DCC Sword&Sorcery (2)

I am having a lot of fun working on my campaign. I am trying to follow the "create situations, not stories" game-design philosophy in that I am making scenes that will pop up wherever they pop up, and hoping that I can wing the rest as it happens. Hopefully my players will feed me some creative prompts and ideas on their end, and I can incorporate what they want to have happen into the campaign. 

I admit that I am an overplanner: I live in mortal fear of being caught flat-footed if the group goes way off the reservation, so I tend to over build my game stuff. What's been nice about working on this campaign is that I can cannibalize a little bit from my Lankhmar game (something I set up but have yet to use). DCC is highly interoperable, so that's helpful. A grog hole full of lowlives in Lankhmar isn't hard to reskin as an infantry fuck-hole (to steal a term from HBO's Rome) in Khanyria. 

I am also going to add a bit of Lovecraftian horror. The main antagonist is an iteration of the sorcerer Pelias from Robert E. Howard's story "The Scarlet Citadel," and I'm using him as a cultist of Yog-Sothoth who wished to find 'the opener of the way': a magic door pull that creates portals to other worlds. I'm also stealing an idea from the Suicide Squad movies and the Raymond Feist novel Shadow of a Dark Queen: the PCs are dead, and have been resurrected by Pelias to serve at his bidding. He is going to infect them with a parasite (the Curse of the Red Spider) which both keeps them alive and binds them to his will. In reality, the parasite is just gross, and has no power over them...but they don't know that! There will also be a shadow demon that pops up from time to time and scares them. I'm going to use a variant of the 'patron agent' rules so that the PCs can call upon Pelias when they need aid...but the price is steep and horrible.

As I said, I'm having a great time working all of this out! I've populated a map of the city of Khanyria with a bunch of points of interest, and now I am fleshing out each area so the PCs will know where to find information, where to buy things they might need, and where they can come across money. I haven't yet decided if Pelias will throw them out on the streets naked, or if they will be able to pick and choose from a few limited items before being set upon their path. Seek the Opener of the Way. That's all the information I am giving them! Should be fun since 'the opener of the way' is a magic item...and a name of Yog-Sothoth!  

More to come as I plan. A few pictures from my mood board so far.

DCC Sword and Sorcery (1)

     So...Castles&Crusades may not be a thing for my group, at least for a while: we have games stacking up like airplanes on runway waiting for the thunderstorms to pass. I am blessed in that my gaming group--there are six of us--has multiple people who want to GM. I tend to be the forever-GM (which I honestly don't mind), but now we have a guy who ran 5e Saltmarsh and who is building out Star Trek, a guy who ran the DCC funnel Hole in the Sky as well as a 5e Sandy Petersen campaign Dark Worlds, another guy who is currently running the 5e version of The One Ring (and who also ran a short Stormbringer game), and another guy who GMd for the first time and ran the Mutant Crawl Classics funnel Hive of the Overmind. "An embarrassment of riches," as they say. So. Many. Games. 

    I have been running a small 2-3 player Dragonbane game on Sunday mornings, and it's been fun. Chaosium's Basic Role Playing engine is my favorite TTRPG system, and Dragonbane has a lot of that DNA. I could easily run a high-fantasy campaign using this system and be perfectly entertained (and entertaining). With that said...Goodman Games, and their DCC brand, is wonderful. Their system has just enough crunch so that rolls matter, but it is not overly mechanized like D&D 5e is (someone on Reddit said "What was once narrative is now mechanical," and that's stuck with me). And these frigging people basically give their stuff away on Humble Bundle! I have more than 100 DCC modules and game supplements now, and I am chomping at the bit to use them. 

    I have run a few games using DCC. Last spring and summer, I ran a game--maybe five or six sessions--and I've run a live-game funnel as well as two modules. It's an easy game to run, and it is extraordinarily funny: bad shit just happens, all of the time. The magic is very swingy, which is an aspect one of my payers (the guy who loves being a wizard) doesn't like. One bad roll and poof! You can be well and truly fucked. So that's something we are working on, seeing if we can get the system to run the way we like to play, but honestly, it's one of my favorite games ever. 

    So I've been messing around with how to run a Sword&Sorcery campaign; something that feels a bit like Conan, or Kane, or any number of other blood and fire books/movies that I love, and I'm made a few campaign constraints. No demi-humans, for example. Limited class choices. No clerics. Low magic. A few healing mechanics I've adopted from DCC Lankhmar. Stuff like that. I'm going to set the game in a bastardized version of Howard's Hyboria/Xoth. I want to have a desert wastes sort of feel; like Afghanistan or something.