True Dungeon recently announced a massive expansion to the the live-action D&D-style adventure that it has run at Gen Con for the past nine years. To celebrate its tenth year, the wildly popular event is moving from its old home in a 20,000-square-foot ballroom in the Marriott to the 45,000-square-foot Exhibit Hall D in the Indiana Convention Center.
In a True Dungeon event, each player takes on a traditional RPG role — fighter, wizard, rogue, etc. — and a game master escorts the party through a series of rooms constructed inside in a large hall. You get a limited amount of time to solve the puzzle or defeat the monster in each room, and then you move on to the next. Puzzles can involve physical trials or tests of dexterity, while combat runs on a modified shuffleboard table onto which you slide pucks based on your class and weapon. You can also use collectible tokens that represent weapons, magic items, and so on, to tip things in your favor. An entire game takes two hours and fifteen minutes.
Tickets for this year’s events go on sale on this Sunday, May 20. To grab one, you’ll need to have at least a one-day badge for Gen Con as well. There are about 6,000 tickets available at $38 each, and they often sell out fast.
There are three new adventures for this year, plus a new Storyscape staging area that features concessions and a cash bar. While inside the Storyscape, you can also try out a new series of mini-games called Truecraft. This costs $12 for eight tokens you can use to play the three games and — if you’re good — win prizes to help you in your adventures.
My eldest son Marty and I played in a VIP True Dungeon session at last year’s Gen Con, along with a killer lineup of geeks, including Monte Cook, Colin McComb, Ray Vallese, Eric Harshbarger, and Wired’s own puzzle master, Mike Selinker. Even with such an illustrious group of gamers by our side, we got slaughtered by a red dragon in the end, but we had a ball every minute.
Disclaimer: I’ve known Jeff Martin, the creator of True Dungeon, for years, and he comped our tickets for last summer’s event.
