Pendragon, Carcosa, and DCC. Plus, a realization about my Sunday group's preferences.

The entirety of my creative attention lately has been focused on finishing "The Blade of Takshaka", a full-length adventure scenario for the Swords of Cydoria, written for BRP. I have finished the writing and am ready to move into layout and illustration.

Pendragon

We're still playing Pendragon on Fridays. Last week, our intrepid knights tracked the knave Ithyll into the Saxon-controlled northeastern section of England. We passed through a dense forest and found some moors. On the morrow we awoke to find ourselves magically transported to a fairy realm. A gigantic sword balanced on its edge to form a bridge across a raging river. Sir Hyll made it across. We found a pagan cairn atop a hill and a sword in a magical red stone. Nearby, we found a city filled with beautiful fairy ladies. Our knights were besotten and partook of the comely hospitality. They laid out a test for us the next day, a gauntlet designed to test our knighly qualities. We all failed pretty quickly.

Failing the test, we found ourselves returned to our original location. We continued our mission and came across an abandoned farm. It was a Pictish trap. The three of us slew a score of Picts. My knight, Sir Hyll, had no small difficulty defeating the final Pict who was, in fact, the bastard Ithyll. The rest of the eschille stood by and looked on as Ithylll and Sir Hill traded blows for nearly an hour. Finally, Sir Hyll won the day and grudge-killed that evil traitorous mother-loving... Anyway. You get the point.

Carcosa

 On Saturday, I picked up the book Carcosa. It is nominally for Lamentations of the Flame Princess, a D&D retro-clone, but it can be used with any OSR game. I have been wanting to purchase this book for a long time. It's bound in soft embossed leather. It has amazing artwork and typography and layout. It's just a really well done book. Christa was admiring the printing of it and the overall design.

Carcosa is a hex-crawl adventure setting. The book consists of a hex-map, a guide to the setting, the special rules for characters, some new special rules for combat, psionics, alien technology, and sorcery, new monsters, and a big section with two encounters in every ten-mile hex. Then there's an adventure.

As a setting, Carcosa is weird-fantasy mash-up of science fiction, sword and sorcery, and Lovecraftian horror. It is very inspired by the writings of Clark Ashton Smith and Jack Vance and H.P. Lovecraft. It feels like a Rene Laloux sci-fi film. It's creepy and dark and menacing.

The setting catches a lot of flak because of the graphic nature of the sorcerous rituals. The rituals all require some kind of human sacrifice, and some of the sacrifices involve rape and infanticide and, well, just really really depraved actions. But that's the point. Sorcery in this setting is meant for bad guys. If you, as a player character, are willing to do these things for sorcery, then maybe you're the bad guy! I think it's totally in keeping with the setting and mood of the game. The book is also clearly marked on the cover with a warning of the mature and gruesomely graphic nature of some of its contents.

The hex-crawl aspect is fascinating. I want to run a hex-crawl type of game and I really wanted this book to help inspire me. Although, now I kind of just want to run Carcosa instead.

Dungeon Crawl Classics

On Sunday, we continued DCC. In recent weeks, we plumbed the depths of a dark pit inhabited by faceless (literally) cultists and giant tentacles. We reached a point last time where we had to retreat out of the dungeon. We re-traced our steps using our maps and managed to get out. We returned to the town of Swallow and recuperated for a few days. We levelled up (Level Two! W00T!), resupplied, recruited some new henchmen (our original four had died or fled), and went back into the pit.

We explored some side-passages we bypassed, lost some henchmen and a PC (poor Pyramis the Halfling) to some basilisks during a scouting mission, retreated and returned with the full party to kill said basilisks. Henchman Hector Mierdas Vendedor became a bad-ass warrior in this battle thanks to being Enlarged by the wizard Zebediah. Afterwards, we continued down. We defeated a tomb full of ghosts and got a +2 short sword, which we gave to Hector the Zero-Level Henchman. Then we linked up this path to a path we previously explored, closing the loop. We came across and defated some cultists and brainwashed captives and our out-of-game characters decided to call it day.

I really enjoy DCC. It's very weird fantasy. It feels like Clark Ashton Smith's Hyperborea. As I keep saying, it's like Warhammer FRP and Basic D&D had an RPG baby.

