I've been playing a decent amount of 4AD lately since I was gifted it for Father's Day. It fills me with the same enjoyment I get from 2d6 Dungeon, but requires a little less table reference, so I can easily run four characters without it feeling too slow.
I whipped up this dungeon in an hour after my wife and kids went to sleep, playing through to a satisfying resolution.
I used the Solo Gaming Sheets by Perplexing Ruins to add a bit of flavour to this dungeon by rolling on the quests table, which provided me a prompt of "survive" and "hunters".
With that inspiration, I decided to add a simple sign to the enterance room that read "riches for survivors" and then I rolled on the Solo Gaming Sheets "mundane items" table, which provided a rabbits foot.
That spawned the idea for a small piece of flash fiction to set the tone and then I was off to the races, drawing rooms and fighting monsters.
Then, with the dungeon behind me I thought it may be time to flesh out the world my characters exist in a bit more. 4AD's core book doesn't contain anything outside of the dungeon, and while expansions do cover that... There are quite literally dozens of them and the fan-created expansions vary wildly in quality, tone, and content. Plus, I already have and love the Solo Gaming Sheets, which contains its own hex map and exploration rules and prompts.
So I rolled up a town and put my first dungeon within it, and then rolled up some hills and a cave, which is where my second dungeon took place.
This is seriously such a wonderful little tool. I use it for so many different games and it's constantly useful, inspirational, and additive to my enjoyment. It allows me to take a very simple dungeon crawling game and build a narrative around it.
Going forward, I'll be expanding the hex crawl before doing further dungeons and placing the 4AD dungeons in whenever I roll up ruins, dangers, or other terrain features that might make for interesting potential delves.
I once again highly recommend grabbing these sheets.
As always, thanks for reading and happy gaming my friends!
