If you think dungeon crawls are fun...

...don't let anyone else tell you it isn't (run your games this way if you want). I recall a sentence to this effect in Robin Laws' book on refereeing. Today, our gaming group validated this statement.

It started out with having one afternoon to run a one-off old school game. So I decided to dust off (figuratively) my pdf copy of Labyrinth Lord and cobble up a one shot dungeon crawl. To spice up the weirdness factor, I decided to throw in a mutant human and mutant animal (antman!) warrior from the Mazes and Monsters optional rules at the end of the book thereby importing mutant warriors from the Mutant Future. So my pregen list ended up with a stock human fighter, a cleric, a magic user, a thief (all of the above representing the big four basic classes), a dwarf, an elf and the two afore-mentioned mutants.

To spice things up even further I set the game in what turned out to be a frontier scout surveillance base staffed by Vargr Mercs from Traveller. I know we always used to consider tech level 6 Traveller weapons as being on the lower end of the deadliness scale during combat. Today's game showed how the "typical" battle rifle (being the venerable M14) proved deadly against a group of 5-6th level D&D characters, particularly when paired with an odd laser carbine and wielded by a foe that seemed to remotely know what they were doing...

It was fun. I recall the last time we did this sort of D&D-Traveller genre bend was in high school. I wonder how their magic items will stack up against an enemy in Battledress?

We might get to find out as my players are clamoring to continue. This one shot is turning out to have a continuation after all....