Notes On My Upcoming DCC Campaign
Beginning this Saturday I'm back in the DM chair, or the Judge chair as Dungeon Crawl Classics calls the GM/referee/etc. When I first blogged about running games again, uh, over a year ago I mentioned being interested in OSR-type stuff -- systems, aesthetics, procedures, and so on. DCC and its modules are more superficially related to OSR play rather than actually designed with OSR sensibilities, but that's perfectly fine as far as I'm concerned. I figure it can nevertheless be a good stepping stone into something different both for myself and the group I intend to play with.
Most of my RPG experience so far has been with longer 5E neotrad style campaigns (at least "longer" in intent, a number fizzled out fairly early). When I was initially curious about the OSR, I was particularly drawn to the idea of long-form, open-ended sandbox play, but I eventually realized I was getting a bit ahead of myself. Having not been a GM for a few years -- and having not really actually played or run anything in the OSR style before -- I was likely setting myself up for failure by thinking too much about the long term, sweeping scale of "wouldn't it be cool if..?" that the ideal OSR sandbox presents. Better to focus on smaller snippets first -- one-shots and two-or-three-parters -- as I get my sea legs back under me.
DCC strikes me as ideal for this. Not only do I vibe with the general aesthetic, but Goodman Games has made their business on putting out lots of self-contained, generally well-regarded adventures that can usually be run within 1-3 sessions. My general idea is to run Tim White's "The OG" adventure path with some elements of the Known Realms Hexcrawl from the 2019 edition of the Gongfarmer's Almanac. At the start I'll be drawing almost exclusively from Goodman Games or third-party adventures; once we're well into it I'll try my hand more at designing my own (particularly for anything the PCs want that would be a "quest for it!" situation). In doing so I can still engage with an aspect of fantasy RPGs that I (and I believe most of my players) don't have much experience with: that of the more modular, adventure-by-adventure approach to an otherwise ongoing campaign. I'll be keeping an eye out for loose narratives to emerge, and connections to make between the otherwise separate official modules, but otherwise I'll be approaching each adventure as its own thing.
Although this wasn't originally my intent, some recent reading of Appendix N fiction has since informed this approach. As folks like to point out, Lord of the Rings is an outlier among the influences on D&D in multiple ways, one of which is its lengthy narrative compared to the short stories that make up the bulk of Appendix N. Even when hammered into collections and/or fixup novels, the characters of Appendix N stories flit from one adventure to the next, with little if any connections between them. Elric is here dealing with one thing; now he is there dealing with a different thing. Considering DCC was expressly designed with Appendix N in mind, this isn't some shocking revelation, of course, I just found it interesting.
As mentioned above, one of my greatest problems when it comes to running RPGs (and I know I'm not alone in this) is getting too ahead of myself, spending too much time engaging in lonely fun rather than directly planning for things that will hit the table soon. So, as a sort of "challenge" I'm trying to avoid thinking ahead too much. Now, when running from pre-written modules, this isn't really a challenge of improvisation so much as it is fighting the impulse to tinker in advance. There is lots of fan content out there for DCC without even counting system-neutral material that can be bolted on without any conflict. I don't need it now. Maybe I will later! But there's no point in, say, implementing the very nice looking BX-based Adventuring and Exploration just yet. Maybe later if there's an adventure where having procedures exploration and resource-tracking adds depth I can add it and then, if the group seems to enjoy it, I can make it a mainstay. I'll get to it when I get to it, make rulings as they arise.
...okay, that being said I am implementing the Crawl! fanzine's additional demihuman classes from issue #10, but that's it for at least the first few sessions, I promise!
I was also hoping to run this as a semi-open table, but based on my limited availability (I can only run a game in a way that is fair to my wife when it at least partially overlaps with our son's nap time on the weekend) I don't have quite the pool of players to support that just yet. Perhaps more folks I know who I might not have expected will express interest as it goes on -- we'll see. My bolder idea is to eventually consider going fully open table at my local game store, but again, I am getting ahead of myself.
We are, of course, starting with Sailors on the Starless Sea. I highly doubt I'll blog about every session or module, but I do want to at least record my thoughts on the funnel. Since Sailors is a bit longer than the other funnels it may take two sessions rather than one, but if I haven't posted a follow-up in, say, four weeks from now feel free to ping me on Discord or whatever way you know me.