Dungeon Crawl Classics

Dungeon Crawl Classics (Joseph Goodman, Michael Curtis, Harley Stroh, Dieter Zimmerman) is an odd beast. On the one hand, it's exactly the sort of rpg that I absolutely love - a quirky labor of love driven by a highly specific point of view. On the other hand, the particular quirky idea at the heart of the game comes with certain intrinsic pitfalls . . . which were not always successfully avoided.

The main thing you need to know about Dungeon Crawl Classics is that it's going to throw the words "Appendix N" at you as if you're expected to know what they mean.  And look, the actual literal definition of "Appendix N" is relatively simple - it's the list of "Inspirational Reading" that appeared at the end of the 1st edition AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide. But when this book talks about Appendix N, it's not just referring to an old bibliography. Appendix N is an ideal, an aspiration. We are meant to be drawn into Joseph Goodman's dream of Appendix N, and Dungeon Crawl Classics is as beautiful and as revelatory and as tedious and as alienating as listening to any articulate stranger wax poetic about their dreams.

Sometimes it works, and for a moment I believe. Yes, it's ridiculous from a mathematical perspective to add Zocchi dice to your dice chain. The difference between a d5 and a d6 amounts to a +0.5 bonus. But if you look past the facts of the dice to the dream of dice . . . there's this moment, when you first start the hobby, where your whole life up to that point you've exclusively used cubic 6-sided dice and now you're being asked for a four-sided and eight-sided and twenty-sided die and what even are those? Polyhedral dice?! These weird little plastic trinkets that you've never seen before, never even heard of before have the specific, esoteric use of playing this strange new game. You can't just raid the Monopoly box for supplies, you have to go to a specialty store and maybe even mail order them. And in the subsequent 20 years you can never have this experience again because every other rpg uses some subset of the Standard D&D Dice.

Except Dungeon Crawl Classics does manage to snag a little bit of that magic, in a way that proprietary dice like Fudge Dice or Genesys Dice do not. A d7 or a d24 feels like a discovery. They're not just a set of new labels on something I've seen before. The result is the best kind of nostalgia - an echo of a once-in-a-lifetime experience. You can only have one first encounter with the full range of Platonic solids, but this evoked a similar feeling, and that's more than enough to justify what would otherwise be a pretty pointless game mechanic.

But it's unclear whether the creators of this game fully understood the nature of the magic they were working with, because sometimes the good nostalgia and pure enthusiasm for the source material would be interrupted by weird gatekeepery bullshit like, "Modern role playing games include complex rules for encounter levels, challenge ratings, and other systems for balancing encounters. These rules do not capture the glory of classic fantasy! The DCC RPG has no such rules beyond the generalities of hit dice and dungeon levels. Let the characters learn when to charge, when to retreat, and when to bid their time until they are powerful enough to win. If they don't learn, let them suffer the consequences."

I read something like that and think "Who is this for? Who is this message directed to?" It's the bad kind of nostalgia, the sort that equivocates between change and decay. 

Don't mistake this for a commentary on playstyle, though. I can be sold on the idea of sandbox dungeons that don't automatically scale to the PCs' level. But tell me how to fairly telegraph to the players that an encounter is too hard. Help me explain to them the appeal of this style. Hell, advise me to thrown in the occasional too easy encounter, because the idea is a world independent of the PCs, not a world explicitly designed to screw them over (or, if that is actually the idea, then help me explain the appeal of that). If you're going to sell me on an idea, sell me on an idea. Don't present your game to me like the act of playing it is picking a side in an ideological controversy.

And, again, Dungeon Crawl Classics is capable of doing this right. The suggested character creation method of rolling up 2-4 disposable 0-level characters, running them through a too-tough dungeon with a high level of character attrition, and then playing whoever survives is an amazingly fun and creative idea. It's didactic to a particular game style, but in a way that feels very natural. The DCC RPG wants you to think of dungeon crawling adventurers as these sorry bastards who stake their lives on what is essentially a roll of the dice - "the race is not to the swift" and all that - and I think this might do the trick. Hard to get too irrationally attached to a character when you don't even know which character you're going to play. 

