomes, gnomes, everywhere gnomes? Enjoy yourself.

Our next blog post, we’ll be talking about how to make dungeons. In the meantime, be sure to head over to DriveThruRPG and check out all of our Pathfinder, Traveller, and other supplements.