Why Dungeon Rush?

When we started this game, we already resigned ourselves to being an odd bunch of individuals who are trying to do something mildly out of our league. We keep asking ourselves these questions: “Why Dungeon Rush? Why are we gluttons for punishment?” And the answer is simple. Because we can.

None of us have ever played Dungeons and Dragons. The closest system we’ve ever played is Pathfinder. And while they’re very closely related, in their current iterations they’ve become completely separate beasts to tackle. DnD being the less beastly of the two.

Honestly, as a group, more accurately, as the two main GMs of the group we’ve been wanting to try DnD5e for a while. Mostly because we were looking for a simpler system to run “The Gate Chronicles” in.

Initially we were going to try running that setting through Numenera for the science-fantasy and the artifact-like “cyphers” that riddle the game. But our reasons for now focusing on DnD for the system are two-fold.

5-Minute Dungeon board game

It started with 5-Minute Dungeon, a card game with a dungeon-crawl-esque theme where players only have five minutes to match the symbols on different cards and beat the floor bosses. It’s a great game that we found just bit too easy to play. Maybe because we all have great hand-eye coordination. Thankfully, the addition of Curses Foiled Again has made the game slightly more challenging.

This gorgeous piece of work, Arcana of the Ancients, on Kickstarter!

The second part, which was announced recently and only affirmed our decision, is that Monte Cooke is making a science-fantasy supplement for DnD5e. Arcana of the Ancients was just announced on Kickstarter and it promises to “bring the wonders of mysterious technology and weird science-fantasy elements to their traditional fantasy campaigns.”

This is great news for “The Gate Chronicles,” which was in desperate need of a system that was simpler for some of our players who get overwhelmed by the feats, special abilities, and combat tactics of Pathfinder.

So, in the end, we determined that Dungeons and Dragons was the best system out of everything that we tried. But then we realized, we need our players to learn this and the GMs have to become familiar with it as well. And that’s when the idea was conceived.

“Clearly because we know how to play Pathfinder so well, there shouldn’t be an issue with us transferring systems. And why not put a time-limit on it, say five minutes or else the players are penalized! To make it easier, of course we’ll just run a one-shot.”

While the statement above is clearly an embellishment, at least we hope that is perceived…it is essentially how things went down. But at this time, “Dungeon Rush” is acting as placeholder for when we can’t run our Sword Art Online: AOD campaign.

This does make getting the rules down to a science a bit difficult, seeing that we’ve only had one chance to play at the current writing of this article. This does bring me to my final point, however.

It’s Spring Break for some of our players, which means vacations and time to recoup from the stresses of school and life. While almost everyone loves Spring Break, it does have its downsides. Namely that there won’t be an episode of Sword Art Online: AOD released on Sunday this week.

In its place, however, we’re going to be running another episode of Dungeon Rush on Saturday at 3 pm, 3/16/19. This will be a live-stream run on Twitch and YouTube.

That’s it for now. If, for some ungodly reason, you want to run your own Dungeon Rush or even want to get involved, send us a message! We’d be happy to help you get started or have you join us if we have the space.

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