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Dungeonslayers is, as it is advertised, an old fashioned role playing game. As you could guess from the title, old fashioned in the sense of slaying things in a dungeon. At only 20 pages it's quite lightweight, but I appreciate this as it does away with less than useful content and makes for a quick and enjoyable reading experience. The layout is good, although 3 columns isn't ideal for on-screen reading. It seems more suited to printing, given it's black and white. My main complaint with the layout and style is the heading text for each section isn't the best font choice. I'm not sure what it is, but it seems to be the jagged offspring of Impact and Comic Sans MS. That's my reason for giving Dungeonslayers a 4 for style rather than 5.

On to the content, rather than being presented chapter by chapter, it's just one section after another. Reminding me of the beginning of my Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition Player's Handbook, it starts of with character creation instructions. Unlike old fashioned D&D, it's completely point based. You have 3 base attributes over which you distribute 18 points and from that you get 6 sub abilities to which you can add additional points. Subsequent values for combat are derived from a combination of these attributes and abilities. Evidently Dungeonslayers draws its inspiration from more than just one "old fashioned" RPG.

You get to choose from 3 races (Humans, Elves, Dwarves) and 3 classes (Fighter, Scout, Spellcaster - which is further split into Wizard, Black Mage and Healer). The races get some bonuses to attributes and some abilities. Fighter is what you'd expect, a fighter, Scout is a Rogue, Spellcaster is either Mage (Wizard, Black Mage) or Priest (Healer). Spellcasters get to start with one spell, from a page long list in the book, and are limited to those that can be cast at first level. Starting equipment is rather modest, with a default kit everyone gets and 10GP discretionary wealth.

Dungeonslayers is a level based game. XP works as you'd expect, just here you need 50XP to get to level 2, rather than somewhere between 1000 and 4000. Max level is also unsurprisingly 20, although it wouldn't be hard to extrapolate further levels.

Starting at 2nd level (or 1st for Humans), characters can start acquiring talents. They're basically a combination of feats and skills in one. You can buy them multiple times (from 3 to 5 times depending on the talent) and the benefits from them stack. Certain talents require a minimum level in a certain class to get.

The mechanics are fairly straightforward, a roll under d20 system where you try to get under the value that is determined by a combination of your attributes and abilities. Positive modifiers are for easy challenges, negative modifiers for difficult ones. Something unique is that if the total of your attributes and abilities is over 20, you get to make a 2nd roll at whatever the number is, minus 20. Since 1 is an automatic critical success and 20 is an automatic critical failure, the first roll isn't just given to you. It presents something of a mathematical conundrum, in that you go from a 5% chance of critical failure to 10% chance once you hit 21, and the increased chance of critical success doesn't match it at all. I would houserule that critical failure is only possible on the second roll to get around this.

Combat, damage and healing is pretty standard, nothing new here. What is interesting is spell resource management. First, a spellcaster can only have one spell prepared at a time (reminding me of Earthdawn), but can cast it as many times as he wants, allowing for the cooldown period. The cooldown period is how long a spellcaster has to wait before casting a spell again. Some spells have a cooldown of zero, and could be cast repeatedly as much as you want, others have a cooldown of a few rounds, meaning you have to do something in between, and the more powerful spells have a cooldown of one day. I like this system more than Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition's at will, encounter and daily powers. The effect is roughly the same, but Dungeonslayers has a more elegant solution to it. Spell acquisition is either through finding spells, or buying them from a library. Prices go from cheap enough for anyone to get, (10 GP) to very expensive (over 1000GP).

Speaking of price, equipment isn't very expensive, but with the starting 10GP you can barely equip a fighter in decent gear. A longsword or mace costs 7GP, a steel shield costs 8GP, chainmail costs 10GP. With 10GP you can get a wooden shield (1GP), leather bracers & greaves (4GP), and a spear (1GP). Even a hoplite is better equipped, and they're infantry which obviously can't have overly expensive equipment. This makes me think the designers had something different in mind from me, or perhaps it's oldfashioned in the same way Advanced Dungeons & Dragons didn't give Wizards enough money to buy a spellbook, except in this case the Fighter is getting screwed.

The Gamemastering section is again nothing new or revolutionary. It explains XP, gives some basic advice, details some traps and handling random encounters, a few magic items and offers a bestiary. Right off the bat I noticed that the XP for a Fire Dragon was over 1200 while for a Greater Demon it was just over 100. Clearly demons aren't the badasses I expect them to be in an "old fashioned" role playing game. Also of interest is the Rust Slater (can you guess what that is?) and the "Tentacled Brain", which I can't decide if it's supposed to be an Illithid with the serial numbers filed off, a Grell, or something entirely different. The monster stats are roughly as complete as those of the characters, nothing streamlined to just what you need for combat. Of course the character stats are pretty streamlined to start, so this is probably a good thing.

It also comes with a short adventure centred around ridding an inkeeper's cellar of rats, and of course there's more than just rats to be fought. I won't spoil any more, but it's a good enough taste of a dungeon crawl and a good quick run-through of the system.

I like the fact that it's able to pair such a simple system with a light page count, I hardly find anything more annoying than a bloated page count for what should be a rules-light system. And as far as being rules light goes, it's about as light as AD&D with all the rules most people ignored stripped off. Quite convenient in that way. I figure it'd probably be some fun for some quick adventuring, I'm not sure I'd want to get through the level grind though. The task of waiting to get enough talents through leveling would probably get boring quickly, except for the Spellcasters who would be getting new spells. I guess there's a reason that Spellcasters don't retire but continue studying and getting more powerful while Fighters retire when they hit level 10.

I guess this is the archetypal "Beer & Pretzels" game (although I've seen it more as "Pop & Pizza"...), it has a quick startup time, easy monsters, easy combat, some interesting magic conceits and some short adventures. Possibly good for 3-4 nights before moving on to something more fleshed out and involved. For that, it does a very good job.

Also, I've read through a lot of short (and not so short) old school fantasy RPGs, and hardly any of them captured my interest long enough to digest and write a review, let alone actually try playing, so there's definitely something to this (maybe the quality cover helps too), which is why I'm giving it a substance of 4.