Well, third place, anyway.
Last week Goodman Games announced the winners of their first Road Crew Bumper Sticker Design Contest. One of my entries came in third!
I’m really excited to see it in print and to proudly display in on our family van. You can check out all the winners and runners-up on the Goodman Games web site.
Chris Doyle’s The Sunken Temple of Set was released in 2021 as one of Goodman Games’ Free RPG Day modules. It’s a 7th-level adventure for Dungeons & Dragons set in the classic Dark Tower setting and ties in with Goodman Games’ upcoming DCC/5e conversion of the original module.
The adventure’s titular temple is dedicated to the lesser deity Sobek, but has recently become the locus of a powerplay by a son of the evil god Set. The PCs can be roped into the conflict in a number of ways, but wind up (unwittingly) working on behalf of the temple’s former high priest to oust the usurper and his minions.
Things start off with a great sequence around the lake on which the temple is located as PCs must navigate to the entrance. Investigation and exploration are rewarded, with multiple paths possible. Once inside the PCs must contend with secret doors, an underwater crypt, and numerous crocodilian monsters, culminating with the three-headed son of Set, Makura. The module also features some new desert-themed weapons and spells.
I’ve had the opportunity to run Sunken Temple for my regular 5e group and online as part of Gary Con. Both groups enjoyed the old school challenge of the adventure, with my regular 5e group, which is made up of players relatively new to the hobby, particularly intrigued by a style of play they weren’t accustomed to.
Crafty players can make quick work of the module if they don’t do a lot of exploration — my Gary Con group completed it in about 3 hours by avoiding a major fight and speeding through the crypt. This might be mitigated somewhat in campaign play, when PCs are more prone to search for treasure than in a one-shot.
Bottom line: The Sunken Temple of Set is a fantastic 5e adventure with old school charm. It can be easily slotted into an existing campaign (my regular group is playing through Descent into Avernus, so the sunken temple became part of that plane’s hellscape) and can serve as a fun side quest or one-shot.
Mind you – you can never guarantee that any given gaming crew will have a good time playing your adventure. A million things can go wrong, up to and including incompatible styles between yourself and the group playing through your dungeon. Games go off the rails all the time, and there is nothing you can do to prevent that from happening. What you can, and should, control is the quality of your design. The better adventure you write, the more likely it is to facilitate a fun night of gaming for a group when the GM picks up your adventure.
Brendan J. LaSalle, “Unleashing Your Dungeon Creativity” in How to Write Adventure Modules That Don’t Suck (2017)
Ethereal Gary Con will be running online March 24-27, 2022! Game tickets go on sale tomorrow; I’ll be running three games at the con:
I hope to see you there!
It’s hard to deny that magic is the default mode of human storytelling. All the old myths and poems contain transcendent magical powers and transitions. Medieval romances and epics are full of fantastical and miraculous things. It wasn’t until the 18th and 19th centuries in which stories arose in which nothing magical happened, and verisimilitude became the watchword. We sometimes call it realism. I have nothing against realist novels, as it happens… I just think we need to acknowledge that they are the aberration in the larger context of humanity’s appetite for stories. For the moment however, this rejection of the power of miracles extends even to our stories about the miraculous. One feature that Rowling’s and Pratchetts’ series share with nearly all narratives and stories predicated upon magic is that magic has rules. This is because magical thinking has rules. Psychological rules, that is. Magical thinking is that near-ubiquitous human state of mind at work in ritual, prayer, and religion, as well as obsessive compulsive behavior. The belief that there is a causal relationship between human actions and beliefs, and cosmic eventuality. I wonder what it would be like to write a fantasy novel in which the magic has no rules at all. That would be bracing, and might bring out this buried truth: millions who think they love fantasy because of the magic actually love it because of the rules.
Adam Roberts, forward to Monday Starts on Saturday (2017)
I’ll be at Heroicon on Saturday, May 7, in Decatur, Illinois, running my first in-person con game — Museum at the End of Time at 1p CT:
The Rite of Passage is a generational custom, and the PCs’ future position and rank within their society is largely determined by the quality of artifacts brought back to the tribe! A zero level funnel adventure for Mutant Crawl Classics; pregens provided.
Badges are now available. Proceeds from Heroicon go to Games For Troops, an Illinois non-profit whose mission is to deliver board, card, and other games to the men and women of the US Armed Forces. I hope to see you there!
At the end of 2019 I was planning to dive deep into board games: I was putting together a little card game about a robot who saves a crippled spaceship’s crew, I had started attending a local board game meet-up, and I even had tickets for Gen Con 2020.
Then came a global pandemic and lockdown.
As a result, 2020 was the year I went deep into role-playing games, spurred on by a late 2019 invitation to play some Mutant Crawl Classics.
