Tag Archives: actual play

Third Session – We delve deeper into the flying iceberg and disturbingly find child souls trapped in the form of trees. Old school dungeoning proceeds, with monsters, traps, puzzles, inscriptions, weird terrain, and of course a load-bearing boss.

But first we all glory in our copies of the DCC rulebook – it had been out of print for a little while and finally a new batch dropped.

I missed last session but made this one. The fire magic the locals gave us was a huge help, and I enjoyed shooting flaming arrows into everything – which is foreshadowing for Hemp’s later character arc!

When we kill the boss the iceberg starts to fall apart. This is no time to screw around; I remember a Basic D&D adventure where this happened and if you paused one round to loot, you died. We had to spend a bunch of Luck to get away – the wizards could just zoom off but we meat-bags had to do it the hard way.

Apparently this was the DCC 2013 holiday module “The Old God’s Return” which accounts for the Festivus-ness of it all.

The rest of the session is advancement, both plot and character – Old Man Fish gets the ability to heal from the village priest, and Podrick decides to become a Knight of Lushnia (which the rest of us refer to as the Loyal Order of Water Buffaloes since their heraldic sign is a water buffalo), which will also become a long term plot thread. We decide to go to a nearby tentacle cult pit that locals get carried off to.

Second Session – Our new first level party goes from Weebrook to an unnamed ville that is all about a fire god. Naturally, they get attacked by a flying iceberg, which has a bunch of “tontuu” aboard, which if you guessed are humanoid tauntauns, you’d be right! Except they steal child souls instead of keeping you warm on a chilly Hoth night.

Sadly I wasn’t here for this game, so can’t report on how the rest of the guys felt about their first level one escapades in DCC. But, they survived, which is good in DCC! And the power of animal summoning is introduced – when individuals aren’t that bad ass and get one attack, the abilty to soak attacks, position, and add actions to the action economy is nice.

You can tell from the early part of the session that much of the character development is quest-based. Old Man Fish the ranger wants to get some clerical healing? OK, go do an adventure that’ll get you that! Very different from the entitlement-based powerups of modern D&D.

Here’s the flying iceberg map – classic DCC, they like their maps being both sketchy and not 3d-realistic, but also works of art!

First Session – We start with a brace of level 0 characters each, and giant ants attack a wedding and eat half of them! We end up with a set of surviving level 1 characters – Bruce plays Gallfred Weasel the guild beggar (thief), Tim plays Ned Wimbly the beekeeper (wizard), Chris plays Old Man Fish the locksmith (thief), Patrick plays Podrick the squire (warrior), Matt plays Mordecai the gravedigger (wizard), and I play Hemp the weaver (warrior).

One of the cool things about DCC is you start with randomly generated level zero characters – in other words, normal yokels – and they go through an adventure where they get winnowed down to the survivors you pick your actual character from!

First, we generated 4 random characters each using the super helpful Purple Sorcerer DCC character generation online tool and picked three to put into “the funnel.”

Here’s my four! A jester, a dwarven chest-maker, a miller-baker, and a weaver. Yes, they’re all kind of trash – you don’t get high stats in DCC, you get 3d6 down the line! I pick Happy the Jester, Hot Pie the Baker, and Hemp the Weaver as a personality of 3 does *not* suit my playstyle.

We start the game with three zero level characters for each of us at a wedding that goes bad quickly. Hot Pie gets decapitated by a giant ant in the very first combat. I start to favor the jester, as he has no ability penalties and is a great justification to tell jokes all the time.

Happy asks, “What do you get when you have a room full of dwarfish cheerleaders?”
Nobody knows.
“A full set of teeth!”
The dwarfs do not laugh.
Happy explains, “When you’re dealing with dwarfs, the jokes just write themselves!”

We go to a haunted winery, where both of my PCs end up surviving. I decide to go to level 1 with choosing Hemp the Weaver as an archer type, mainly because Bruce really really really wants to be the party thief with Gallfred Weasel, and I’m a team player. Not enough of a team player to decide to play a cleric, but then again apparently none of us are. OLD SCHOOL!!!

We all had fun. The game system is super easy. You don’t succeed at stuff nearly as much as modern D&D since you kinda suck and have low stats, but you get to try anything and don’t get told “oh there’s no rules for that you can’t do it,” so you are more effective overall if you use your brain, which is frankly how it should be.

We’re lucky enough to have a gaming group that meets weekly; while on alternating weeks I run my Reavers Pathfinder campaign, fellow GM Paul has started a Dungeon Crawl Classics (or “DCC,” for those in the know) campaign in his homebrew World of Iriolus!

Check out the map he made with Campaign Cartographer!

For those of you not familiar with DCC (by Goodman Games), it’s an old school renaissance (OSR) game, which is code for “like old style Dungeons & Dragons, not this newfangled super complicated stuff from Y2K on”.

There are many OSR games, but DCC in particular has a weird flair to it, with a little bit of “airbrushed van art” look and a Warhammer “beware the forces of Chaos and magic will melt your face eventually” conceit. And, they’ve published rafts of adventures for it – like old school D&D, it’s not about book after book of new character options, it’s about book after book of adventures, which all have weird stuff that can be used to mutate your character in an in game way.

I’ll put the session summaries on the World of Iriolus page and blog them up in more detail as usual!