I've been running Grizzled Adventurers for RPG sessions where I didn't have the time to do the sometimes hours-long prep needed to run other games.

I was already familiar with the wonderful Beyond the Wall and picked this up as a tongue-in-cheek look at the other end of the heroic journey.

While Beyond the Wall and Through Sunken Lands use playbooks allowing players to pick an archetype and then weave their characters together into a cohesive group, Grizzled Adventurers deconstructs Flatland Games' design a bit, making class just one more roll in the process. Almost everyone uses a single playbook that focuses on the characters' past together and the things the characters might be squabbling about, decades after they happen. (I allow my players to pick their class, as randomly determining it both sets up some parties for failure and sometimes sticks players with characters they won't enjoy.) You probably want at least three player characters to be created at a time, to get maximum value out of the tables.

Latecomers, who are rolled up seperately, have a seperate, even more simplified playbook. They also look like they might end up with higher stats, which is interesting. Maybe that's meant as a tradeoff for not having the fun of creating a character with the rest of the players.

Physical stats are much lower than they end up being in the other two games, which is supposed to represent missing fingers, bad shoulders, lost eyes and the like. None of my players have minded, but there's always a moment of shock when one realizes they're playing a warrior with a 7 Strength. (Stats in all of these games will be familiar to anyone who's played any edition of Dungeons & Dragons over the decades.)

Like the other two games, Grizzled Adventurers is a mix of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (saving throws versus type, a mix of rolling high and rolling low) and third edition (a single unified rolling system, a light skill system). I found play to be fast, only slowed by remembering which rolls were high and which rolls were low.

Where the game really shines is in its dungeon creation. The DM asks questions throughout the character creation process (which is unfortunately not represented on the character hand-outs, which would facilitate the questions being asked and players remembering their character developing answers), which are then used to help inspire the evening's dungeon.

A bunch of small Dyson Logos maps are provided in the book and a pair of treasures (one the MacGuffin driving the adventure, one a surprise) are randomly determined, along with two traps and then the DM picks two enemy types for the dungeons and selects encounters from each to drop in. In practice, the process has taken less than five minutes and has meant some very flavorful and satisfying dungeon adventures. This is aided by the monsters having a nice dose of creativity injected into what could otherwise be stale standard dungeon monsters. Swarms of goblins and skeletons turn standard monster fights into something much more visceral and scary and the demons and summoned creatures present in some dungeons are likewise creative (whoever came up with the rolling ball of claws demon needs to make a horror game).

I supplemented the tables in the book with online name generators for magic swords, dungeon names and necromancer names, and tossed various appropriate nouns into Google Translate to come up with creepy gods and goddesses for the characters to encounter shrines to underground.

The sessions I've run have taken less than three hours to resolve, including character creation at the beginning. We haven't yet run one of the optional return home epilogues from Travels and Travails, but that's planned for next time. I can also see a need, eventually, for the promised dungeon design guide to give us more options, but this is already a great game to have on hand for times when you want to play a dungeon crawler but don't have the time or energy to deal with either prepping something heavy or running something heavier.

This is not meant to be the one fantasy RPG to rule them all. It's designed for a small handful of adventure types -- dungeon crawls and overland travel to and from dungeon crawls -- but is excellent at those. (I could also see a supplement on running tavern brawls, which seems like it'd be very fitting for these characters.) But it would also work well with any OSR adventure or setting, if one wanted to do so. I plan on running my grizzled adventurers through the Dungeon of 1,000 Swords next time everyone is together and will likely be using the Monster Overhaul as my monster book for Grizzled Adventurers when I'm looking for critters beyond what this game offers. (If there was ever a crew that should have to deal with a grue, it's the Grizzled Adventurers.)

An enthusiastic A+ of a game.