Tabletop Tuesday: Date Night Dungeons – Wight Wedding by Urban Realms

Hey all, Sam (and David) here today.

All right. We are finally at our first tabletop focused post on the blog, and considering that Valentine’s Day is in a week, we might as well focus on a new 3rd Party Content Release…especially since it is particularly focused on couples and romance, so perfect for right now.

As a disclaimer or whatever, we are not sponsored for this post or anything. I backed this project when it was up on Kickstarter, and as soon as we got our PDF download as a reward, we got it printed and then sat down over a weekend and played through the adventure. We will obviously be giving our honest review of the product.

First up is an image of the adventure’s cover, and then a photo we put together when we sat down at the table to run it. Other gaming accessories used in that second photo might be discussed in future Tabletop Tuesday posts. Because obviously there is so much that can be discussed when it comes to tabletop games, and we’re excited to talk about them.

Make Date Night an Adventure
Welcome to Wight Wedding, the second in Urban Realms’ series of Date Night Dungeons. This color version of the book for 5th Edition has the tokens and 10 maps in the back in color. Take them out and use them during play for some extra pizazz. This is the first module where the players have two class options.

My husband, Tom, and I have been playing role-playing games together for twenty years. We get together with friends around a table and enjoy a slice of fantasy and adventure. But in all those years we’ve never come across games specifically made for couples to play together. We wanted something where we could enjoy a little romance and fall in love all over again, so we created Date Night Dungeons.

The Big Idea
The idea is that each partner is both GM and player, and the story unfolds for both as the adventure moves forward. To that end, we’ve divided the module into four scenarios. Each scenario challenges the characters with at least one conflict, a mystery, and deepens the romance with role playing. Players are encouraged (but not required) to trade off GM duties each scenario, and to not read past the current scenario in the book in order to avoid spoilers. That way both partners get to be players and the mystery lasts until the final chapter.

This is a fleshed-out RPG module that is 5th Edition compatible and complete with locations, maps, backstories, character sheets, NPCs, and baddies.

Bring on the Romance
To facilitate the romance, we’ve also added a few extras, like Attraction Points, Turn-ons, and Pet Peeves. These keep your mind focused on the romance as our characters battle villains and solve mysteries. There are romance roll throughout. It’s the dice, though, that decide if our characters fall for each other or can’t wait to get rid of each other. Then again, isn’t love always a roll of the dice?

The Story
Your best friends, Bjorn and Estrid have been forbidden to wed. Against their families’ wishes they plan to be married in secret before Bjorn takes ship to earn his fortune as a Viking. But dark and sinister forces have arrayed against them. Only you can save the love birds and see them united forever. And, just maybe, you’ll find your own true love along the way – dice willing.

So light some candles, set the mood, and let the adventure begin.

Our Thoughts

Sam’s Rating: 4.5 stars

David’s Rating: 4 stars

Overall, I think we both can say that we love the concepts of these Date Night Dungeons. The idea that you can run a two person adventure–either all in one day or spread out of the course of up to like four days–is pretty awesome. And the fact that what technically matters most is the romance of the story instead of really trying to focus on the rules…well, that takes some of the “stress” out of session prep, right?

We can also say that it’s pretty cool that they offer these adventures for 5e, Pathfinder, and 3.5, although since Pathfinder has been on 2e for several years now, I wonder if they will stick with the original or if they’ll eventually offer both editions. Speaking of, we’ve just started really delving into learning more about Pathfinder 2e (even though we’ve owned the Core Rulebook since it was first released) and honestly, I’m pretty impressed by it…although that will probably be its own Tabletop Tuesday post.

We received the 5e edition for Wight Wedding, and like with Rescue of the Blackthorne Clan before it, there are a couple things missing with the characters, namely things revolved around character racial benefits and background, so the characters are missing out on some skills and features. But honestly, that’s fine with us…because we don’t actually use the pregenerated stats or character sheets anyway. It is our personal gaming preference to create more epic heroes for our adventures. Now look, there is nothing wrong with how the characters are built for these. And with Wight Wedding you even get to choose between two builds for your character (Bard or Wizard for Storm, and Fighter or Rogue for Ulf). And the options they give you are all the most basic options, the ones that are covered by the OGL. But again, it is our personal preference to have epic heroes for adventures, and there are so many other class archetypes available.

