Cinema

Appendix N Part 3 - Cinema

I started this short blog series back in April and then it fell by the wayside as other things had to take priority, but now we’re back. In the last two posts I looked at some of the games and fiction that have impacted the design and ethos of A Dungeon Game, and today I’m casting my eye onto influential cinema.

As with the other two posts these influences have more bearing on how I think about adventures than about game systems in general, but because A Dungeon Game is simply a vehicle through which you play adventures, the two are largely inseparable. Everything I put into the game is in pursuit of making adventures come alive at the table in the way I want them to.

The Descent (2005)

Dir. Neil Marshall

Is this the perfect horror film? It might be. It’s certainly one of the best depictions of a dungeon crawl ever put to screen. The Descent really highlights what a horrible, awful experience caving can be on its own, let alone when you add horrible not-quite-human creatures that want to eat you and can hunt you even with the lights off.

The Descent is one of the scariest films ever made, in my opinion, and it’s everything I want dungeon crawling to be. Dungeon crawls are survival horror, at their heart, and if I can evoke even half the dread you feel watching this film when I run a dungeon I count that as a success.

Yojimbo (1961)

Dir. Akira Kurosawa

The Platonic ideal of a “village with a problem” sandbox adventure. Kuwabatake Sanjuro walks into a village overrun by criminals and plagued by an ongoing war between two rival yakuza gangs. Everyone tells him to leave, to stay out of it, to leave them to it. But Sanjuro sees that the violence will continue, and that everyone would be happier if both of the gangs died. And he sets out to make that happen.

If you look at the classic starter adventures for D&D - by which I of course mean B2: The Keep On The Borderlands and, especially, T1: The Village of Hommlet, you’ll find Yojimbo’s DNA lurking beneath the surface. I’m convinced that if the original Appendix N contained films, Yojimbo would be present. All you need to know about running factions, and about how NPCs who want things is all you need to power gameplay in a sandbox, is right here in this film. Bodies In Flight may not have been written with A Dungeon Game in mind initially, but Yojimbo is in its blood and it’s basically a statement about how I think location-based adventures should be presented.

Alien vs. Predator (2004)

Dir. Paul W.S. Anderson

Is this film good? Absolutely not. Is it a ton of fun? Yes. Did I spend a very long time trying to decide whether to pick this or Paul W.S. Anderson’s other early-noughties dungeon crawl film, Resident Evil (2002)? Also yes.

If The Descent is the creeping horror that I want from the idea of dungeons in general, AvP is the fun that I want from exploring a dungeon. It’s full of over the top violence, horrible monsters, devious traps, and a group of adventurers thrown in way over their heads and regretting every single stupid decision that they make but still ploughing on ahead with it all anyway. This is, hands down, one of my favourite dungeon crawl films and I go back to it time and time again.

A Field In England (2013)

Dir. Ben Wheatley

My favourite Ben Wheatley film is 2021’s In The Earth, which heavily inspired the adventure FEAST, but A Field In England is the one that has had the most impact on the way I think about this game, and you’re going to see some of that influence when The Fractured Nations starts to happen next year.

Hex crawling and wilderness exploration was a late addition to A Dungeon Game, and those procedures only exist because I wanted to write The Fractured Nations. And A Field In England is, in a lot of ways, the perfect example of what I think hex exploration should look like (though on a smaller scale). The geography itself is largely mundane, but it’s filled with relics from a forgotten past, weird flora, and - crucially - strange people doing strange things who exist against a much larger and richer history that makes itself felt in everything that happens despite largely only being alluded to. The world feels rich and alive with only a minimum of detail. That’s magic.