First Time Playing: Dungeon Bitches

Dungeon Bitches is a game I wanted to support, hence backing the kickstarter, but wasn't one I expected to actually play.  Fortunately I was wrong, and a small group of us assembled to give it a go.

The premise of the game is that you play women who've found themselves for whatever reason with no play in society and end up dungeon crawling because the dungeon, while full of horrors, is still safer than town.  There are inevitable comparisons to be made with Thirsty Sword Lesbians, but while TSL tends more to swashbuckling romance, Dungeon Bitches is more on the survival horror end of things.  And that suits me just fine.  Even after a short campaign of TSL, I still find romance rather awkward.  Horrible things in dungeons, not so much.

We'd all decided on our playbooks (called deals in this game) in advance.  The one I found myself drawn to was the Beast, who's reason for having no place in society is that's she's literally a monster.  Ignoring the obvious werewolf option, I decided to make her a lamia.  Horrid Form and Intoxicating Bite made sense as moves for a snake person.  I had to pick a mannerism that hinted at her true form, so I decided that Emerald always wore long skirts and had a tendency to forget to walk and inadvertantly glide.

The other two players picked up the Wounded Daughter and the Disgraced Princess.  The playbooks list two relationships to define with the other characters, so with only three players, we were a pretty tight-knit group and started with plentiful bonds, the meta-currency you can use to help each other out.  (The fact you can spend bonds to improve a roll after they make the roll is a strong positive for me, someone who hates being forced to gamble with meta-currencies.)

As is tradition, we started out in a tavern.  With the premise of the game being that the town is not a safe place for us to be, there was immediate trouble.  Emerald was concerned about one of the waitresses who might have got a glimpse of her true form, but ultimately it was the Disgraced Princess who ended up getting us into a fight when all Emerald really wanted was to eat her plate of boiled eggs in peace.

The adventure saw us leave town, have a brief period of respite in a hut in the countryside (after cleaning up the remains of a jar of noses that got knocked over), before venturing into the dungeon proper.  There we dealt with spiders, slimes, paladins, and the worst thing of all: temporarily getting separated.

The actual dungeon crawl didn't grab me quite as much as the rest of the adventure.  I suspect it was because it felt a bit OSR-ish, and while I'm not entirely uninterested in OSR dungeon crawls, it doesn't exactly fit in with the PBTA mindset I'd gone in with.  It may just be that in this one-off game which included character creation and a town sequence just didn't have time to properly explore the dungeon aspect, so perhaps a future game will make things clearer.

Mechanically things felt pretty solid.  There are four stats and ten standard moves which covered everything we found ourselves wanting to do.  The playbook moves felt interestingly thematic and got plenty of use.

And despite everything the book says about this not being a nice game, and about it being raw and emotional, it wasn't particularly uncomfortable.  While the characters had traumatic pasts and traumatic presents, we were playing a close-knit group who loved and supported each other.  That meant there was room for light-hearted moments (Emerald's obsession with boiled eggs, the ongoing issues with spilt nose juice) and tender moments (protect Debbie the NPC at all costs!)

We all had enough fun that we're thinking of playing again with these characters.  I'm also looking forward to the various supplements from the kickstarter stretch goals, which offer some different settings to play in.  It's not going to be a regular favourite, but I'm glad I took a chance on this one.

There's just one big negative.  The book itself  Unlike every other book I own, this book is in landscape format.  Which for the PDF actually works really well when I'm reading off the screen, but for the physical book, I hate it.  It's weird to hold, and looks terrible on the shelf.  (There's also no form-fillable PDF character sheet, although that's a minor gripe compared to a landscape oriented book!)

It's also not a particularly enjoyable read.  The author's writing style grates on me at times.  The art is a mixed bag, with some evocative pieces but some that I just find unpleasant - and not the ones that are intended to be unpleasant, either.  The visual layout is stunning but frequently hard to read.  Between that and the landscape layout, this one is not joining my bedtime reading pile.

Ultimately, it's a weird game and one that's certainly not for everyone, but despite my issues with the book, the system is well designed for its target audience and does everything it set out to do.  I would absolutely play this again, if only with a pretty small select group.  I would definitely recommend the PDF over the hardback though.  Unless your shelves are just too well arranged for your liking and you feel the need to throw a spanner into the works, of course.