So we reroll our characters, getting new stats, and then choosing our backgrounds. We keep the class and items given by the Date Night Dungeon, but we might change the class’s archetype. And we know that having more powerful heroes means we might have to make adjustments when it comes to the combat scenarios of the adventure, but we’re both experienced DMs, so we can handle it.

What was super fun for us with this adventure is that with the previous one (Rescue of the Blackthorne Clan) the characters we built and played were a little more shy about their romantic yearnings. Storm and Ulf were a bit more bold about things, although yes, they did get a little help from their NPC companions, and the way we played Storm and Ulf made it clear they were a little shy about admitting that there was more to their attraction than just physical desires.

And okay, Date Night Dungeons adds in this cool gameplay mechanic called Attraction Points. Based on Turn Ons and Turn Offs you select before beginning the adventure, you can gain or lose points based on some skill checks, attack or damage rolls, or actions to help or distract and all that. There’s even rules for redeeming in game points to do out of game actions like hand holding or kissing or whatever. But look, we’re in it for the story and the romance, so while we tally up points earned or lost, we don’t worry about cashing them in to do other things. Focusing too much on the points means we’re not as focused on the story. But we like that the mechanic exists for gameplay.

We also like that when they create the characters and write about them throughout the adventure they do it in a gender neutral way, which most of the time means just always using the character’s name instead of using any pronouns. This means that both characters could be male, both could be female, they could be non-binary, or one male one female…whatever. It’s your game. Play it your way.

Plus, Wight Wedding is based on Norse mythology and Viking history, which is pretty cool. And so much information is included in this adventure, about Norse drinking games and weddings and other sorts of historical and cultural details, which was pretty awesome.

Urban Realms really stepped up their game with this one. A couple of the encounters were pretty tough…and like I said, we completely remade our characters and they were much stronger…and we ended up not really making adjustments to the baddies in the encounters either. But overall the adventure was pretty solid. There was opportunity to show off in combat and to problem solve while traveling, as well as to have the characters interact and bond on the road.

About the biggest complaint we had was that the bad guys in this story were basically repeats of the bad guys from the first Date Night Dungeon. I mean, that type of ringleader baddie made sense for the story and where the encounters were set up and everything, but we were hoping to have a different type of baddie. So, it was still good, but also ended up feeling a tiny bit repetitive.

Still, we enjoyed ourselves. We bought a bottle of mead to enjoy together while we worked through the adventure. I made up a simple roast and veggies in the crock pot for us to eat while we played. We lit a candle and dimmed the lights slightly, and we turned on a Viking themed instrumental playlist as background music. It basically just added to the atmosphere, which was cool. And this time we didn’t spend the whole day running the adventure; we split it up over two evenings, and that was nice.

We had a nice time with this, and if you’re looking for something to do with your partner for Valentine’s Day, or just in general for a date night or romantic weekend experience, this might be the thing for you. All you really need is scissors, pencils, and your imaginations. Each adventure has handouts included that give you tokens for the characters and NPCs and baddies, as well as the battle maps and such. For that reason, I actually recommend the Color Editions of the adventure.

But we can say that the prep work for each encounter can take a little bit of time, as you have to cut out the maps and the tokens and everything. So just keep that in mind before you play. And it is designed for you to only look at one scenario of the adventure at a time, so as to not spoil yourself by reading too far ahead. You can have just one of the two of you DM the whole thing, or you can alternate back and forth, changing with each scenario. That is the method we both do, because we are both long time players and DMs, but if you’re a TTRPGer and your partner isn’t, then one person can run the whole thing and it’s still fine.

Yes, we decided to use terrain pieces we had and built up a couple of the encounter maps, which added time to set up, but was fun for us. And actually we went really crazy and designed character miniatures on HeroForge first. David printed them out with his 3D printers, and we were able to use actual miniatures instead of the paper tokens. Of course, you absolutely do not have to do that. We just get really into what we’re doing, and like going a little overboard sometimes. We’ll post screenshots of the minis we designed on our social media accounts, so you can see those (@SamRushingBooks and @freestateofgeek on Instagram, or Free State of Geek on Facebook).

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If you want to pick up your own Date Night Dungeons (For 5e, Pathfinder, or 3.5 editions), you can visit the Urban Realms site or you can also find the adventures on Amazon. If you get the digital version now, you can definitely play it for Valentine’s Day.

Thank you so much for stopping by, and we’ll be back soon with more geeky content.