The meta concept of an "adventuring society" has not gone unnoticed in the realms of parody and satire. The Red Dragon Inn focuses on the inns and taverns where dungeon-delvers gather and their drunken hijinks, Recettear focuses on the life of an item shop owner digging her way out of debt, and the sample game in RPG Maker detailed the life of a monster goblin who sought to become a proper Boss.
Dungeon Bastards is a rules-lite table-top RPG which follows a similar path. The focus of the game is on a group of sociopathic and probably inebriated adventurers back in town and up to no good. It emphasizes poorly thought out shenanigans and belligerent conflicts. Think of the Rat Queens comic and you're probably close to the mark.
The writing style is intentionally vulgar in imitation of the play style. There are quite a few products which are written this way in an attempt to be edgy, most notably more than a few in-character White Wolf stories and such. I feel that its success can vary wildly depending on the reader: it's done more for humor's sake as opposed for a "shit sucks" grimdark narrative, although in this case I feel that it works in that the PCs are intended to be macho adventurers with more bark than brains, so the text comes off as how they'd actually talk in-game.
Dungeon Bastards uses six-sided dice for its resolution system. There are Moves in the game which trigger depending on the enfolding scenarios (sort of like Apocalypse World system) and you roll a number of dice depending on your Stats and relevant Skills (which add two extra dice when they come into play). Every 5 on a die counts as one success, every 6 two successes. Competitive Moves have people subtract their successes from their opponents before resolving it, while passive Moves require 1 to 4 successes depending on their difficulty. There are four Stats and are relatively all-encompassing, including Brains, Fists, Guts, and Mouth, and correspond to the abilities you imagine them to.
Be it fighting, getting high, bullshitting someone, or even getting hurt, the Basic Moves are more or less universal for the scenarios for this type of game and provide a good format for expanding beyond. When you gain successes, you can spend them as points to gain additional benefits in narrating the scene. For example, a success for "Ain't You Tough Shit?" for Fists might allow the winner to gain a useful piece of information from intimidation, killing their opponent, or impressing the audience watching the brawl. More successes allow for more narrative benefits being accessible to the character.T
he resolution system is quite simple, with no real variance and a reliance on narrating things out instead of setting benchmarks. The final parts of the book detail character creation, some GM advice, and a d66 table of adventure plots with a humorous twist ("A Lich is hosting a haunted pool party. You fuckers were dumb enough to show up").
Although not as detailed as more typical fantasy RPGs, Dungeon Bastards is amusing in parts and serves its purpose well for the murderhobo kind of game it facilitates.
You can get it for $2.50 on Drive-Thru RPG or RPGNow, published by Friendly Neighborhood Gamer.
