Four Against Darkness Review

 

A review

I now feel I have played enough games of Four Against Darkness to make a fair assessment of what it has to offer. I've played at least 12 or so dungeons. Keep in mind, this is the base game. So if you like, continue on under the break to read more!  

 

First, a brief summary of what Four Against Darkness is. This game was published by Ganesha Games and authored by Andrea Sfiligoi, the maker of one of my favorite skirmish systems, Song of Blades and Heroes. It weighs in at 90 pages in PDF form. It is also available in softcover. I own both, because, why not?

It's purely a dungeon crawler. You start out looking for what all good dungeoneers seek, treasure! Of course, it's not that easy. You can encounter vermin, minions, bosses, and even weird monsters. You get to choose from eight classes; warrior, rogue, cleric, wizard, elf, barbarian, halfling, and dwarf. You go in, plunder the dungeon, and then, hopefully, come out the other end full of treasure. Maybe you'll pick up a quest along the way or clues to a secret. Maybe set off a trap.

You build the dungeon by a simply rolling the entrance room on a d6 and then all further rooms and corridors with d66 (two six-sided dice). Then, every time you generate a room or corridor, you roll on the room contents. It could just be empty, have monsters inside, special features, an event could occur, etc. An empty room might not be empty at all as something might be hidden in there. All the standard dungeon crawling tropes are here.

One thing I really like are the monsters reactions. You can either immediately attack or see what the monsters decide to do. You may forfeit the initial attack to see what the baddies do. For example, you might be able to bribe a group of monsters, get a quest if you're lucky, they might flee, etc. I know my wife will get a kick out of this part if I can ever get her to play. She's always of the mindset "ok, let's negotiate before going into battle." I guess I'm just used to punching first and asking questions if they survive.

You level up every time you beat a boss/weird monster, kill 10 minions (at a -1 penalty), or complete a quest. You roll a dice and, if the roll is higher than the level, congrats, you just leveled. So the maximum level is 5 with the exception of elves who hit max level at 3 and dwarfs and halflings cap out at 4. You can't level the same character twice in a row either, so make a note who leveled up last. On my current campaign, my characters are around level 3, which is the result of going into about four or five dungeons, so your characters don't level too fast. Or maybe mine are just slow!

If it was just the base game, I could see this getting a little stale after a bunch of play throughs with multiple class set ups, etc. But there is an immense collection of both adventures (modules), supplements (add monsters and/or classes), and settings (a romance theme?). You can also increase the level cap to 9 (think!). There are even spinoff games like Four Against Mars, Alone Against Fear, and Four Against the Titans, which I have purchased but wanted to give the original flavor a try first.

A final note, the artwork in the book is very cool too. I've liked Andrea's artwork since I first saw a few pictures in Warrior Heroes: Armies and Adventures. He's a talented guy!

I can't wait to see what happens with the Metalhoods (my adventurer guild). There's even a fan made conversion to take them on D&D modules here!

 What I'm trying to get at here, if you haven't tried it yet, check it out!