Thanks to my still having trouble doing fiction writing thanks to health problems, I continue in my exploration of Dungeon Crawl Classics–this time with a second player! My wife and our friend made it through the beginnings of another 0-level dungeon, only losing half their party to ill-equipped goat- and lizard-men in reaching level 1, though they took home a lot less loot in doing so.

I am setting both dungeon crawls in the same world, near enough to each other that the bandits killed by my wife’s party of now-level-2 adventurers were still bothering the environs of the village of the second group. Now that the bandits are gone, I have to come up with some other hazard to harass the party as they travel. I have some ideas involving either curses or wars, but I haven’t decided yet, and probably won’t until they set out to sell what they came away with; assuming, that is, that they don’t go back into the dungeon to die–I mean “adventure.”

Dungeon Crawl Classics is definitely a fun system, especially with the Mighty Deeds dice and the Mercurial Magic. In this second group, we have two spell-casters with innocuous spells that draw energy from dying dimensions to cast, killing thousands of innocent, unknown people with each use. Meanwhile, the only cleric in the party (half of whom are Lawful characters) is a Chaotic ex-gong-farmer worshiping the god of filth and pollution for whom healing Lawful characters is potentially sinful.

I am looking forward to running both mini-campaigns, and exploring both 2nd level and the further misadventures of my wife and our friend. I might type up some of the highlights after next time, in addition to my other plans to go a little bit into the details of character building in my own game system.

P.S.: Try out this dungeon map, by Tim Hartin. It is what I am using for my second game, and I think it is much easier to use than the one I chose for my first. They have currently only made it through a path of rooms 1-5-6-7-8-10.