We are back from our annual trip to GenCon (affectionately referred to as The Nerd Hive). This year was a pretty good convention, which marked the first trip our our intrepid party into True Dungeon. My opinions of this waver quite a bit from “a good time” to “really poorly managed” and back to “still fun.” It was basically like a haunted house, only you could kill the ghosts and solve traps and find treasure.
My main complaints were twofold… one: they ran out of treasure tokens, so you couldn’t buy the standard Treasure Token starter kit before the event. That forced our team to be at the mercy of this covetous (yet generous) uberdork that one of our friends came across that was to become our seventh player. Two: the timing… we were allowed 24 minutes in the “town” and then 12 minutes in each room of the dungeon. Since we were playing the late night hardcore mode, they offered to add a volunteer 8th member to act as a barbarian for us. We agreed, and got this Asian kid named Eric.
Between Eric and Jacob (the other group outsider), they pretty well wanted to take over the decision making process for the party. This was mostly fine, since this was our first stab at this experience so it was nice to have a little extra guidance. I was a bit irritated by the fact that those two members enjoyed monopolizing the DungeonMaster’s time, which made it hard for us to get as much accomplished or provide as much input as we would’ve liked.
In the end, one of our buddies Ryan was a porn star at disarming the traps. This required a skill akin to the Operation Board game, where you couldn’t let this metal stick touch the metal lockplate that was in a certain design. Once you traced the design without touching the sides, the trap was disarmed. He only messed up once, but since he had an item provided by Jacob he was able to try again without destroying us all. What a champ.
The puzzles in this thing were HARD. I don’t think we successfully solved one of them, save the one that required knowledge of bardic runes that Tasha was able to solve. We made it to the second to last room of the dungeon, which not only had a trap and a monster to kill, but it also required us to pick a door out of seven to continue. Our whole party had 15 seconds left to decide and chose poorly. We were escorted to the Hall of Valhalla, where we had one last chance to crit Death in the face to get to go back into the dungeon. Two of our guys did this, however they were unable to solve the last puzzle in time to save the world.
I would do this again if the opportunity arose, however I would probably not camp out on the website expressly to get tickets on my own. I was able to buy a Treasure Token bag the next day, as they had recycled enough tokens to be able to offer them again. I also got their collectable “silver” piece (which was made from aluminum) to use as my flip coin at work.
I’m sure the rest of the group will weigh in with their thoughts, but I enjoyed it pretty well all told.
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