Jennifer M. Baldwin

I love DCC’s funnel adventures, and in my continuing quest to make DCC more streamlined, combat faster, etc., I delved a little more deeply into using Spellburn & Battlescars for the DCC funnels.

First, I made my own zero-level character sheets that mimic the “fancy” zero-level sheet from DCC, but with the three stats of S&B (Body, Mind, Luck), no alignment, and slots for equipment.

Then I rolled up the three stats using S&B’s rules (2d6+3, lowest score goes to Luck), hit protection 1d6, and then I used the DCC rules for Lucky Sign and Occupation.

These took some modifications, since many of the Lucky Sign rolls include bonuses to saving throws or stats or attack rolls or whatever, none of which works for the Into the Odd-style system of S&B. For some of the Lucky Signs, it makes sense to simply increase a stat by one (or hp or whatever).

For other Lucky Signs (like ones related to specific DCC mechanics that aren’t found in Spellburn & Battlescars), it probably takes some creativity on the part of the judge and players to see how they could work, but it’s doable. The great thing about these Into the Odd-style games is that they won’t break if you start homebrewing.

After the Lucky Sign, I rolled on the DCC Occupations chart and used the weapon and item as the starting equipment (some items I classified as “small items” that didn’t count against my inventory). After that I rolled 1D6 for gold, rolled for one random item on the equipment chart, and let my PCs do a little extra shopping if they wanted.

Finally I thought up a name, wrote it on the top of the sheet, and the character was complete. This process was even faster than the DCC character creation at zero level (which is already pretty darn fast!).

To test my new zero-levels, I decided to run a quick solo funnel using Portal Under the Stars, the funnel included with the quick start and core book.

Since Spellburn & Battlescars (like Cairn and other ItO-style games) only has three stats (Body, Mind, and Luck), I figured that when a DCC module asks for Intelligence checks, I would either simply tell the players the information (per Cairn’s philosophy that players need lots of information to make informed choices), or I would have them make a Mind check (if failure is interesting or risky).

For the first challenge in Portal, the characters saw the stars shining on the floor, and because they would have no way of knowing that the changing constellations would magically open the door in two-hour’s time, I did have them each roll a Mind check, thinking that if they failed they might try to break down the door which would (of course) lead to a magical attack and possible injury or death (this is a funnel, after all). However, my woodcutter character was able to make his check and see that the constellations would eventually change and shine on the door, so they waited and the door opened.

In the next room, there were the four statues with spears, but instead of making attack rolls, in S&B you just roll for damage, so if I played the module as written, my first player through the door would take 4d8 damage.

I ruled that this was too much of a “gotcha,” so instead, I allowed the players to act before the spears if they passed Body checks. The woodcutter was going to dive out of the way, and the trapper was going to press herself against the hallway wall to avoid the spears. Sadly, they both failed their saves, so the spears hit. Two went to Philomena Skunk, my trapper, and two went to Jimminy Bark the woodcutter. In S&B, if more than one attack is aimed at a single target, only the highest die hits. Philomena got hit and her hit protection went to zero exactly, earning her a roll on the Scars table (a chance to increase one of her stats! Luck! Yay!). Jimminy also got hit but still had hit protection. (To keep this game in the spirit of the DCC funnel and high body count, if a PC takes Body damage and fails the save, then critical damage = death.)

After that, since neither had taken critical damage, they took a short rest and recovered their hit protection. At first I thought this might be too overpowered for a funnel: Wouldn’t these characters end up surviving to the end instead of being mowed down in grisly, gruesome, and hilarious fashion, which is the intention of the funnel?

However I was soon disabused of this worry because in the next room the statue that throws flames at whomever tries to leave the room totally took out Jimminy as he opened the door to the left, got hit with a fireball, and failed his critical damage roll. The funnel was doing its job of killing characters.

Philomena was able to run out the door before being hit by the fireball, but in the next room she encountered the giant snake, Ssisssuraaaaggg, and even though she got in a few hits, the beast was simply too strong. One person against a giant snake is not going to last very long (of course, in a “real” funnel, I would have at least four zero-levels and other players at the table with me). Philomena did take Body damage in the first round but made her saving throw, so she was able to fight again, but then she took Body damage a second time and failed her saving throw (with only 3 points of Body, it was gonna be tough to survive).

