DCC RPG/Xcrawl Free RPG Day 2013

The DCC RPG/Xcrawl Free RPG Day 2013 offering was written by Daniel J. Bishop and Brendan LaSalle, with art by Doug Kovacs, Jeremy Mohler, and Brad McDevitt. It was published by Goodman Games.

Disclosure: I am the writer of the Dungeon Crawl Classics adventure in this product.

This product contains two adventures, The Imperishable Sorceress for Dungeon Crawl Classics, and Maximum Xcrawl: 2013 Studio City Crawl by Brendan LaSalle for the Pathfinder version of Xcrawl.

The Imperishable Sorceress was the first writing that I had done for Goodman Games, and it came about as a request from Joseph Goodman for a short adventure. I was imagining that he was gearing up for the first DCC Annual, or that he was looking for a second adventure for another module (like The Balance Blade is included in The 13th Skull), but that turned out to not be the case. The Dark Master accepted the first pitch I offered, with the minor exception that I was considering recruitment offers leading the PCs to the Cleft Mountain, ala Fritz Leiber's Stardock.

I had just finished reading Stanley Weinbaum's The Black Flame when I made this pitch, and, along with Stardock, it was a primary inspiration. The original text included mountain climbing tables to more closely reflect Stardock, but playtests indicated that too many encounters on the relatively linear mountainside detracted from the whole. If you like the "secret doors" in the adventure, you have Joseph Goodman to thank. He wanted at least one, and I had to devise a way to make a secret door work in an ancient structure like this.

The Builders are, of course, inspired by H.P. Lovecraft. The “Adamantine Mole” was inspired by the "Iron Mole" from Edgar Rice Burrough's At the Earth's Core, and may lead PCs to Harley Stroh's Lost Agharta from Journey to the Center of Aereth and The Lost City of Barako.

Ivrian the Unkind is named for the Gray Mouser's paramour in Ill Met in Lankhmar and, in particular, The Unholy Grail.

The ghosts of fish were inspired, in part, from the 1986 film From Beyond, itself based off a story of the same name by H.P. Lovecraft.

Brendan LaSalle's Maximum Xcrawl: 2013 Studio City Crawl was written for Pathfinder, although it could be converted to Dungeon Crawl Classics. Nonetheless, because it is not a DCC product, it will not be getting in-depth discussion here.

There are already three converted Xcrawl adventures available for Dungeon Crawl Classics, and a DCC version of Xcrawl is in the works. Afficianados of the Dungeon Crawl Classics game will know Brendan LaSalle from The Hole in the Sky, as well as (possibly, if you are lucky) his judging at many conventions. At the time of this writing, he featured on the most recent Spellburn podcast, where his newest DCC adventure, Neon Knights, is mentioned.

Get It Here.