The dungeon crawl is the heart and soul of the classic role playing game. Few things are more mentally satisfying than methodically working your way through a big maze, clearing out lots of monsters, and contending with the occasional devilish trap/puzzle. That's why Dungeon Master ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeon_Master_(computer_game) ) was one of the most pwn video games ever. I've spent hours playing that game on a DOS emulator with 80s pop blaring in the background just working my way through mazes and checking all the doors.

The thing is, why must we only have dungeon crawls in medieval fantasy settings? Why not have them in modern settings? If you think about it, a typical "dungeon" is a collection of rooms and cooridoors. So instead of charging into each room and beating things down with a sword, why couldn't we imagine an abstract scenario where a theoretical SWAT team clears an endless progression of more rooms and cooridoors filled with modernistic theoretical hostiles?

Imagine the following scenario. The player characters are members of a South African mercenary company circa 1985. They somehow learn about a hidden cave system off the coast of New Guinea where a certain group of pirates who normally raid shipping vessels store their plunder, so as to keep it out of bank accounts which might theoretically be frozen. They decide that given the huge potential payoff that they're going to grab their equipment and storm and capture the cave system in order to take all the money. Their enemies are pirates with various firearms who are guarding the cave system, and maybe certain defensive fortifications within the cave system, and some booby traps. That would be very much like a dungeon crawl, but it would be set in modern times. You could even make the gameplay more "realistic" if your game system allowed for the use of things like flashbangs, smoke grenades, tactics, and so forth.

I'm beginning to feel like maybe something I should do as a hobby of sorts is try and work out a "modern day" firefight engine that I feel is satisfactory. Then maybe I could write up some modern day dungeon crawls.

In my opinion, DNA/DOA and Renraku Arcology: Shutdown are both pretty decent examples of dungeon crawls in Shadowrun.

If you're looking for a P&P experience, I'd imagine d20 Modern, especially... whatsitsname, Urban Arcana I think, would deliver. From what I've seen, that's basically a D6D style monster-hunt with guns. And it even runs on the same devilish engine as everyone's favourite (now obsolete) dungeon crawler.

If you're thinking about a PC game... weren't you working on a 80's mod for Jagged Alliance? Well, there you go!

Its really easy to do in shadowrun too. Clearing out a nest of ghouls in the tunnels in shattergraves is a dungeon crawl.

Go for it!

And for a special treat - send the team on an astral quest and have the runners clean out some fantasy dungeon with their modern weapons.

Play Warhammer 40.000: Dark Heresy. Hunt heretics in hive cities and space hulks. If needed, substitute heretics with Chaos Space Marines, Tyranid Genestealers, Necron Warriors, Dark Eldar Wych Gladiators, and Ork Boyz.

And yeah, Urban Arcana had everything pulp-fiction-goshy what you wanted for. If you want less elves and magick, and real-world older settings, but not the medieval times, I would recommend D20 Old, where you fight Nazis and Commies in a race for the golden chalice in a mezo-american temple hidden deep into the jungle. If you like Space Ship Exploration and kill Space Bugs, D20 Futre might also work.

Base something on the movie Aliens and sub in bugs for the aliens.

There are many scenarios that can be based on crawling a hive. Say a corp has lost contact with a remote, high value, complex in a jungle, or on an island. The team that goes is isolated and must rely on their wits to get out alive. Have them find the complex seemingly deserted, but give them some clues to draw them in deeper and deeper until they find the truth. Hit them with an assault that leaves them reeling, but allows them to survive and regroup. Make sure they run low on ammo, and have to scrounge along the way. Destroy their transport and force them to find transport of some kind in the facility. Basically, grab some of the good ideas from the movie.

You know, I was thinking about this the other night. All the "mundane" monsters like orcs or bugbears would probably get pwnt by the firearms. But as soon as something shows up that requires +1 weapons to hit, the runner team is screwed unless they have someone who can cast spells, or someone with a weapon focus.

The only real problem you have is that combats in modern games tend to be unrealistic, drag on and on, or both. Combats with large numbers of participants are pretty frustrating to run in any edition of Shadowrun and firearm violence of any kind is astoundingly unsatisfying in D20 Modern of any flavor.

The creation of a table-top role playing engine which would allow you to run around an office building with an assault rifle playing XCOM, Aliens, Condemned, Resident Evil, Star Wars, or whatever is something of an RPG holy grail. Once that's been done, the number of modern era dungeon crawls that one could use are beyond count. Basic and obvious plotlines include:

• Zombie Apocalypse / Survival Horror.
• Alien Invaders / Bug Hunt.
• Asymmetric Threat / Law Enforcement
• Urban Warfare / Military Take and Hold

And so on and so on. The supernatural can be included or not, you just have to have a game system in which you can have your characters sneak and run through a couple of square blocks filled with an unknown number of sneaky hostiles and fire off a few hundred rounds of bullets in a constant level of storytelling abstraction without taking all fucking night to do it.

Whether the setting is Mech Warrior or the Sino-Vietnamese War or Men in Black or whatever, you just need a game system that handles sneaking, booby traps, melee combat, and assault rifles without bogging down or resorting to handwaving. Closest thing I know that does all that is Feng Shui, and it's definitely a bit over the top for what you want.

-Frank

One thing about the classic fantasy dungeon is that the vast majority of them are apparently designed by madmen. It's like there are no sane architects in fantasy settings. Natural caverns have an excuse (even if they are geologically improbable), but temples, castles, towers, and other facilities which were designed for practical every-day use shouldn't be maze-like or death-trappy.

Depends if aforementioned temple, castle, tower or facility has been recently raided by small critters who trap the normal pathways that normal-sized folks use, while the little blighters use other pathways like small tunnels and such.

It's a very amusing thought. Imagine if the hallways of a typical office building were filled with deathtraps to keep burglars out but during the day 1 out of every 100 trips down the hall resulted in an accidental death.

Now there's an idea. Print out a shitton of office floor-plans, grab some minis, a Savage Worlds rulebook + your copy of Amber Castle and then run a crawl through the Nakatomi Plaza.
With Insta-Death-traps.

No more screwed than shadowrunners are when faced with a critter with immunity to normal weapons. In D&D as "need to have a +1 to hit" means "or the first X damage of your attack do not count" these days.

Or to put it another way - if you can handle spirits, you can handle fantasy monsters with "DR 10/magic".

Based on the table top version, I present to you Aliens: The Boardgame... done in Flash (warning: takes a bit to load but pretty badass). I don't see why the original A:TBG system couldn't be adapted to a P&P RPG. From what I understand it had fairly simple mechanics. Fire pulse rifle! Roll to see if you get sprayed with acid! Next player! Use flamethrower! No acid! Next player!