Why Pay to Play?™

Complete content Copyright © 2007-2011, Steigerwald EDV™ Verlag, all rights reserved. Dungeons Daring™, Vintyri™ and Steigerwald EDV™ are trademarks of Steigerwald EDV Verlag. LINUX® is a registered trademark of the Linux Mark Institute. Dungeons & Dragons®, D&D®, d20® and Forgotten Realms® are registered trademarks of Wizards of the Coast® Inc.

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Current: July 10, 2011

About Dungeons Daring:

After two years of input from game masters and players running Dungeons Daring adventures, we've released the 2^nd Edition of our free game, incorporating most of the ideas suggested by users. To skip ahead and find out what's new, click here!

Dungeons Daring is a new fantasy roleplaying game that has been released as a free, open source gaming product much in the same sense that LINUX® is a free, open computer operating system. Although some people later may be licensed to print versions of Dungeon Daring, the official guidelines and companion products will continue to be available for free downloading in PDF form at this website and perhaps at other websites as well. In other words, you may be able to buy Dungeons Daring, if you wish to do so, but you never will have to pay for it.

This describes a part of what Dungeons Daring is. To keep things clear, let us look first at what Dungeons Daring isn't:

· Dungeons Daring is not a Dungeons-and-Dragons®-lookalike. It is a different game from D&D®.

· Dungeons Daring is not a d20® product, although it does use some open game content from the d20 Standard Reference Document.

So, what is Dungeons Daring? It is a fantasy roleplaying game that has the following goals:

· To be relatively simple to learn and play.

· To strongly emphasize roleplaying rather than detailed and complex rules structures. Common dice-generated abilities like Intelligence, Wisdom, Comeliness and Charisma are left totally to role-playing in Dungeons Daring. Instead, abilities such as Magical Aptitude, Mechanical Aptitude and Knowledge are measured.

· To focus upon the story and role-playing elements of the adventure rather than being targeted toward hack-and-slash adventuring or an RPG style that focuses upon strategies and rules.

· To be a player-character-driven game rather than one that is forced along its path by deities and high-powered non-player characters. Gods are regional powers in Dungeons Daring, and their Clerics tend to be Non-Player Characters with limited powers.

· To be designed in a manner that allows game masters to modify texts, dungeon plans and maps to suit their own campaign goals. Texts are available in the editable reference document, and all dungeon plans and maps are available in editable form for use with the cartographic program Fractal Mapper 8.

· To provide a free and legal game foundation for game masters and players who wish to publish their own adventures and fantasy RPG inventions.

Each of these points has effects. In the interest of simplicity, Dungeons Daring does not have rules that tell you what happens to your character every time he or she sneezes or moves a foot or 30 cm to the right or the left. In such situations, we leave the matter up to common sense, with the game master having the final word.

Dungeons Daring does not decide whether a person is won over to a certain argument, bluffed, etc. as a result of statistics and dice rolls. These are matters of role-playing in Dungeons Daring. The basic Dungeons Daring ability scores for Strength, Dexterity, Stamina, Magical Aptitude, Mechanical Aptitude and Knowledge are extended through Skills.

What's new in the 2^nd Edition?

These are the main things that changed in Dungeons Daring as a result of user input.

· Character Classes have been eliminated. Dungeons Daring 2E is skill-based. The Skills that a character uses determine which Professions he or she may choose. Professions are the successor to the old Character Classes.

· 2E Characters have a single level, their Character Level. All decisions are based upon Character Level checks and Skill checks, rather than varying checks for each Class.

· 2E changes Dungeons Daring from a 30-Character-Level to a 20-Character-Level system. A number of users who run hybrid Dungeons Daring/d20® campaigns requested this change for compatibility's sake. Most other users told us that they found the high (21-30) levels uninteresting.

· Despite these changes, spellcasters who live long enough still can advance to the use of Absolute Magic.

· The system of standard magic and the definitions of most magic-using Professions have been improved.

· The system for Absolute Magic has been revised completely.

· The definitions of draugs (undead) has been expanded.

· Character creation has been simplified substantially. New, free electronic character sheets help make things even simpler. They are available for OpenOffice.org Calc, Microsoft Excel and the NBOS Campaign Sheet Viewer.

