Some Commentary On The Dungeon Crawl Classics Rpg System & A New 'Heavy Metal' Inspired Funnel Idea For Your Old School Campaigns

So today I got a chance to look over Dungeon Crawl Classics hardback with a friend of mine & gave him a hand with a new character creation funnel idea. Dungeon Crawl Classics can be a bit of an intimidating beast of a book weighting in at four hundred and sixty pages. The game is a favorite of mine because of its leveling and PC balance issues.


The funnel I helped Steven with was a simple affair based around the Heavy Metal film from 1981, the sequence that we settled on is one that we've used before. We settled on O’Bannon’s “B-17” from the film a pretty horrific little nod to EC and precode horror comics from the Forties & Fifties. The PC's are all survivors in a lost world where the dead are ghouls and the characters must survive against the background. The idea of the funnel sequence wasn't too bad but the dice conventions make the game a bit of a pain in the ass but all in all it went down fine.

There are several great resources on the web for DCC including the the 0-level character generator at Purple Sorcerer Games.  The resources at People Them With Monsters are absolutely essential to working with the DCC game in my humble opinion. 

The PC's are going to have a hell of a time with this one, Steve's got a number of encounters already planned out based on several of the back half of some of the DCC games we've run in the past. There's also the fact that this is going to be both a story & adventure driven campaign. So what's the reason for all of this prep work on our part? Well the Mutant Crawl Classics kickstarter is starting to wind down and if you want to get involved you've got two days.



Now here's the thing this game isn't going to be out for months yet and there are so many folks who are putting together DCC games to get the jump on it. There are several options on the table at the moment one of which happens to be the Crawling Under A Broken Moon DCC fanzine whose setting is going to be cross compatible with Gamma Crawl Classics. The amount of material in CUBM makes this a great low cost resource for both DCC And MCC's.



So what's the premise of this DCC funnel, well its quite simple the PC's are castaways on an island. They can either be the crew of a wrecked B-17 plane or castaways straight from the DCC rule book. The ghouls are waiting among the undead crews who have already crashed on the island and its various adventure locations.
 
I'll let you know how it works out for my fellow DM and his players in the next couple of weeks but for now keep those dice rolling.