I am very much anticipating both the revised core DT set and the Dust Warfare book. However, I’ve had an idea in my head that I’ve been knocking around for a month or two. I think it would be fun to go in the opposite direction and create a mod for DT to do an infantry only dungeon crawl something along the lines of Incursion from Grindhouse games, played out on a small scale grid.

My thought is that most of the rules would transfer directly with only a few tweaks here and there. So far I’ve only taken it to the brainstorming stage, but am ready to start working things out and testing. I’d like to bounce it off of the community and see if anyone has worked in this direction too, and/or if you can see any obvious holes in my plan.

OK, here’s my plan as far as I’ve gotten. Start with the revised core set and make the following changes:

1. Minis – Infantry only. No heroes or vehicles.

2. Points – To keep from having to try to reverse engineer the costs of individual figures, you’d have to buy whole squads, but each figure in the squad would act as an independent unit. I could see working out figure points individually, but that would take a ton of testing and balancing.

3. Stats – Most of the stats would stay the same, but be broken down by figure. So each figure would have its own card with one point of health and only the weapons that it carries. Because you wouldn’t need the weapon stats for, you could also make the cards standard game size. Both movement and range would have to change, I’m not sure to what, but my gut says 1:3 (so a squad with a movement rate of 1 would be able to move 3 squares).

4. Game Board – I plan to use a set of game tiles from other games until I could design and print my own. I think any system with a 40mm or greater grid would work, roughly 3' square with plenty of walls and corridors. In my collection, I’ve got boards from Incursion, Space hulk and a few Horrorclix/Heroclix maps that could work. I think the Tannhauser boards might do, but I find the pathfinder system kind of wonky. As far as terrain, it should probably stick to circle terrain and blocking terrain until things get worked out.

5. Doors – No dungeon crawl would be fun without doors. Doors could be opened closed or destroyed. They should have the same stats as ammo crates. Opening or closing doors would count as one of a figures two actions.

6. Skills – You’d probably have to go through each one and make sure it works or tweak as necessary. As an example, should "fast" remain 1 square, or be increased by the 1:3 ration as a unit’s move? Again I think this is where playtesting would be sorely needed.

7. Missions – I think the standard, kill’em all would be a good place to start, but other more complicated missions like getting one of your units to a certain point on the board would only come after settling what game board or tiles to use.

Another thought I had was to go with more of a classic space hulk model and make a couple of heavy infantry go up against a hoard of light infantry. Anyhow, that’s what I came up with so far. Any thoughts or comments would be welcome.

Sounds like a cool idea, I'd have the heroes in though as what is a dungeion crawl without heroes to lead them? Just give them the normal cover save. Buying a standard unit actually makes sense really. One scenario you could play would be from The Bunker film. Investigating a reserch bunker and getting jumped by Zombies. For scale I'd just go for range 1 = 3 squares and just apply to everything, you probably don't have to mod the basic rules further. Providing you can keep track of what model has moved you wouldn't even need to make individual cards, but would be cool if you did, it's the sort of time-wasting projects I do LOL, pics of individual models and named, weapon stats and rules - would look good.

I have a bunch of the "Legions of Steel" tiles and have been thinking of something similar. Not thought it out as far you did, I'll give it a try soon.

Henry

If you want more territory covered faster, you could go with 1:6, as that's apparently where DUST Warfare is going, but 1:3 would be better for the scale you're talking about. Slowed slightly from open field because of the congested conditions, perhaps.

I'd also say to allow heroes, though you could add additional stipulations, either on the total number, or a normal limit of one per squad. Of course, going with a hero only option would allow for some interesting scenarios. The Magnificent Seven of DUST, or something like that.

Doors could be interesting, as you can vary them. A light, interior door could be Armor 2 with 2 hits, an exterior door like a crate or slightly heavier, and a bulkhead like an anti-tank trap.

Skills could either be kept working only for the individuals that have them, you could add a range of effect equal to one square, or use the standard assigned together mechanic. It would be a little more book keeping, but that would mean the points characters pay to allow the use of them with squads would be offset. The simplest for point values would be to buy the heroes and squads just like in DUST, even if the squad can separate.

As another thought, going with your 3:1 range shift; allow close combat for adjacent models (ie: range up to 3 spaces), with grenades being able to attack without shifting, but knives having the model shift up to two spaces to an adjacent space on the target. As it is still occuring 'adjacent' based on the DUST spaces, it wouldn't count as movement, but it would differentiate between a knife attack and a grenade attack.

It would mean a grenade attack could be an unanswered close combat attack, or you could allow an unengaged model to reactively shift next to the grenade thrower, but it would make more sense than using grenades right next to your model every time.

Perhaps more complicated than you were looking for, but it wouldn't be too hard to deal with.