If this were a normal funnel and there were multiple zero-level PCs, then most likely a few more PCs would have died, but the party would have been able to take out the snake eventually, especially if they were all attacking it at once. That would have given them advantage and the highest attack roll would succeed.

I was making up the stats for the giant snake on the fly, but I think if I were actually running the funnel I would spend a little bit more time thinking about how many hip protection points it had and its armor and its Body score, etc. The snake was probably too overpowered as written for S&B, and I didn’t make the necessary adjustments in this little practice funnel. Or maybe if the party had been bigger, the casualties would’ve been in keeping with the spirit of the funnel.

All in all I think my modifications to S&B, including the incorporation of the DCC Occupations and items as well as the Lucky Sign roles all ended up working just fine. This is what I like about into ItO-style games: They are easily hackable, and hacks don’t break the game.

If my PC had survived the fight with the snake she would have probably taken up the horn and received the Invoke Patron spell. Using the spell mechanics for S&B, she could try to cast it, spending as many dice as she has inventory slots available (up to five). I practiced this just to see how it would work, and she used all five of her inventory slots to roll five dice. She did roll a misfire (rolling doubles on the dice), and using the table in S&B, I got a result that her grimoire burned up. This was irrelevant (she didn’t have a grimoire), so I had the misfire burn up something random on her inventory instead.

Her spell result for Invoke Patron was pretty high, rolling a 21 (she took four slots of exhaustion as a result). I wasn’t sure which patron to use so I just looked on the entry for Sezrekan, and her result would have given her a +5 on her next spell casting. Since this was a funnel, she didn’t have a scroll or a grimoire to cast any spells with (yet), but if she were to find one, a +5 bonus would be pretty handy.

All in all, the spell-casting mechanics can be modified to use with the DCC spell charts. I’m still not a huge fan of looking up spell results in the DCC core book because that takes time, but it does open up more opportunities for more spells and more DCC flavor to a game of S&B.

This little experiment has really whetted my appetite to try a full-length funnel using the Spellburn & Battlescars rules. Not only is making a zero-level PC super-fast and super-easy, but it still retains the flavor and fun of the DCC RPG funnels. Of course the dirty little secret is that any DCC RPG module can be used with any set of rules; just modify the monster stats and a few other things and you’re ready to go.

What I like about S&B as a DCC hack is that S&B is easy to mod in general and also fits the flavor of DCC in ways that other OSR games might not. You can dial-up the power level if you want, making PCs a little hardier and able to withstand some of the crazy stuff that comes with a DCC module. And in S&B, magic is something that any player can use; it’s not tied to a specific class, which suits DCC better than even the original DCC rules (which restricts magic to wizards, clerics, and sometimes thieves when they read scrolls).

If we’re looking at Appendix N literature, often the heroes are not magic-wielding types, but there are instances in which warriors, thieves, and adventurers of all sorts end up finding magical books or scrolls and reading the spells. Also, think of a warrior-wizard like Elric. In S&B, you can definitely have a character like that. In some ways, S&B hues closer to the pulp literature than even DCC does.

It would be interesting to see how Spellburn and Battlescars really stands up to a true funnel, with a group of players around the table each controlling four zeroes. I think it would work, and I am itching to try.

I really love the aesthetic and attitude of Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG, and I don’t even mind the general d20 system and game mechanics, but when I think of my ideal system, I’m much closer to the rules-lite side of things: Cairn, Into the Odd, Mausritter, Mythic Bastionland, etc.

I like DCC’s mechanics, but I don’t love them. Too much time looking things up in charts (and yes, I have the Crawler Companion on my phone, but even that takes several seconds to look things up). Too many stats that don’t end up meaning much. Roll-to-hit combat that means when it’s a player’s turn, they may end up missing, and then they have to wait for the next round to see if they can maybe try to succeed at hitting again, and too many misses in a row becomes frustrating for the player, and combat becomes a slog of misses and misses and misses. Roll-for-damage combat is the way to go. Faster, more intense, and nobody’s sitting in frustration because they’re not really involved in the action.