Important points for those playing in current Dungeons Daring 1E campaigns.

· The 1^st Edition books will continue to be available for those who don't want to switch systems in the middle of a campaign as well as those who prefer 1E. However, 1E will not be further developed.

· 1E and 2E are not compatible, but 1E characters can be converted easily to 2E characters.

The Dungeons Daring Books:

The paper part of the Dungeons Daring game consists of one book for players and game masters and two books for game masters only. All three books are available for free download as bookmarked PDF files:

· Players Guide. This volume has all the information that players need to construction their characters and that game masters need to understand the traits and abilities of the characters that their players have constructed.

· Game Masters Guide. This booklet gives game masters all of the information they need to create and run a Dungeons Daring adventure or campaign. It also contains a complete starters' adventure named The Last Mill.

· Creature Guide. This guide contains the definitions and statistics for all the official creatures (i.e. monsters) of the Dungeons Daring game.

The Dungeons Daring maps:

Many game masters use published products as a starting point. They take the published works and modify them, so that their adventures or campaigns fulfill their own goals and desires. The starter adventure The Last Mill in the Game Masters Guide includes a large number of maps, floor plans and dungeon plans. All were made with the commercial cartographic program Fractal Mapper™ 8 from NBOS Software. Game masters who wish to modify these original maps can download them free in FM8 format, which allows full modification. These original maps also have been released under the Open Game License,

The Open Game Content Reference Document:

The complete game system in the three Dungeons Daring corebooks is Open Game Content. However, for those who wish to use it as OGC, the PDF format is somewhat inaccessible. The entire game system also has been released in a completely editable Reference Document available in the OpenOffice.org Writer formats. OpenOffice.org is a Freeware program that can be downloaded at no cost from the Internet. Instructions are in the Dungeon Daring books.

Dungeons Daring Free Trademark License

The Dungeons Daring game system is Open Game Content. However, the Dungeons Daring name trademark and graphical logo trademark are identified as Product Identity and are not available as Open Game Content. This is necessary to:

1. Preserve the meaning of the Dungeons Daring trademarks.

2. To meet requirements of laws in the European Union and the Federal Republic of Germany to prevent the publication of illegal material with our trademarks.

However, those who wish to publish material with the official Dungeons Daring trademarks can do so under the Dungeons Daring Trademark License Agreement. You have the following options:

View the Trademark License Agreement online (HTML): Click here!

Download the Trademark License Agreement (PDF) and

the Trademark License Application in OpenOffice.org and

Microsoft Word formats. Click here!

Jörðgarð™ - Free Open Source Campaign Setting

for Dungeons Daring™

A new game like Dungeons Daring™ can become valuable only after supporting material is available for it, material like campaign settings and adventures. After long deliberation, the creators of Dungeons Daring, the members of the Vintyri™ Project, have decided to drop plans to make their Jörðgarð campaign setting a commercial product. Instead, it will be released as a free, open game product written for the Dungeons Daring™ game.

We also are planning a version for the OGL 3.5 system used by such games as the Pathfinder® RPG from Paizo® Publishing, True20™ from Green Ronin and Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 from Wizards of the Coast® Inc.

So … what does this mean to you?

It means that you not only will have a free RPG in Dungeons Daring but also an open, free and highly detailed campaign setting and adventures (modules) available for it. All of this, of course, underlines the Dungeons Daring slogan: Why pay to play?™

What do we mean by that? We think it's great when people create commercial RPG products, and we intend to support folks who want to do that with the Dungeons Daring game system. But we don't believe that creative people who want to make RPG material should be hampered by license fees, threats of suits over copyright violations or by more restrictions than are necessary to see to it that misrepresentations aren't being made and the law isn't being broken.

With Dungeons Daring, anyone who wants to develop material – free or commercial – is able to do so, and not only for the game system but also for the Jörðgarð campaign setting. For more information, click here.

Help for members of armed forces

We've received inquiries from members of armed forces of various nations who are stationed in foreign lands and who are unable to access our download site. If you fall in this category, please inform us by E-Mail at info@vintyri.org, and we'll try to resolve the problem.