Monthly Archives: February 2026

Dungeon Crawl Classics – Forty-fourth Session

Forty-fourth Session – We continue our CQB-filled city fighting as we try to liberate Fythorp from the undead. We get to murder some live people too, as a bonus!

Lady Skeam

We continue to clear the Cider House, which still has poisoner monks in it that decided to serve Lady Skeam rather than skedaddle like the others we met on the road. Some of them are ambivalent about serving her but we just sweep and clear them, poison monks are bad enough, but bootlickers must go.

After we get through them, it’s into the salt mines, where we try to bluff our way in using poison monk robes but that goes to shit fast and we kill kill kill! Many of our foes are “salt-tongued cultists” which generates a lot of unfortunate speculation from the group.

We do capture an ex-acolyte of Alar who has been working for Skeam, but he seems penitent enough that we send him above to fight random undead in the streets to work it off.

We do stop to refill our lamprey milk dreaming drug from the Snuggoo cultists in the mines (that’s a long story, you need to read these summaries from the beginning…). They helpfully tell us a secret passage to get right to Skeam’s lair.

Fighting Lady Skeam is one of those complex environmental boss battles with soul pylons and skeam-bound skeletons emerging from pylons and such. We manage to kill her and avoid the whole lich-escaping-to-their-phylactery thing because Podrick’s magic wolf-spear he found long ago can pin even gaseous or incorporeal creatures, which turns out to be a great benefit when we’re always fighting vampires and liches and ghosts and stuff!

From DCC 66.5 Doom of the Savage Kings

Podrick invokes the powers of Chistu to turn Lady Skeam’s soul and destroy her forever. The effect is breathtaking, or at least as breathtaking as a 1980’s effects house can manage.

And with that, Fythorp is liberated from the undead army!

Dungeon Crawl Classics – Forty-third Session

Forty-Third Session – Time to liberate Fythorp from its undead masters!

Fythorp is actually the village of Hirot from DCC 66.5 Doom of the Savage Kings. Paul our GM used ChatGPT to convert it to “what would happen after a bunch of undead take over!” AI is the lazy GM’s new best friend and from here on out a lot of the stuff we do isn’t from printed DCC adventures but is AI-generated. We do some wandering around to adventure locations but when we go somewhere that needs to be something specific it’s easier to whole cloth make it as we are basically carrying the plot around with us in a mature campaign.

We juggle a bunch of allies. We have a group of bounty hunters along, the Ironfall Company of dwarven mercenaries, Morgan the goth, Amathies the lamia, my three berserker retainers… We create complex tactical plans with the nut of it being the party infiltrating the Sanctuary of Alar via underground tunnel to stop it from spewing out the supernatural clouds covering the area – we figure the best first strike to weaken a whole city of undead is to get the sunlight shining again.

Long story short this is successful, though there are a lot of extreme undead shocker traps/devices in the church. We aren’t too badly wounded and reason that with the sudden onset of daylight powerful undead are probably trapped in inconvenient places so a hurry-up offense is called. We go break into the local courthouse where undead weirdos have been “judging” and executing locals. We get there just in time to interrupt the Mayor’s execution!

Hemp destroys both Skull Clerks with the blazefire bow. He finds himself short of legalistic one-liners, so he goes with, “The defense rests!” Then he calls out for Old Man Fish to cure his magical boils.

About this time the worthless priestess from Weebrook arrives with some peasants in tow and declares herself the savior of Fythorp. We decide she’s a danger to herself and others but luckily talk her into fortifying the courthouse instead of going and getting more peasants turned into undead we have to fight.

The hurry-up offense continues and we hit the Cider House that used to hold poison monks, it’s our last hardpoint to take in the town and we know it must have secret tunnels into the salt mine where Lady Skeam’s HQ is!

Dungeon Crawl Classics – Forty-second Session

Forty-Second Session – We talk to every NPC who will talk to us in Weebrook and then head off to the undead army occupied Fythorp to begin our guerilla resistance.

But first, Gallfred goes to meet the local witch Ymae the Mad Widow. Seems like there’s old witches everywhere and they’re generally related. He loves their poison and filth. And she makes him an indecent proposal – she’ll make an undead-catching net if he agrees to marry her! “Sure,” he says…

After that, we split our time between recruiting allies and planning Gallfred’s bachelor party!

