The Wizardarium of Calabraxis

The Wizardarium of Calabraxis is an adventure with no specific level, written and illustrated (including cartography and cover) by Claytonian JP. The publisher is Kill It With Fire.

Disclosure: There is a mongrelock in the adventure named "Danyellbishp" with the power of "Atomizing Thought".

I have made no secret of my love for this adventure. Back in 2014, I listed it as the #1 must-have Dungeon Crawl Classics adventure. I wrote:

"You keep fish in an aquarium; you keep spell-slingers in a wizardarium. Here, in a handful of pages, is an adventure that you will want to run again and again. And, luckily, the material suggests that you should, merely by opening up new areas of Calabraxis' wizardarium, using many of the supplied monsters and supplementing them with new ones of your own creation. And the odds are very good that, even if another installment comes out, your work will not be invalidated.

Why did this get the #1 spot?

It's got creepy.  It's got funny.  It's got more than enough role-playing, problem-solving, and combat to make any group of players happy.  Depending upon player choices, the same encounter may be role-playing, problem-solving, or combat.  It has time travel, in a way that makes time travel fun, scary, and informative. It has psionics. It has ape-men. It has Vorbians. It has......well, enough spoilers, right?

Suffice it to say that The Wizardarium of Calabraxis is wrapped up in a neat package, giving you everything you need to run the adventure, and giving you lots of opportunities to make it your own.  The psionics system used is perfect for adding your own unique powers to a DCC game.

Look at it this way:  I come to DCC primarily as a writer and a game master.  All of these 15 Must-Have DCC adventures are ones that I would have been proud to have written.  This one, though, makes me wish I could go back in time, prevent myself from having read it, and find some way to a table where the author was running it.  It is that good."

Five years later on, I am not sure that I would still give the Wizardarium the #1 spot - the number of cool adventures has only grown exponentially - but I am sure that it would still make the Top Ten. I still stand by my reasons for giving it that exalted position in 2014, although I would now point out Mind Games as my preferred source for DCC psionics. The Wizardarium of Calabraxis continues to be a fantastic adventure!

At one point, Stephen Murish did a free expansion of the Wizararium, but the link on DriveThruRPG seems to be broken, and I couldn't locate it using Google. Thanks to Judge Joe Kilmartin, though, it has been located here (or non-embedded here).

Reviews of this adventure can be found here, here, here, and most especially here. The adventure is discussed on Spellburn in Episode 31, Episode 48, and Episode 55.

The Wizardarium of Calabraxis starts off with strangely behaving apemen, but players who start to explore the cave where they reside will soon discover there is a lot going on: ancient civilizations, the mad experiments of a forgotten wizard, and a couple unique magic items are guaranteed to provide a lot of bang for your buck to your players. This module has stats for the DCCRPG, but if one wants to work around the weird dice, this module is probably at home in just about any OSR rules system.

Characters of almost any DCC level will probably have fun in this adventure; just adjust some numbers until the exact right number of PCs are dying.

Get It Here!