14 November 2025 The Shudder Mountains

 14 November 2025 The Shudder Mountains

    We have been playing DCC for about six months now, and it is gonzo-fun for sure. Our big group is five players and one GM (Mr. Cheese), and all we do is laugh our assess off. The rolls are so swingy, the magic so weird, and the monsters so bizarre that it all makes for a fantastic beer and pretzels sort of gaming experience. I have run this system twice: once in a sort of catch as catch can, episodic game where I was just learning the rules (we played some home brew and the module "The Well of the Worm," which was fun. The second time was a longer campaign set in Hyboria, using the DCC: Lankhmar rules; it, too, went well, ending in an epic TPK. 

    So I like the system a lot, and I hope to run it again. Hyboria is still wide open, but I was thinking about something a little bit different as well. In my head I have a Call of Cthulhu game that begins in the real-world and moves into the Dreamlands, something I did do a few years ago using the CoC 7e ruleset. It was one of my favorite campaigns that I've ever run, and everyone seemed to enjoy it. With that said, the reality is, I have played Call of Cthulhu too much. I have found the end of that game. Don't get me wrong: it's a wonderful, wonderful game; it is the game I have run the most, I think; even more than Dungeons&Dragons. But after 44 years, I think I am Cthulhud-out. It's hard to keep the game fresh after all this time, and it is impossible for my players (and me) to avoid metagaming. 

    But I was thinking...what if I used the DCC rules instead of the CoC 7e rules, to create a campaign like what follows: the game begins during the Great Depression, and is set in the Appalachian regions of Kentucky or West Virginia. The players are all normal things: doctors, cops, whatever, who for reasons are going to investigate strange doings in the hills and hollers. There is a ton of super spooky lore in that part of the world, so a few horror-themed adventures would be totally fine (and mechanically easy) to run. The big threat is a snake-handling Christian cult that is being influenced by an actual entity from another world, in the Shudder Mountains of...somewhere. The multiverse. Players would be drawn into the Shudder Mountains and take on their fantasy personas-- much like the Eternal Champion, or like Lovecraft's Dreamlands. On that side of the multiverse, they are a dwarf, or an elf, or a fighter, whatever. They would explore the Shudder Mountains, and adventure there with the Big Bad (a snake god like Yig or Damballah). Weird, horror-infused fantasy. At times, they would pop back and forth between worlds. 

    Shudder Mountains is based on the works of Manly Wade Wellman and his Silver John stories, which I love. The author of the source book, Michael Curtis, loves those stories, and wrote a really unique campaign setting which I think is great. I also have been digging Old Gods of Appalachia, a horror podcast set in that same part of the world. This may be be a thing I try and do sometime. I think it would be a blast. 

     

11 November 2025 The Runes: Design Journal (2) (plus 5e and DCC!)

 11 November 2025

    Veterans Day, so no work for me today. As a veteran myself, I find this is a nice day to reflect on my own service from 1993-1997 (a long time ago now), as well as the service of my family. My great grandfather, Michael Joseph Reilly, earned his American citizenship when he emigrated from Ireland and joined the USN during World War I. The next generation, my grandparents, served in WWII, while the next generation--my dad and my uncles--served during Viet Nam and the first Gulf War. Then my brother, myself, my sister in law, and my cousins served. Most recently, my nephew Connor! That's five generations of veterans over the past 100 years, and that's something to be proud of.

I have been banging away at The Runes. It is a disorganized mess, but progress is happening. There are a lot of questions I have about how to organize this thing: monster stats in the back, or in text? How specific vs. general do I need to be re: how events unfold. How much detail is too much? How polished does a first draft have to be? Does any of it even make sense? Hard to know. I'd like to have a workable, edited draft of this thing by the beginning of summer, so that's my goal. Once I have a student teacher (starting in January) I'll have a lot more time to work on it. As it is, I am picking away at it here and there. You can see my amazing hand drawn maps below. They are, literally, good enough for now. 

We have been playing a DCC campaign with Mr. Cheese as our GM. It's a bonkers game, and I think that's the point: the system itself leads us toward funny, chaotic experiences. There are so many tables, and so many out of pocket results that weird shit happens all of the time. I admit that DCC brings the freak out in me; my imagination just goes haywire and I say and do bizarre things (like my breast-feeding male cleric, Otto). It is a fun experience for sure, but I do think that the built in randomness of the game engine makes it more funny than serious. We laugh our asses off, everytime we play! 

Which brings me to my next point: having messed about with various systems now--D&D 5e, Dragonbane, Star Trek, Dungeon Crawl Classics, BRP, Castles&Crusades, and Cthulhu 7e--I have come to the conclusion that the system can drive the vibe of the game as much as the GM and the players can. DCC, for example, has swingy magic (and swingly rolls in general) baked into the pie so that the unexpected happens all of the time. You are one roll away from disaster or triumph regardless of your actions and choices. My wizard, Cal, either throws biscuits or nuclear bombs when he uses magic missile. It's a crap shoot every time. In Dragonbane, the monsters were tremendously difficult because they always hit, and oftentimes more than once.  Because it is an unleveled game, combat felt dangerous. Because there were limited spells, it felt...I don't know, fey. It was fun for sure, but the engine made the game feel a certain away (or at least that's how I experienced it). I ran it with a bit of a fairy tale vibe on purpose, and the system led itself in that direction. 

Castles&Crusades has an OSR ethos: characters are generally weak, progression is slow, powers and abilities are given sparingly, and the whole thing feels like player thinking is far more important that player character features. We've been playing it for a few months now, and I've noticed that my three players are playing more thoughtfully than normal, because they have to! They've had to retreat a few times, which is unprecedented in my gaming experience. It's a good system to play with experienced people because they really need to stay focused on what's happening. The system is not going to protect them.

Which brings me to 5e. 5e is the 10,000 pound elephant in the room. It is the system that an overwhelming, vast majority of people play now. While I might be hammering these stats a bit, according to the data I've seen, between 12-15 million people in the US play Dungeons&Dragons, and 80%+ of them are under the age of 40. Old heads like my friends and I make up a vanishingly small part of the TTRPG hobby, and our memories of the earlier version of D&D, especially 1st, 2nd, and BECMI, are not widely held by the majority of those who play these games. Those crazy kids are all playing the most successful, and most popular iteration of this game: 5th edition Dungeons&Dragons.

Having run two campaigns (one didn't go well on my end, but my players had fun) and played in 2.5 (two regular, one modified Lord of the Rings variant), I found that 5e was not to my liking (I am confident I wrote about this before).  But as I thought about it, and as I had a great conversation on ENWorld with other people who love these games as much as I do, I realized my dislike for 5e is a me issue, not a game issue. I joke with my brother and say in my best stoner voice, "You can't play 5e with a 2e mindset," but it it turns out, that's true! 5e is designed to be a high-fantasy, heroic RPG. Characters are powerful, and have a lot of options, very quickly. It is a wildly different game than earlier iterations, and it does what it sets out to do well. Comparing it to older versions, or OSR variants, is unfair to the system: it doesn't want to be those things! So 5e isn't less than or worse than; it is its own thing, and it's good. It works, people love it, and I need to stop being a grouchy old man about it. Over the past six years, I have amassed so much stuff, a lot of it 5e, and I hope to--at some point--play it. Maybe it will be a Lord of the Rings campaign, or maybe I'll dip my toes back into Kobold Press and Midgard. We'll see, but my days of complaining about 5e are done. Things change.