We go and talk to the worthless local duke, who checked out the undead army and turned tail. As best as we can tell he and his thanes don’t do anything except live off the townsfolk. Hemp mentally marks them all for death as part of his “Anarchy Now” political platform, but decides not is not the time since the region is already very destabilized. “Soon…” he muses.

And then we go skulk around the haunted town of Fythorp. The local church is spewing out supernatural cloud cover of the “I bet vampires can scamper around freely during the day in this zip code” variety.

We find some holdouts boarded up in the local inn and get a message to them. Then, we pretend we’re with a batch of bounty hunters we’ve befriended that are roving magic artifact collectors (Lady Skeam has people rounding up chaos artifacts to give to her). We send word that have found the Helm of Chistu, which can be used to summon whatever evil god they worship (Chauvinism, IIRC), and would like 5 large for it please. This story has the benefit of being true, but rather than hand over the helm to the banshee that comes to get it, we attack!

We’re sad to find out that the banshee is the nice sea shanty singing lady from the town, now undeaded. She nearly gets away but Gallfred uses his dowry on her (the undead catching net the witch made for him). Our sorrow is assuaged by the fact that she did indeed have 5,000 gp on her. “Grand Theft Auto for the win!” we cry.

Dungeon Crawl Classics – Forty-first Session

Forty-First Session – Travel is easily as dangerous as dungeons in DCC. We return from the Mortal Kombat Dimension and travel first to Wymoor and then to Weebrook, and there’s quite some trouble along the way!

First, we meet a weird cursed chimera doing a demon summoning ritual. We’ve actually run across this chimera like twice before out of sheer encounter table luck and he’s become a recurring thing. We kill him so he won’t recur. (Well… It’s probably not that simple, but may as well try.)

When we get to Wymoor by luck it’s the Spring Renewal festival, so we drink ourselves into a frenzy and/or unconsciousness. like a medieval version of The Hangover.

But no rest for the wicked, we leave the next morning and come across ghouls trying to sacrifice some random peasant. And then we come across some random monks that are actually a poisoner cabal that Gallfred keeps wanting to join. And we reunite some ghost lovers. Fythorp has been taken over by an undead army, we get it!!!

We finally get to our home town of Weebrook and they are quite distraught by the ill goings-on right down the road. We brought some refugees here knowing that army was coming and knowing the 5 of us weren’t “fight an army” caliber, but it’s still sad.

I spend the rest of the time trying to wingman Podrick into hitting on the crazy priestess lady in town but he denies her his precious bodily fluids for some reason.

Dungeon Crawl Classics – Fortieth Session

Fortieth Session – Ned finally fights in the Wizard Kumite! But that’s not the height of drama this session because it turns out Soylent Green is people!!! And the island we’re on sinks.

Since we are in a crazy wizard deathmatch tournament, some of the other wizards are understandably reluctant to open their AirBnB tower doors and speak with us. Which is probably wise as we do contemplate home invasions when it suits us.

However, the one that will talk to us turns out to not really be a mage but a hot thief in disguise. Her costume of an old, white-bearded wizard drives Gallfred mad with desire. Hemp rolls 1d20 (1-10: cockblock; 11-20: wingman) and decides to assist this doomed romance.

Illika the Fey gets a bye on her first round since Urzeth turned up dead of a severe dagger allergy. Our own Ned gets tapped for the next fight with Alred the Harbinger of Fate, who is just a toad-looking guy. I immediately start making Wastri the Hopping Prophet references even though no one else gets them. “You know? The Greyhawk quasi-deity of amphibians and racism? Like a 1980s Pepe the Frog!” They just stare at me until we return to play.

Alred’s froggy familiar tries to gas us on the street. Well, I say tries, but it did, and it was a pretty bad poison, but we survive. In an attempt to prove that the Secret Masters running this wizard tournament are up to no good, we decide to go break in to the crematorium they cart the dead wizards off to, and, spoiler alert, they are using them to make tasty treats, including the tasty treats in our tournament gift basket that we’ve been snacking on.

Now we have proof! And tasty cannibal treats, as solidly half the party is Chaotic and down with it since they give nice buffs. In fact, my character Hemp really appreciates this as Aphiel his god always wants him to commit cannibalism but he considers that pretty gross and declasse.

Then it’s time for Ned’s fight! It’s pretty anticlimactic because he goes first and blasts Alred with the biggest magic missile ever conjured, one-shotting him.

But that’s for the best because we decide it’s time to ambush us some Secret Masters as they wine and dine Ned for being the winner. Read on for the climax and watery denoument!