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.
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