Old school extravagance
DUNGEON CRAWL CLASSICS
Designer: Joseph Goodman | Publisher: Goodman Game
From the instant you lay your eyes on this book, you know what you’re getting into.
It’s inch-and-a-half thick with three bookmark ribbons, and the cover is a vivid gouache painting of a warrior staring across an impassable chasm at a forbidding stone door. Dungeon Crawl Classics is excessive. Do you like Dungeons & Dragons? What if there was more? More dice, more spells, more characters! It oozes confidence.
The rules that power DCC should be familiar to anyone who has played D&D in the past 20 years. It takes the Third Edition engine and crams it into a van with a wizard airbrushed on the side. The core mechanics of the game fit comfortably on just one of the book’s 500 pages, and the rest is content.
Over a third of this book is dedicated to spells, but there’s no complicated magic system you need to learn here. No, instead DCC gives every single spell from Animal Summoning to Wizard Sense at least a page of possible results. Roll 34 or higher on your simple Knock spell and you might find yourself forcing everything even metaphorically locked to burst open for miles around. Windows and doors, of course, but also wine bottles, shoelaces, and belt buckles.
Wait, rolling a 34? That’s right! In that same spirit of excess, Dungeon Crawl Classics will occasionally call you to roll a d7, or a d24, or even a d30 if the wind is blowing particularly in your favour. Wizards can also spend their stat points to increase their spellcheck modifier! For when you absolutely need to make sure your fireball kills absolutely everything, you can sell your soul to a demon and unleash hell.
The other innovation here is in character creation. Characters are created as randomly as possible; 3d6 down the line no re-rolls and no rearranging. The book is very insistent on this point. But this is DCC, so you don’t get just one character, you get four. Dungeon Crawl Classics is the home of the “funnel” adventure; a deathtrap-filled obstacle course full of insurmountable odds designed to kill as many characters as possible. This might sound like something out of a reddit post about a nightmare DM, but it’s actually a bit of a magic trick.
For a start, it makes it so that playing the game happens as quickly as possible, no time is wasted. But then, when your own personal army of expendable lads are thrown into the meat-grinder and, by some combination of planning and luck, one of them survives? That’s a character you are already invested in! That character gets the honour of graduating to level 1 and picking a class, and a newly minted adventuring party is organically born.
There’s a lot to like between the covers of Dungeon Crawl Classics, but it’s not all perfect. It’s stuffed to the brim with classic feeling fantasy art, but that art misses about as often as it hits; for every gorgeous Peter Mullen ink drawing there’s a cringy comic about an orc with huge boobs. The tone of the writing can also be a bit off-putting; the book starts with a list of “qualifications” you must possess before going any further. It feels like it’s calling me a fake gamer girl at the jump and it sucks.
That’s the kind of thing that kept me away from this book for years, and honestly that’s a shame because I love Dungeon Crawl Classics. Luckily, the latest printing of the softcover has made a move towards gender neutral language, which is a massive positive step, and i think the next printing of the hardback will have the same. Each day I spend with DCC, I inch closer and closer to making it my entire personality. So put on your best Hawkwind t-shirt, grab your d30 and get in this slightly janky wizard van with me.
ROZ LEAHY
WE SAY
It’s a massive book full of both style and substance, and huge catalog of adventures will keep you satisfied for years.
TRY THIS IF YOU LIKED DUNGEONS & DRAGONS...
With Wizards of the Coast’s latest missteps with the OGL, I know there are a lot of people looking for a new way to play the game that they love. If that’s you, I think you could do a lot worse than DCC.