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A blog perpetuated by the men behind NYC gaming troupe DIY DUNGEONS.

Monday, December 17, 2012

Program for 12.22 @ The Olive Garden

Hey Guys, its time for us to reveal what games we will be running at the next DIY Dungeons event! This time the theme will be Apocalyptic post nuclear holocaust stuff with anarchist themes built into the action! 

We'll see you there! 

Tavis Allison: CONQUERORS OF BRONX RIVER ROAD. The zombie apocalypse is here! Can you rebuild civilization using your wits, nerve, and the resources you can loot from the neighborhood around you? In this hack of the Adventurer Conqueror King roleplaying game, you'll play yourself struggling to survive in a bleak future by fortifying a stronghold, recruiting other survivors, and decapitating zombies with chainsaws. 


The day before might look something like this. 

Tim Hutchings:  I'll be running one of two games.  The first option is an anarcho-syndicalist take on Dogs in the Vineyard, an award winning indie game by Vincent Baker.  The players will be dealing with the problems of a Murray Bookchin-esque settlement in a near future wasteland - capitalists loom in the wasteland, rice must be grown, free will respected and the town protected.  There are no wrong answers, but not really any right ones either.  Or we'll just play Everything is Dolphins and some shit. 


Why is the farmer named Miguel?

Raymond Weiss: I will be running a game of 1st Edition Gamma World where the players will be roadies for the most famous band in all of post apocalyptic America: Duckballz. The roadies will be forced to clean up the PR messes that the band makes, all while surviving long enough to make it to the next gig in one piece. The game will take place in a sandbox campaign I've created set in Allegheny County (Pittsburgh) PA. 


Im going to have fun with this one. 

Thursday, December 13, 2012

The First DIY Dungeons Event!

If you guys didn't make it to our debut event @ the Clocktower Gallery in lower Manhattan, you really missed out! We had 3 awesome games going (which were described earlier) and we all had a super awesome time. Special thanks to everyone at Babycastles, The Clocktower Gallery, and Allison Leah Alston for the photos!

DIY arcade games included one about the Israeli Palestinian conflict called peacemaker.

Duke Ruben's Pizza Kingdom ruled.

The game/installation room, gamelan gongs going off in surround sound.

Brians Cthulhu game 'No Future.'



Ray's Cyberpanky N.O.W. game, 'McDonald's Mercs.'



Tavis & Tim @ Tavis's crossover ACK/XXXXtreme Street Luge game.

And if you missed this one, come to the next one!
Here is a facebook event. (here)

Monday, December 10, 2012

Program for our first event W/ Babyharvester!

Hello everyone! 

First off, I hope you have all emailed events@artonair.org to RSVP for our first event tomorrow night! 


Here is a program of the games we will be running. Tim Hutchings had to cancel and will not be running a game, but he will probably drop by and hang out. 


Tavis Allison: I'll be running an homage to the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon, in which

a group of kids ride a roller coaster that transports them to a fantasy world. This scenario unfolds in 1983 at the L.A. amusement park from which these kids recently disappeared. Players choose to take on the roles of either 1) a party of wizards and warriors going the other way through this portal and exploring a strange land of bright lights and dismal smog, or 2) a posse of 16 year olds, one of whom will grow up to be Vin Diesel, whose Saturday night is rudely interrupted by these broadsword bozos. The game will be a mash-up of the Adventurer Conqueror King System (for fantasy characters) and XXXXTreme Street Luge (for '80s ones).


D&D cartoon from the 80's
Ray Weiss: I'll be running my new game Cyberpanky N.O.W. which is essentially a 70's D&D approach to cyberpunk games. In my game, the characters will take on the roles of mercenaries who have been hired by Mc' Donalds to go terrorize and trash several other competing fast food establishments in an adventure I've lovingly titled, 'Mc Donalds Mercs'. The last time I ran this adventure, A player decided that the best way to terrorize the establishment was to defecate on the front window, as you can clearly see it will be a fun, chaotic, and cyberpunk'n good time. 


Standard game equipment
Brian Dudolevitch (Guest GM!): Brian is running a Call Of Cthulhu adventure he wrote called 'No Future' which takes place in late seventies England right about when the Sex Pistols started playing out. Knowing that Brian is one of the best GM's that I know, this game is guaranteed to kick ass as anyone who played his game at the Everything Is Dolphin's release knows. 


H.P. Lovecraft & Punk were made for each other. 

If you cant make this event tomorrow, stay tuned for our next event on 12/22 at a punk house in the Bronx!






Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Metamorphosis Alpha

So all of us in DIY DUNGEONS have at some point or another been involved in this sprawling Metamorphosis Alpha (old school) campaign over the past year, we have left it, come back to it, and some of our old characters's have now become NPC's and still after all of this time, Mother Brain is still quite insane.