I have also come to the realization that our Sunday group really enjoys games were the PC's kind of suck. We have the most fun playing games were our characters are nobody sub-standard slightly amoral peons just trying to survive. Not where we are failing, mind you, but where we are making our way in spite of our lot in life. Where we're playing rat catchers and shit farmers and blacksmiths fighting kobolds and goblins and giat rats. Or, like in our Ghostbusters campaign, where they are just dudes who get enough money to purchase a ghostbusters franchise which they operate out of one of their mom's basement, with a crappy van and no office and yadda yadda yadda. You get the idea.

I'll need to remember this when designing future campaigns for this group.

Gaming Update

I'm currently playing in a Pendragon game on Friday nights and a Dungeon Crawl Classics game on Sunday afternoons.

Pendragon
The Pendragon gamemaster, Dave, is running us through the Great Pendragon Campaign. We are currently in year 513, during the early years of Arthur's reign. I'm playing Sir Hyll, an unattractive knight that distrusts religions.  Last week we mostly did "paper-work" for our Winter Phase, taking care of our lands, determining the health status of our wife and offspring, etc. Sir Hyll is notoriously randy, with a Lust rating of 17 (out of 20)! During the year 513, Sir Hyll fathered 13 children while convalescing at the Castle of Ease in the Faerie lands, then got married and fathered a daughter with his wife.

Mostly the campaign has been a series of major battles to solidify Arthur's consolidation of the kingdoms and to put down King Lot's rebellion of the Northern Kingdoms and a few personal missions assigned to us by "That Douche" Merlin.

Dungeon Crawl Classics
DCC is a fun little game that plays on the nostalgia for early editions of D&D but with new rules. It is also highly reminiscent, in my opinion, of games like Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. It also does a great job of emulating the style of weird fantasy written by the likes of Clark Ashton Smith. There are a lot of references to strange alien gods and there is a high probability you are going to receive some horrible mutation, especially if you dabble with magic.

You start with several characters per player, each level zero with no class or special abilities. The idea is you go through a meat-grinder introductory dungeon that will kill off several of your plebes. Whoever survives at the end earns a class and goes up to level one. My characters included a tax collector named Kevin, a butcher named Oscar, a baker named Franz, and an astrologer whose name I forget. The rest of the party included a similarly motley assortment of chicken butchers, candle-makers, etc.

We gathered to explore a legendary portal on an ancient hill that appears once a generation. We entered tentatively, fought a giant snake, encountered and ignored some bizarre room features, and activated an army of clay golems that chased us out.

Due to our over-cautiousness, we had multiple survivors in our group, and little treasure as well, so our DM ran the survivors through another zero-level adventure.

I played two characters for the next adventure. First was Kevin, the former tax collector now turned Lawful Thief. He has an Intelligence of 7 so I played him kind of dim and a little reckless. I also played Thisbee, the female halfling. Thisbee has a Strength of 4 so we kept joking that she can barely support the weight of her own head. She has no melee ability (-2 to hit, -3 damage), despite halflings penchant for two-weapon fighting. She was pretty useless.

In the new adventure, our heroes went to a crumbling keep to rescue some captured villagers and some gold stolen by some beast-men. We fought some beast-men, desecrated an ancient crypt protected by  magical traps, splashed around in a murky pool looking for some magical glowing skulls, flushed said pool down a drain like a tub or toilet, killing one of our wizards i the process, found an ancient magical viking boat in a subterranean lake, fought a giant tentacle monster, then unleashed a terrific battle while climbing an underground ziggurat to stop a ritual sacrifice and save the villagers. Doing so brought the entire cavern down and we rode the viking ship through an underground river into a lost canyon, where we'll pick up next week.

By the end of the adventure, Kevin had aquired a mutation of an owl's beak and feathers for hair, and Thisbee had gained the mutation of over-eating. She's going to gain forty-something pounds over the next month, reducing her Agility (her best stat) and movement rate, making her even more useless. Kevin's mutation was fun, however. Anytime someone would say something to Kevin, he would respond, "Who?" The other person would usually start answering before they got it. I got Nick several times. It was hilarious! Kevin became the most lovable asshole in the group.

I'm liking DCC so far, but I'm kind of a sucker for games where you play nobody schmucks who are barely able to survive.

In other news, I'm writing an adventure for Swords of Cydoria set in the city of Norukar. I'm about 75% finished with the core writing. Now I need to fill in some gaps, descriptions of things, and details. Then I go in with the rules portion of the writing: monsters, NPCs, room descriptions, etc.

I'm also doing additional development of Exiled in Eris whenever I can. I can't wait to run this setting using.. AD&D? Swords and Wizardry? Castles and Crusades? I haven't decided.

More next week!