Likewise, the magic system is similarly thematic - it's unpredictable and dangerous, it will inevitably ruin your wizard character with random mutations, but it's potentially very powerful. The allure of being a low-level caster, rolling a natural 20 on a casting check, and just machine-gunning a routine magic missile would present a terrible temptation. Each time you cast a spell, it puts your body, mind, and soul at a terrible risk, enough that being a warrior or thief starts to look like a good deal, but to be a wizard is to be the sort of person who will gamble with their life for the prospect of power.

All good. So why couldn't the same sort of thoughtful "mechanics give rise to intended modes of play" approach be applied to magic items? We're told that they're meant to be rare. We're given a demographic explanation for why it makes sense that they're rare (because the people who create them are scarce and don't like to share knowledge or techniques . . .  due almost entirely to the game's genre), but we're not given a reason to be glad that they're rare. It's a thing that is the way it is in emulation of a genre, but it's taken for granted that emulating the genre is something we're going to want to do.

If I had one wish-list item for a potential second edition of Dungeon Crawl Classics, it would be to ban all use of the words "Appendix N" from the main body of the text. If you want me to love the source material as much as you do, show me what the source material looks like, don't just assure me it exists. Sometimes, I got the impression that they loved Appendix N so much not out of any intrinsic merit of the cited works, but because the list was curated by Gygax in 1978. Is this a game about swords-and-sorcery-inspired dungeon-crawling adventurers or is it a game about trying to capture and fossilize the style of roleplaying you imagine existed at the start of the hobby?

Not to present it as a hard dichotomy or anything. Obviously, it's both. I guess I just enjoy one of those goals much more than the other.

Which brings me, sans elegant transition, to the other big pitfall of focusing on Appendix N, specifically. As a potential Canon For All Roleplaying (or even just the canon for a single game) it . . . reflects a very particular and narrow set of attitudes about gender, race, and sexuality.

That doesn't necessarily stop a modern game from approaching the tropes with a critical eye, to recreate the general overall feel of the genre with a more inclusive atmosphere . . . but Dungeon Crawl Classics doesn't really do that at all. To be fair, it also does not seem to deliberately lean into the problematic aspects of its inspiration, but bits and pieces do manage to break through, especially in the monster chapter. There's an enemy type that is literally called "subhumans." The section on regional variations for monsters begins, "Just as the men of one nation may be smarter, hardier, or more dangerous than their neighbors . . ."

Please, I beg of you, creators of DCC RPG, we have learned more in the past 50 years than just "AC makes more sense as an ascending value." But like I said, I don't think there was any malice too it. Just carelessness. "Degenerate Deep One hybrids" is something straight out of the source material and it's easy to just focus on the horror element of half-human fish monsters without realizing that in its original context it was anti-race-mixing propaganda. That's not an excuse for thoughtlessly repeating it, of course, but it's more on the level of an error than a crime.

Overall, I'd say that Dungeon Crawl Classics piqued my curiosity, but didn't make a compelling case for itself outside a very temporally specific form of nostalgia. Like, to me, the idea of going back to the proto-D&D source material and reverse engineering a new game based on those same sources is . . . an interesting thought experiment. Something that may, potentially, give me new insight into the hobby, but not anything like a much-needed-return-to-form-in-a-hobby-environment-that-has-sadly-lost-its-way. Like, my first thought after completing this book is that I'd like to see a WoD-OSR, where someone gives the DCC treatment to the Anne Rice novels and late-80s goth music that inspired the original Vampire: the Masquerade. And I'm fully capable of admitting that this is a needlessly perverse takeaway, but also, that's just who I am, and so I'm bound to appreciate Dungeon Crawl Classics more as a work of genre commentary than as an actual game.