If you are unfamiliar with the setting of Metamorphosis alpha, essentially the idea is that this huge gigantic planet sized ship is sent away from earth to colonize another planet. Somewhere along the way something terrible happens to the ship, radiation is leaked, and things get all mutated and weird, not to mention that the ships AI has gone bat shit crazy.
We are somewhere in there...

As of late, our party stands as such (minus a few auxiliary followers/characters.)


Check out the punk patches on the jacket.
Randy Buffet & Robo: Randy is pure strain human (probably was once an engineer or a technician) who awoke from his sleep chamber to find himself being poked and prodded by a telekinetic fox and a mutant gorilla, both completely sentient and with human intelligence and speech. Randy started off the game with a smart phone, bottle of whiskey, and a whip. Robo is Randy's robot (looks familiar im sure for SNES gamers) who Randy weened off the ship's AI in order to befriend the robot. Robo is now loyal to randy and recently saved Randy from having his brain fried by some strange weeds he walked near.

Emitting weird fox vibes. 
Oryx: Oryx is a telekinetic fox who is on a spirit quest with her friend Racs-Keol given to them by their village elder. A hole has mysteriously opened up at the edge of the universe and her and her buddy are sent to go investigate. Before leaving, her Shaman hands her a device called a food maker used to provide rations for the journey. When they get there, they find Randy Buffet who starts talking hysterically about something called a ship. Soon after they find Randy they encountered a gigantic snail that nearly killed them all if it hadn't been for Oryx's cunning to whisk everyone safely away from danger.

This ain't no Donkey Kong
Racs-Keol: Racs-Keol is a mutant gorilla who has (maybe had?) some telepathic abilities, and has been travelling with Oryx. Racs-Keol has often been the cool enforcer of the group who has been making sure people stay safe and sound, not to mention he kicks major ass as a gorilla. Both him and Oryx believe that if they continue to follow Randy they will eventually fulfill their spirit quests.

After the party had met up, Randy Buffet had realized that something had gone terribly wrong on this ship, and first went to see what he could do about it. It becomes clear that the ship is now miserably beyond repair and he has convinced the party to find a way to leave the ship. While the other characters want to leave the ship to go find help, Randy just wants to find a nice shack out somewhere in the woods and play chess with Robo until he dies peacefully. Tavis, the GM of our group wrote about my emergent player goal to retire over at The Mule Abides.

A map of what we've seen of the ship as players. 
In future posts regarding the game, I hope to give updates from A, the most recent session, and B, talks about what each of the ships levels were like, and what they inspired us as players to do. One I'll talk about now is this crazy weed that Randy found that totally rotted his brain right when the party had reached the part of the ship with the smaller spacefareing ships (1 on the map).

Once it was clear that randy had permanent brain damage, the group realized that getting off the ship (which was mostly all Randy's idea) would be impossible being that he was the only Pure Strain Human (PSH's in Metamorphosis Alpha are really the only characters that can access the ship's main functions and other technologies.) The party decided to take Randy all the way back up to the jungle level (7 on the map) and use this strange machine they saw randy use earlier to give a construct of the ships AI a flesh body (more on that another time). 

On a side note Chrono Trigger is a great game.
Feeling like I had most surely lost the character I had liked enough to want to get to safety, I rolled up a new character (again looks familiar for SNES gamers,) named Frog. I decided that Frog would be a chivalrous type (hard to find in Metamorphosis Alpha) and would have totally different motivations than randy, and while he would be an anthropomorphic frog, he would also start the game with a split personality, the other being of a human who believes himself to be a romanticized medieval knight, I figured I would totally love this character just as much as I loved Randy. 

Everyone eventually makes it to the Jungle after running into Frog along the way. The party all being fairly incompetent with technology actually managed to roll well bringing Randy back with only a few errors to his original personality using a large protein synthesizer on the grounds of the jungle. The party got greedy though and decided to use the machine again to make some cows for the local lizard people. Unfortunately that roll we messed up and ended up making a pair of Ibex that gored a few of the lizard people. The lizard people being fairly stupid thought these were all cows none the less. 

Now I'm left in a curious position  I have two characters! I've never really played a game with two characters (3 I guess with Robo) and I am super excited to continue the game tonight! I'll continue to post updates and interesting things from our campaign as it happens. 

Double Trouble





Hi & welcome! Let me tell you about us.

DIY DUNGEONS is a pen and paper gaming troupe dedicated to both playing games in unconventional environments and providing a dense, intimate, and fulfilling role playing game experience. NYC happens to have the largest concentration of role players in the country and possibly the world, but there are very few places to go and play without paying lots of money, or in big awkward convention spaces. We seek to jointly explore the existential implications of everything from original games from the 70s, modern games, & story games all while having unique problem-solving fun doing so. 

DIY DUNGEONS is put together by Ray Weiss, author of RPG Everything Is Dolphins and guitarist in Butter The Children; Tavis Allison, co-author of RPG Adventurer Conquerer King, and lead blogger at The Mule Abides; & Tim Hutchings, artist & creator of the Play Generated Map And Document Archive.