Dungeon Crawl Classics - the Xanthus River Valley campaign

Last Friday, the Friday after Christmas, was the first time the Friday group had gotten together in almost a month. I was losing interest in Silver Age Sentinels and super-heroes, and I'm pretty sure my players had forgotten what we were playing.

I brought it up and we had a discussion. We'd wrap up the Alternatives campaign with a nice break point and play some Dungeon Crawl Classics.

We finished the raid on the secret AEGIS research facility with some new information about several top-secret AEGIS projects: Prometheus and Pandora. Prometheus was a way to harvest super-humans for their Mysterium and use it to give regular humans super-powers in a controlled and predictable way. The creator of Prometheus had gone insane and was being held in suspended animation in the orbiting space station known as Citadel guarded by none other than the Guardian, the most powerful super-hero known to man.

That's where we left it.

After that, we got out the DCC books and rolled up some zero-level characters for the funnel.

I love Dungeon Crawl Classics. I like its randomness. I like its simplicity. I like its old school feel. I like its weird fantasy presentation and pseudo-setting. I really enjoyed playing it in my Sunday group and I wanted to run an old fashioned dungeon crawl/sandbox hex-crawl for my Friday friends.

Here's what I want from this campaign: I want some table-rolling. I want some exploration. I want some monster-bashing. I want to use my miniatures and terrain. I don't want to have to think about the story all the time.

Over the last week I've been putting together a small-scale setting. I'll be releasing details of the setting here.

The World of Agartha

The place is Earth, the time is 100 hundred thousand years ago. The continents of the world include Atlantis, Lemuria, Mu, Hyperborea, Thule, and Agartha. You are denizens of Agartha and that is where the focus shall be. The other places are semi-mythical and you will likely never go there.

There are currently no great civilizations on Agartha. The last great empire fell to an apocalyptic war over a thousand years ago, leaving behind ruins throughout the landscape. 

The Xanthus River Valley

The Xanthus River valley was once a tiny province of the vast empire that once ruled Agartha. The valley is nestled between the Great Wall mountains and the Smaragdine sea. The valley's chief claim to fame was that it was home to the subterranean realm of the dwarf king Duirn. A great sea port city once dominated trade at the mouth of the Xanthus river. The sea port city was destroyed in magical fire during the apocalypse that decimated the Agarthan empire. 

Duirndown is a small village of 200 people located near the source of the Xanthus River. Duirndown was once a major trade center and the entrance to the underground Dwarven Kingdom of Duirn located beneath the Great Wall. The dwarves fled their kingdom a few generations ago and now live in small communities on/near the surface. The subterranean realm is now ruled by monsters and the entrances have been walled up. Duirndown is still considered a trading town, though its glory days are long gone. Today, its mostly farmers from Wince, fur-trappers from Swallow, and dwarven miners and craftsmen who meet to trade in Duirndown.

Duirndown is where the campaign begins.