Playing Four Against Darkness

Father's Day this weekend was super chill, and my wife and kids bought me some really cool Father's Day presents, one of which was a game that I've been wanting to buy and play for quite some time: Four Against Darkness.

If you're at all into solo ttrpgs, this is likely a game you've heard of! It's got something like 50+ expansions, adventures, and rules updates from a wide variety of authors, but it all started here, with this original 77-page booklet.

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4AD (As it is commonly abbreviated) is an old-school-inspired Dungeon Crawler. It's got fairly simple and intuitive rules that make soloing with 4 players quite easy (or, running a coop/group game just as fun and easy).

This edition takes your characters from level 1 to level 5, but future expansions let you level your characters right up to level 20 (similar to classic D&D).

I also got a new A5 six-ring notebook along with 4AD (and a cool Plague Doctor plushy who will be my adventuring mascot), so I decided to put both to use and whip up a set of characters for my first adventure.

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There are 8 classes in the core rules: Warrior, Rogue, Cleric, Wizard, Dwarf, Elf, Barbarian, and Halfling. I opted to try my luck with a group of the first four classes and whipped them up fairly quickly. It took maybe 20 minutes or so as I wanted to have a separate sheet for each, and I wanted to make sure I was getting my details correct for each class.

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With characters built, it was time to roll up an entrance and then roll a d66 for the next room type. The dungeon creation in this is very similar to my playthroughs of 2d6 Dungeon - you find the shape of your room, reference a roll table for possible contents, and then deal with whatever shows up. It's all very streamlined, and I really enjoy the experience.

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In this first run, which I played for about 2.5 hours, I explored north into a corridor, found a fountain in R2, an empty room in R3, and a minotaur in R4. After dispatching the minotaur, I thought it might be time to backtrack to the entrance and try one of the other doors to see what else I might find - which is where I ran into a Wandering Monster in R2. A giant spider, that promptly attacked the last person in my marching order - my weak mage with 3 life - and proceeded to ignore everyone else in the party as it went for him again and again.

Unsurprisingly, this was where my first death happened. Garth, the human wizard, was bitten twice and succumbed to the spider's venom before the rest of the party killed it.

At that point, my kids were up from naps and it was time to call my session to a close. I don't know if I should keep pressing on with the three characters I still have left (two of which are level 2 now thanks to the Minotaur and Giant Spider each counting as Boss Monsters). I am tempted to see how far they might go even if they're down one member of the team.

With that said though, I wanted to talk a bit more about what I thought about the game itself. There are a few things that this (at least, with the core book alone) doesn't do for you and one big one is that it doesn't give you any reasons to be doing what you're doing.

You're simply a team of adventurers going into a random dungeon, and hoping to come out alive. And if that's all you want from the game - fantastic! They do offer rules where you can say "I'm going to play for 45 minutes, and then no matter how far I've gotten the next room I open will be the Final Boss of the dungeon, and at that point, I'm done". And that's a totally valid way to play. I think doing it that way would lend itself well to a sort of 'monster of the week' dungeon dive where you're just diving in to have some quick fun.

I wanted a little more though, and so I turned to one of my very favourite supplements: Perplexing Ruins' 'Solo Gaming Sheets'. I cannot recommend these highly enough. Honestly, I use these for everything. They're close to, if not surpassing, the number of times I reference Ironsworn or Ironsworn: Starforged.

One of the really cool features of these compact sheets is a simple d6 roll table for Quests:
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Because I like having a goal, I rolled on this and got 'Steal, Capture' and rolled again for 'Document'. This provides a fun little bit of narrative direction. My team is in this dungeon not just to clear it of monsters or look for treasure, but to recover a lost document. What kind of document? Who knows! I can make that up as I go because I've given myself a constraint which I can flex my imagination against. Perhaps it is a lost deed to a location that a noble needs to prove their ownership... perhaps it's a clue to a magic item's whereabouts. It could be anything, or, it could simply be a document that my characters never need to know the contents of. Like the briefcase in Pulp Fiction, what's inside might not matter at all.

Either way, this gives me a reason to push my characters to an ending, and might even give me reason to re-use these characters until they cap out at level 5.

Overall, I really enjoyed my time playing 4AD, it's simple and fun, and I can see it becoming something I leverage outside of just the 4AD rules... or, something I pull other content into to expand it before I go wild and buy more books. Thanks to its OSR roots, it's not very hard to convert and import monsters to this game if I do run out of unique creatures to battle.

This actually brings me to my only complaint - if you could even call it a complaint.

There aren't many unique creatures to fight. I can see that within a dozen playthroughs, I'll likely have encountered everything this core book offers. We get a d6 table of Vermin, a d6 table of Minions, a d6 table of Bosses, and then a d6 table of Weird Monsters. As an example, I'll reference the Minions table here:

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This is a decent smattering of creatures, don't get me wrong, and for the size of the book it's got enough that you'll be able to play a number of sessions without feeling like you've already seen everything there is to offer... but with 4 tables of 6 creatures, you could cap out pretty quickly and find yourself wishing for additional enemies. Which I guess is how they managed to get 50+ supplemental books created since 2017 when it was originally published.

So, like I said, a minor complaint if you can even call it such.

If you enjoy dungeon-crawling, monster fighting, and solo or coop gaming... I very highly recommend this rule set! I don't think you need to even consider buying all of the extra books, you could get a lot of use out of just this first one. I've seen several recommendations for about 3-4 extra books that are often brought up that will help you increase max levels, provide some content for wilderness and cities, etc.

Anyhow, with all of that said... I had a lot of fun with this and I fully expect it to become part of my regular solo ttrpg rotation!

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