DCC Campaign: Serena's Angels?

 This campaign began on March 18th as a one shot originally. My group of friends had been playing Old School Essentials and really just were not feeling the gameplay at the time. Fantastic system but that is a topic for another post. We decided to give Dungeon Crawl Classics a shot after I had heard a lot about it in some other discords and then proceeded to buy a core rulebook and read the entire thing in two nights. Everything about the system caught my eye and there really didn't seem to be anything I did not like. 

This page will mainly hold the modules that we have used as we go through them and how I tied them all together for those who are interested. If people want to read an in-game story of what happened, those will be tied to the blog posts I will be putting up after each session. Once a module is completely finished, I will add it here.

Logistical Discussion

In subsequent posts, I will likely give a full story of what happened during a session of play. I do feel, however, that it may drag this original page too far so, instead, I will first give a general summary of what modules we played through and will tell the narrative story in another post. We began playing with four players in DCC #67 Sailors on the Starless Sea as our character generation funnel:

1. 
   Sean
2. Paden
3. Mavin
4. Isaac

Prior to playing I asked if any of the guys had interest in a specific class and, if so, I randomly rolled up some Purple Sorcerer level 0s with one of them having favorable stats for that class. Sean wanted a cleric, Paden a thief, Mavin a wizard, and Isaac a warrior. This "one shot" nearly immediately moved into a full campaign as the players absolutely fell in love with the system as much as I did. We run about three to four hour sessions on Tuesday nights and I believe Sailors took us about three sessions as we also completed the bonus area that Harley Stroh went back to write for the module. All in all, this was an amazing adventure. I killed 13 level 0s and the players picked up a few more as prisoners about to be offered up to the Slow God. Paden and Isaac both finished the module with two characters while Mavin and Sean had one. Everybody ended up with at least the class they wanted without me fudging any rolls (how could you fudge in DCC?!) so the final party was an elf, warrior, wizard, thief, cleric, and a token level 0.

From there, the segue between our funnel and the next module, DCC #97 The Queen of Elfland's Son, was simple as the players provided me ample plot hooks from DCC #67. Mercurial magic from the wizard ensured that the town they grew up in would no longer have rainfall for four years. This curse, on top of the vine horrors they accidentally unleashed, ensured that the townsfolk chased them onto the next adventure. Arriving in Eng, the party embarked on a... technically successful mission to protect the town.

I should point out here that many of these players are used to playing 5e Dungeons and Dragons and are used to power fantasy. There's not a lot of risk in 5e even at low levels and they assumed that now that the characters were now level one, it would be back to that style of play. This was not the case. Everything went fine until they arrived at the Mound and nearly completely wiped to the door guards. Then they went inside the Mound and tried an elaborate trap on the kitchen staff who then just walked out the other door in the room when threatened. Giving chase, the party then almost wiped again when they made no attempt to be quiet as they ran throughout the dungeon. Forced to retreat, Mavin used Ward Portal to block the exit for a day. The next day went at least a little bit better as they were forced to face the Huntsman early as payback for their ridiculousness the night before but, once inside, they were more cautious but again nearly died a second time to bad rolls. The cleric, played by Sean, was the MVP of this session risking very high disapproval to keep everyone alive. The adventure was resolved when, battered and broken, the party left the Mound and the cleric, with a ridiculous amount of stat loss which will be explained through a "House Rules" page on the blog, successful rolled a DC 20 Divine Intervention to collapse the doorway to the Mound from Eng's side. He decided to retire his cleric at this point and roll up some level 0s for the next adventure.

At this point, the party was gifted a tract of land in Eng to make their home and the-cleric-formerly-known-as-Sean decided she was going to make a church to her goddess, Justicia, on that land. For this, she needed a holy relic that was lost to time. Think something like a finger bone of a Saint. She has visions of this cave which is where a holy book may be hidden... queue the ominous music now as we cut to the One Who Watches From Below... watching... from below. It is worth noting that I run a very different vibe for my Shigazilnizthrub. It is not a destructive power deity like in the original module but think more of the Eye from the Magnus Archives mixed with Hermeus Mora from the Elder Scrolls. At this point, Mavin left the group due to a very busy real life schedule as well as a child on the way and we picked up Steve, a fantastic new addition who has a bunch of experience with other RPGs but was just checking out DCC. He started with four levels 0s and promptly was left with one, a dwarf. Sean lost two level 0s and ended up with a cleric and a thief. The module went fantastic with just the right amount of balance between exploration and caution from the party. Eventually, they of course went off the beaten path and ended up at the area of the module where I have to do actual work and design an area for them. This ended with the elf finally getting a patron in the form of Shigazilnizthrub who named him the Archivist. Steve also picked up another dwarf at this point giving everybody two characters. I had concerns about this at first but they all manage to play their characters wonderfully and as different entities.

From that creepy module, we moved onto Fate's Fell Hand which we are about to finish and honestly, I am crazy about this adventure. I moved between the two after a few weeks in game for the characters to rest and recover temporary lost attributes. Isaac's character began to have dreams of one of the wizards' faces on bodies of people he had killed in the past calling out for help. At this point, I made the mistake (?) of saying that this man's face resembled the Burger King and it helped the party remember exactly which one called them and the proceeded to go through the module and kill the blue and the red wizards as they were now loyal to this man who resembled the Burger King. Where we left off, the party had just finished their first day in the Vale and had managed to kill both wizards but had died so now the entire party is pledged to the yellow wizard who they have yet to meet and they are in possession of the majority of the plaques. This module has been fantastic because it really gives me Alice in Wonderland vibes and the characters feel extremely rich and real based on how I have run them off the few descriptive sentences provided and the feeling imparted through the art in the module. I am coming to realize that Harley Stroh is my favorite author of these by far.