Ukss Contribution: Each and every spell in the 200-page-long magic chapter (out of 466 pages total, because the one thing no D&D-derived game can ever escape is giving disproportionate attention to magic-users) is accompanied by a set of possible "spell manifestations" to reflect the fact that in-setting, there are actually hundreds of different spells that each do subtly different things. The setting element I'm picking here is more of an abstract concept that shows up a couple of times - the Mending spell variant that works by summoning hundreds of tiny gnomes. Or the Flight spell that has thousands of small birds lift you into the air.

I think that's a great magical image - absurd numbers of absurdly small beings working together to accomplish absurdly out-of-scale tasks. Maybe there will be a wand that just summons hordes of tiny creatures.

(Shadowrun) Target: Matrix

One thing I realized during the reading of Target: Matrix is that I have no idea how the internet works. I have a certain amount of familiarity with the experience of using it, in our real world, with our comparatively unsophisticated screen-based computer technology. But then I read something about accessing the local Seattle grid by visiting a virtual Space Needle and then selecting your ultimate destination by looking out one of the many windows that each show one of the various Seattle-based businesses in the form of distant landmarks . . . and I think, Is that how it really works? You know, behind the scenes? If I want to go to the website of a place headquartered in some distant location, is my computer sending messages up a geographical hierarchy until they reach the smallest network that contains both myself and my intended destination, whereupon they get passed back down the ladder to successively smaller and more specific networks until they reach the website I'm trying to access? It's all so seamless and automatic in real life, but I guess it must be a computer-to-computer relay with a small number of possible paths, where the bulk of the exchange happens between large internet service providers, each of which must have a physical location somewhere. 

And maybe it actually makes sense for Shadowrun's various matrix locations to have temporary or teleporting SANs (System Access Nodes) that only appear on particular local grids at specific times, and which savvy criminal hackers need to track down via their poorly articulated "computer skills." You want to access the semi-secret Shadowland data haven, it's not merely a matter of entering an address in to a browser, you have to manually perform all the tedious routing business. And even that will only get you as far the data haven's "killing jar" which is described as if it were a room with no exits where the system administrators can scan your hardware, run a background check, and potentially fry your computer (and brain) with hostile programs. But that could only work if Shadowrun's matrix works by actually transferring your consciousness to distant computers. If there's something more substantial being exchanged, above and beyond a series of encoded instructions, where Shadowland is telling your cyberdeck how to render its environment and your cyberdeck is telling Shadowland what operations you want to perform.

It's probably best not to think about it. The matrix is all about sending your brain on a little trip and never mind that the virtual reality form-factor doesn't really add anything to about 90% of the suggested use cases. You want to look up a particular piece of information and instead of just typing your question into a search bar, you have to wander through the streets of a virtual city or explore a haunted forest where everything is expressed as a mythological metaphor. And maybe this is faster in practice, due to the matrix operating at a far higher speed than meat-space, but maybe you could get even faster than that by just having your thoughts be the search bar and then the information comes to you?

But is that as interesting, narratively? You know, for the purposes of a role-playing game. Would I rather have a book of "locations," including fantastic architecture and human adversaries or would I prefer a book describing a series of blandly functional drop-down menus?

I think it's tempting fate to say, "the menus," because then someone might actually give it to me and I'd be obligated to read it. So I'll say, instead, that I liked the book best when the VR environments were an end in themselves. It was a hoot reading about the "Dawn of Atlantis" matrix game, with its "sprites, lizard men, and earth elementals." I'm not sure I entirely buy that high fantasy is a popular genre in the Shadowrun universe, but I do like the sly Earthdawn Easter Egg and I'm working on the theory that it's actually a canonical connection between the game lines. Some immortal from the previous age of magic got a job as a developer or consultant for this computer game and its seasonal metaplot is based on real events, possibly with some hidden agenda (maybe simulating the fall of Thera so as to make a planned Thera 2.0 more resilient?)

Overall, this was a decent enough book, but you have to spot it quite a bit re: the silliness of its basic premise. Actually, people will enjoy having elaborate virtual environments act as an intermediary between themselves and the work they want their computers to do. Not only that, but it will be more efficient than our boring old internet. That's the sort of world that must exist if you want to depict hacking as a thrilling activity where quick-witted rogues go on action-packed adventures.

