Deadly Missions is a 'print & play' Dungeon Crawler. Does the world need another Dungeon Crawler? Yes, certainly and here's why...

If you look at the Grey Matter Games section on DrivethruRPG you'll see that Deadly Missions has been consistently improved and expanded upon over quite a few years. This means that if you like it's basic premise you can slowly turn it into one mighty big game chock full of monsters, villains, heroes and artifacts that will give it almost infinite replay-ability.

The aim of the game is to gather 4-6 heroes with varying skill sets and pit them against a villain or boss monster in a dungeon of randomised tiles. Monsters appear ranked from 1st level goons up to 3rd level bad asses. The combat rules are simple but effective and doors and difficult types of terrain are covered well. I particularly like the fact that rear attacks are in the rules. The popular Dungeons and Dragons board games don't actually have have this seemingly essential tactic! You can even run out of arrows for your bow. Then you have to hope you can find some more on a dead Goblin. Yikes! Heroes and villains have access to any of the 48 abilities in the rules. As you can imagine this makes for a very interesting selection of characters. I like to randomise the characters I play and find the best way that the group can work together.

The 2nd edition of Deadly Missions is a great improvement over the first both in terms of the art and graphics and also the rules. All of the character art for the standees and cards is produced by the author and this is what really makes Deadly Missions so unique to me. David Wears has a great cartoon style of art that blends very well with his vision of pure unabashed fantasy. I particularly like all the anthropomorphic heroes.

Deadly Missions is really a sandbox game. Suggestions are made for three adventures. 1, defeat the main villain. 2, rescue the prisoner and 3, find the summoning circle and defeat the boss monster. That's it really. Yet, if you look at the tiles that come with the game (or even better the expansion Fantasy Quest 3 or indeed any of the many tile sets available online) See Lord Zsezse Works!) then you can let your imagination soar and come up with adventure ideas only limited by your imagination. The rules are light and flexible enough to accommodate any ideas you have.

So yes. I believe Deadly Missions is essential if you love Dungeon Crawling and are prepared to print and create your own game. Huge fun!