But they tried. "The Imperishable Sorceress" felt like the classic Appendix N that is so central to Dungeon Crawl Classics' overall appeal. It's got strange demons and was weirdly sci-fi. The titular imperishable sorceress learned the art of crafting an immortal body from a species of underwater bug people who lived "before even the age of dinosaurs" (whatever that means in a world where dinosaurs still exist). But then she died in a freak accident before completing the ritual and her ghost haunts a level 1 dungeon (I guess because it wasn't designed to stop intruders, it's just old and haunted) and she tries to manipulate the PCs into reuniting her with her imperishable body and the magic gem that will fuse her ghost back into it.
If you help her out, she's extremely ungrateful and betrays you at the first opportunity, but there's little motivation to actively thwart her return. You can read some of her research materials that reveal her to be a pretty terrible person, but by default she's nice to the PCs as a means of buttering them up, so that feels like an easily missable clue. You could also, potentially, just ignore the ghost plot entirely and loot the dungeon, but there's not actually all that much loot there, mostly just a chaotically-aligned intelligent sword that is surely going to be more trouble than it's worth and the imperishable body itself, which only a member of the ghost's bloodline (one of whom is a randomly-chosen PC, to be fair) can transfer into.
Overall, it just seems like a massive waste of time. Also, one of the encounters uses the word "savages" as a noun in exactly the same context as its Appendix N source material. 2013 was too late to still be doing that sort of thing, so I'm not even going to leaven my scolding. Mr Bishop, you should have known better.
The Xcrawl adventure is a bit better. The premise of the adventure is just the premise of Xcrawl itself - in this fantasy version of North America (which is apparently an empire that worships a bastardized version of the Roman gods) dungeon-crawling is a televised sports-reality gameshow with real life and death stakes! It kind of works. Instead of treasure chests, the Studio City Crawl uses the Prime Time Dance Squad, beautiful showgirls who, if you find them and tag them will award you a fabulous prize (some of which are immediately useful equipment, handed out directly, and others are treasures with monetary value, awarded once you leave the dungeon). Likewise, the dungeon is run by this over-the-top ringmaster figure called DJ (dungeon judge) Prime Time. In the end, clearing the dungeon isn't quite enough. You have to do it with enough style that the audience will vote for you over the other teams of adventurers (who have names like "The New Frogmen" or "Smash and Grab") and give you Fame Points in a system this adventure alludes to but saves for the new Pathfinder-compatible Xcrawl corebook.
It's an incredibly thin plot, but it's an effective advertisement for its parent game (which, I suppose, is what Free RPG Products are all about). I definitely came away thinking I could see myself running Xcrawl as a casual pick-up game or as a breather between more serious campaigns.
In the end, I can't really complain about a book I got for free . . . so I won't (except about that racist bit I pointed out earlier). It's really just a thin, attractive pamphlet that very successfully achieves what it set out to do - communicate the vibes of the rpgs it's advertising. I probably won't run either of the adventurers, but I googled Xcrawl after reading this book, so that's at least one verified advertising impression.
Ukss Contribution: Not a lot to choose from. The thing I enjoyed the most was Xcrawl's weird genre mashup, but it's not something I'd want to port to any other setting (well, maybe Nobilis, but nothing less whimsical than that).
I'll have to go with my second choice - the imperishable body. It's unaging and will survive even grievous wounds like decapitation, but it has no natural healing ability, so even if you do survive having your head cut off, there's no way to reattach it except long-lost spells first developed before the age of the dinosaurs. The result is a pretty robust form of immortality that will inevitably lead to you gradually losing various bits and pieces of yourself over the years until your trapped, conscious and undying, in a body too riddled by damage to function. It's something that strikes just the right tenor of horror for dark sorcery.
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