Dungeon Crawl Classics

Quite recently, I bought my first two Goodman Games Dungeon Crawl Classics , DCC 34 Cages of Delirium (based on the review at rpg.net and the fact that I've liked F. Wesley Schneider's co-authored adventure "Shut-In" in Dungeon) at my FLGS and DCC 10 The Sunless Garden at Half-Price books.


I though Cages of Delirium was great. Very atmospheric and creepy, with a good mixture of combat, investigation, and NPC interaction. Now, the DCC line sells itself with the fact that NPCs that appear in the adventure are there mostly to be killed, and while I realize that this is somewhat of an exaggeration, is DCC 34 an anomaly? If not, are there are DCC adventures that are like DCC 34 in that regard?

The Sunless Garden was also very good. It too had a couple of NPCs that were not meant to be killed, some nice tweaks of standard core monsters, and a lot of 1e, B/X D&D style weirdness which I liked (the atmosphere pulled it all together). However, I noticed that there were some pretty impressive magical treasures in the adventure, especially for an adventure designed for 6th to 8th level characters (a +3 mighty cleaving halberd!). Does the DCC line follow the wealth by level guidelines in the DMG in general or is there a lot of variation throughout the line?

Modules, in general follow the treasure guidelines. They may not "balance" for a single encounter, but you usualy have several encounters in modules with no treasure, then you have the "bonanza" encounter that makes up for all the treasure the previous encounters didn't have, but should have.

So that may help answer your question. I hope.

Since you appear to be "just getting into" the DCC line you'll probably find this info useful to knoPosted: Sun Oct 29, 2006 12:51 pm Post subject:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

We'll have full details posted in the next couple weeks, but for now, here's the basic idea: Between now and January, we'll be reprinting these DCC's:

#2 (third printing)
#6 (second printing)
#7 (second printing)
#8 (second printing)
#9 (second printing)
#10 (second printing)
#11 (second printing)
#12 (second printing)
#14 (second printing)
#17 (second printing -- first printing is not sold out yet, but close)

w.

Actually there are several DCC's that mention that they are giving out more treasure than is warranted, Mysterious Tower and Bloody Jack's Gold being two. Of course, the difficulty of moving the gold in the latter module makes it a pretty tough to spend.

The Thief Lord's Vault also presents an opportunity to get alot of treasure compared to your level.

Personally I think the treasure guidelines are pretty silly and ignore them anyway. While the DCC's might give out more treasure than the core rules call for in some instances, they don't ever go too far over the edge.

Cool, glad you liked DCC34 (I'm the one that wrote the review of it on RPG.net). I'm always afraid someone will read a positive review of something I wrote and buy a product and not like it.

I don't have all the DCCs, only about 7-8, but in my experience, yeah, DCC34 is somewhat unique in having a lot of NPC interaction. Most of them seem to have 1-2 NPCs in it though.

The treasure seems to be a bit spotty - in some it's normal, in others, it seems a bit generous.

Renshai said:

Actually there are several DCC's that mention that they are giving out more treasure than is warranted, Mysterious Tower and Bloody Jack's Gold being two. Of course, the difficulty of moving the gold in the latter module makes it a pretty tough to spend.

The Thief Lord's Vault also presents an opportunity to get alot of treasure compared to your level.

Personally I think the treasure guidelines are pretty silly and ignore them anyway. While the DCC's might give out more treasure than the core rules call for in some instances, they don't ever go too far over the edge.

Click to expand...

I missed that note.

Irregardless, one of the rules of using modules is to make sure the treasure is to your liking and change it if it isn't.

I'm amazed at the number of people I see that talk like modules are a rule book that must be strictly adhered to.

Even if the DMG is followed, it doesn't do any good for those who run low magic/treasure campaigns. Or those who run high powered monty haulish type games. So even following the "standard" doesn't work for the whole customer base, just presumeably most of it.

Like any aspect of any RPG, change it to how you like it.

In regards to treasure, I find that it's a little difficult for the adventure writers sometimes because the PC's may not always find all of the treasure. Do they put an amount of treasure in there equal to what the PC's should get on average and assume that they find it all or do they put more than that in there, guessing that some of it will be missed?

The other thing I found is that not all treasure is created equally. One of my PC's recently got a Ring of Mind Shielding from the final encounter in Terror in Freeport. Is it worth 8k in GP to his character? Probably not. He would probably get more bang for his buck if he got some magic armour or weapon instead. Some PC's on the other hand might find it worth more than 8k.

Olaf the Stout