At first I was a little skeptical. I don’t consider myself an old school gamer (I cut my teeth on AD&D 2e and Werewolf: the Apocalypse) and my experience with grognards was uneven at best. And now a gonzo game with lots of random tables, high lethality, and a design aesthetic from the 70s?
Instead I found that I loved the game. Reflecting back on the last year I think there are three things in particular that make the Dungeon Crawl Classics system (on which MCC is based) right for me:
Randomness acts as a guardrail. One of the things that made me keep old school gaming at arms length was the perception (and some experience) that the “rulings not rules” ethos was used as justification for GM fiat. As someone who wants the characters to be proactive and try things, I tend to at least give players the opportunity to fail. But I’ve played with old school DMs who just say “no, that won’t work” without even letting me roll the dice.
What I found playing MCC is that the randomness actually puts the brakes on some of this because “that doesn’t work” is baked into the system. For instance, the DCC spell system incorporates random tables specific to each individual spell. Roll too low and the spell fizzles out (or even causes physical corruption of the spellcaster!). On the other hand, the effect of the spell becomes bigger and more spectacular the higher you roll.
Even when attempting something that isn’t covered by a system in the rules there’s an easy mechanic for letting players try out something crazy, because…
Luck is the secret sauce. DCC characters come with five stats that will be familiar to most gamers: Strength, Agility, Stamina, Personality, and Intelligence. But instead of Wisdom, DCC (and MCC) has Luck.
Luck can be used in two primary ways. First, if a character wants to try something outside the box, the judge can call for a simple Luck check: roll a d20 and try to roll under your Luck score. If you succeed, it works; if not it fails. This can be used in a variety of situations: did you remember to bring a tool that will help you out? Do you find anything useful in that discarded backpack you found? Is the dragon asleep or awake as you creep into its lair? All can be handled by a Luck check.
Even more importantly, Luck can be used to boost any roll. By taking a permanent decrease in your Luck score you can add a bonus to almost any roll. Decrease your Luck by 1, get a +1; decrease it by 2, get a +2; and so on. Desperate times call for desperate measures and taking a hit to your Luck will get you out of an immediate scrape, but will catch up with you eventually. That extra dash of resource management really balances out Luck and is one of the unique spins the creators of DCC brings to the hobby. Speaking of them…
Goodman Games treats its fans well. Without calling anyone else out, I don’t know of an RPG company that does more outreach and support for its players than Goodman Games. They have regular programming on their Twitch channel with actual plays, shows about the literature of Appendix N and old D&D modules and previews of upcoming releases. They host regular online conventions and actively support a large number of regional and national cons.
They even have their Road Crew program which rewards judges (their term for GM) who run public games in their local community or at cons. How cool is that?!
On top of that, they understand that lots of gamers don’t have a lot of cash to spend on modules, so their price point for the standard adventure is just $10 for the printed version or $7 PDF. They do have some deluxe boxed adventures that cost a bit more, but the fact that I can get a solid adventure that will last 4-6 hours for just $10 is amazing.
All said, getting into DCC/MCC this past year has been a boost to my gaming life. I’m looking forward to running some modules at cons this coming year and continuing to meet more members of the DCC community!
The Museum at the End of Time by Jim Wampler may be my favorite module to run. Set in the post-apocalyptic world of Terra A.D., the adventure follows young tribe members setting out on their Rite of Passage, a dangerous journey to find technological artifacts from the pre-cataclysmic society and return them for the good of the tribe. The PCs stumble across the titular museum and must face it’s wonders and dangers if their are to succeed in their quest.
The module does a great job of presenting a sandbox location for players to explore. Railroading is kept to a minimum and exploration is encouraged as players encounter historical displays to interact with and indecipherable artifacts to play with. This also means there are only a few pure combat encounters in the whole adventure — which isn’t to say the museum isn’t deadly. Only the craftiest and luckiest of PCs will survive as the technology found in the museum can prove to be as lethal to clueless PCs as any monsters. This includes my favorite encounter in the module which, without spoiling anything, features a surprising twist on the TPK.
I’ve run the museum multiple times at cons and for friends, and it never fails to delight and surprise even veteran players by highlighting what makes Mutant Crawl Classics so distinctive: a heavy reliance on bizarre random effects, placing PCs in situations in which ordinary (to the players) objects become alien and unknown, and clever references to a variety of classic science fiction stories and tropes (Museum directly references 2001: A Space Odyssey, Dune, and Critters, among others).
The Museum at the End of Time is a level 1 adventure and was the first module released for the Mutant Crawl Classics RPG in 2016. It can also be used as a zero-level funnel for 16-20 PCs. It can be comfortably run in four hours. A PDF version of the module is available as a free download from the Goodman Games web site.