Ukss Contribution: There's a bit in this book that is weirdly, specifically, a 2000-2006 period piece. People find these strange custom PDAs marked with a big red X. The PDA will send them messages asking for innocuous-seeming favors like "pick up this hitchhiker" or "take a picture of these particular pages from an occult book" (occult books are innocuous in the Shadowrun universe). And if you do it, you are "karmically rewarded" by other PDA-holding strangers doing small innocuous favors for you. 

Nowadays, this plot would focus on people with ordinary smart phones using a special app, but I like the idea of a network of strangers, none of whom can see the big picture, all doing a series of small-seeming favors for each other, blissfully unaware that the network would require some vast computational resources to work the way it appears to (because it doesn't answer requests, it anticipates future needs). I figure it's being driven by a strange intellect that is trying to butterfly-effect its wishes into the physical world because it's good at seeing chains of consequences but bad at understanding how things actually work.

Ukss is going to have something like that.

(D&D 3.x) Magic of Faerun

Magic of Faerun (Sean K Reynolds, Duane Maxwell, Angel McCoy) is the fifth full book I've read for Forgotten Realms and it's the first that I can unambiguously say that I liked. I didn't like it a lot, mind you. But my feelings were consistently mildly positive almost the entire time. This is a functional workhorse of a book that gave me a reasonable amount of Forgotten Realms lore. Some of it was super specific - like the Abbey of the Shining Truth, which gets a full dungeon write up - but it's all the relevant type specific. They're talking about mage guilds or bardic colleges and then they show me an example mage guild or bardic college. It works because I'm primed to be interested, and if all of Forgotten Realms were like that, I think I'd think it was pretty bland, but basically all right.

My only real problem with this book is the fact that the middle of my personal wavelength is probably just slightly beyond the most extreme thing it's willing to do. Like, in the section on gems with magical properties, it tells us about the Rogue Stone. They're rainbow-colored with an almost liquid, iridescent sheen and have the curious trait of always being found alone. They can be found in a wide variety of mineral deposits, but it's always just one rogue stone that happens to be trapped in a fissure. Furthermore, "some primitive human tribes believe rogue stones to be the sentient essences of dragons or mighty heroes, but sages hold this view to be folk nonsense."

And here is where Forgotten Realms really starts to task me, because I love everything about rogue stones. They sound pretty. It would be fun to explain to a group of player characters what these things are and why they're valuable. The low-key strangeness of their origin implies that the world has this ongoing background magic - no mundane geological process could explain the existence of these things, but that's all right because there's no reason to think that all of the world's geological processes are mundane. However, instead of just leaving it an inconsequential mystery, they had to add on that last little bit for me to get mad about.

Why the fuck would you do this to your own fantasy setting? You must realize that "the sentient essence of a mighty hero gets stuck in the rock and becomes a unique, beautiful gemstone" is just something you can decide to be true . . . right? Like, I didn't mind when rogue stones were just a weird phenomenon with no explanation, but I also think this new thing would be pretty cool to have in an rpg. I would have been fine with that explanation. Now, I have to wonder - who are these "primitive tribes" who are these "sages" and why did you decide that the sages know so much more than the tribes (by enough that you're comfortable labeling a cool fantasy idea "folk nonsense" even)?

Walk me through this. You're a sage in the city of Waterdeep. Actual wizards are fucking everywhere. There's a damned prestige class for just the ones in your hometown. Some merchant comes in with a remarkable, shiny rock that looks like nothing you've ever seen. Tells you they traded it from a tribe who says gems like this are always found by themselves, nestled in ordinary rock, because they contain the essence of a dragon or mighty hero. What part of your regular life experience causes you to dismiss this as "folk nonsense?"

And to bring things back to a Doylist perspective - what part of your training or instincts as a writer prompts you to imply that sage is correct for thinking this?

Although, I should perhaps not rant so much about this. It's only one sentence in a throwaway entry in a relatively unimportant part of the book. It's just a personal pet peeve. I do think it's emblematic of my ambivalence to the setting as a whole though. Forgotten Realms is capable of doing interesting things (I refuse to believe the butterfly-riders are no longer canon). You might even infer that it's pretty weird in its outline (high-level wizards in this world are so common that the Silverymoon arcane guild restricts itself to non-evil wizards who can cast 5th level or higher spells, and apparently this is more than just three or four people) but it so often refuses to stick the landing. Isolated ideas (whether they're weird fantasy or vanilla D&D) get maybe a sentence or two before moving on to the next thing and the social, philosophical, and cultural implications of its big ideas are never even slightly explored. Like, logically speaking, items with the continual light spell must be absolutely fucking ubiquitous, giving the Realms-folk a practically modern relationship to the concept of "nighttime" despite otherwise sharing so many traits with medieval Europeans. How does this manifest, culturally? The books are never going to say.

And it's not so much that I want them to (oh, who am I kidding? I definitely do) but when they don't, it gives me the impression that the Forgotten Realms takes itself completely for granted. It grew up in parallel with the primordial D&D, incorporating, from the very beginning, the oral tradition in-jokes, poorly-compensated magazine articles, and general 70s/80s nerd culture osmosis that would become the bedrock of "D&D lore." Hell, it spawned a lot of that lore itself. So I think by the time the setting's twentieth birthday starts coming around (and I'm counting from the first batch of Dragon magazine articles because while the Realms existed in some form since the 1960s, I doubt they were the D&D realms prior to the existence of D&D) it's kind of burdened by the weight of its own success. It only really needs to be "the world of Dungeons & Dragons" and never quite realizes that should be a floor, not a ceiling.

Magic of Faerun, by virtue of being about magic, is slightly less like that than some of the other Realms books I've read (though, if I'm picking a favorite, it's got to be Moonshae - it has lower lows, but higher highs, and I'm the sort of person who can forgive a low for the sake of a good high). Since it's fundamentally about More Stuff For Wizards to Do, it has to at least make a case for why the stuff wizards were already doing wasn't enough. And that shows through in the writing. It's one of the few Forgotten Realms books where I feel like I'm being pitched to. Why yes, I will be interested in this weird enemies-to-frenemies dynamic between Azuth the God of Wizards and Savras, the patron of oracles and diviners. Savras used to want Azuth's job, was turned into a magic scepter for awhile, and now that he's back to human form, the two deities have a somewhat cordial working relationship. Now, if you could maintain that exact level of focusing on the personalities and motivations of significant actors in all your future history sections, I think I could actually begin to like you, Forgotten Realms. 

Aside from having more-digestible-than-average lore, this book is also crammed with a bunch of doodads and trinkets for spellcasting characters. And spellcasters get a lot of love here. All of the prestige classes (with the exception of the technically non-magical Gnome Artificer and the spell-absorbing Spellfire Shaper) gets 10 caster levels, on top of their special abilities. Which make them a pure power boost for any caster who takes them. There's a long chapter crammed with new spells, many of which are bland, but functional, though there are a few standouts - like silverbeard, which either transforms an existing beard into metallic silver or causes you to grow a metallic silver beard, thereby increasing your Armor Class and giving you a Diplomacy bonus with dwarves. And the non-casters are not entirely left out. The magic item chapter contains plenty of new treasure including airships and contraceptive potions, a dagger that can transform into a viper, and regenerating rope made of troll guts (it's gross, I hate it, but I respect it for being so unabashedly gross and hateable).

Twenty years ago, when I was still actively playing D&D 3rd edition, I mostly ignored this book's lore and used it only as a source of bits and bobs for my unrelated campaign settings. Now . . . I still think that's probably the best use for it. It adds a bit to the dense tapestry that is Faerun lore, but it's also mastered the trick of moving past "vanilla" to become truly generic (or, at least, as generic as implied-setting D&D ever really gets) and that gives it a lot of versatility.

Ukss Contribution: Rogue stones, but I'm giving them the "primitive tribes'" backstory, damnit!