Part of this was spurred by a recent Questing Beast video about three-round combats, a hack that’s meant to speed up and make combat more meaningful. I’m not sold on it, frankly, but it got me thinking about my biggest pet peeve in D&D-like RPGs: the roll-to-hit mechanic. Having just been a player in a 5e game, it was beyond frustrating to keep missing with my spells during combat, and to then miss with my weapons during melee. It made the experience frustrating and not very tense.

(Why not tense? If the baddies are whoopin’ on us and we can’t seem to hit them, then shouldn’t that be hella tense? Surprisingly, no. It wasn’t tense at all. Tense is a ratcheting up of tension, but this combat wasn’t ratcheting up anything, it was just bandits hitting us and us missing them, but because we had just enough healing magic and a bottleneck so only one of them could attack at a time, we didn’t feel particularly in danger. Maybe if our rolls had continued to suck and we’d lost a few PCs, then tension would be there, but we avoided that outcome by eventually rolling successfully.)

Anyway, all these things made me think about ways to hack DCC to make it mechanically more like Cairn and other ItO-style games, while maintaining the unpredictability of magic and some of the Sword & Sorcery/Appendix N flavor of DCC.

I had a few brainstorms right before bed and stayed up till 1:00 a.m. thinking about them, then the next day I spent a couple of hours trying to hack together Cairn and DCC (“Cairn Crawl Classics”?). I simplified the stats (STR, DEX, WILL, LUCK), switched to a roll-under system, and for spells, created a new mechanic called “press your luck” where a luck save could bump a spell up to the next “entry” on the spell chart but a failure meant misfire and possible corruption. I also figured that characters could still spellburn to move a spell up to the next “entry.” This would allow players to succeed on their spell with a successful WILL save, but still give the spells their various levels of power.

I wasn’t quite sure what to do with the other classes (Warrior, Thief, the demihumans), so I played around with both Deed Die/Luck Die mechanics as well as offering advantage/disadvantage for various class-related things.

In the end, I “playtested” it by making a Warrior, Thief, Wizard, and Cleric and “running” them through the Abbot in the Woods module from the core book (written by Harley Stroh).

The playtest was a bit meh. The PCs were either overpowered or utterly unable to overcome certain situations. Combat was faster, for sure, but the module itself wasn’t very combat-heavy, so it meant that some of the other changes I had made overpowered the thief (advantage on thief-skill checks was way too much), and the Cleric Turn Unholy spell was simply too strong (I eliminated the HD-tiers and it was just Will SV=success at lowest result, “Turn 1 enemy;” but with “pressing your luck” and a little spellburn, the Cleric was easily able to dispatch two ghosts). It turned the game from one in which clever play, interaction with the fictional world, and teamwork makes a difference into one in which players “press buttons” on their character sheets to overcome obstacles.

Back to the drawing board. Except, I decided to do a quick search to see if anyone else had tried hacking DCC with Cairn, and low and behold, someone had indeed done such a thing: it’s called Spellburn and Battlescars.

Well, well, well. This game did several similar things to my own attempt, but instead of my “press your luck” mechanic for increasing spell results, S&B went with a GLOG-influenced “power” mechanic where a player can increase the power of the spell by spending equipment slots and adding more d6s to the dice pool. This was brilliant! I could easily take a DCC spell, set the first success result (normally 12-13 for Level 1 spells) as 1-6, and then each successive entry on the spell chart would go up by 6: 12-13 becomes 1-6, 14-17 becomes 7-12, 18-20 becomes 13-18, etc. Players who want a result that’s normally a 21 in DCC, would need to roll a 19 total, so they might spend 4 slots and roll 4 dice hoping for the sum to be high enough. (Of course, per S&B’s rules, this increases the likelihood of some corruption happening, because if you roll doubles you have to roll on the mishap table, but even here, I could use the corruption tables from DCC and the spell could still have this more explosive result for the player.)

(And yes, I know I wanted to avoid all the “looking up on charts” hassle from DCC, but I figure, these spell results can be shortened/adapted for use in S&B, and the corruption table could be something I homebrew, maybe modifying what’s in DCC with what’s included in S&B. I would have all this on my GM screen instead of flipping through the massive DCC book, and that alone would be a time saver. But no matter what, S&B generally simplifies combat and makes magic and fighting successful for players because there’s no more roll-to-hit mechanic.)

S&B also solved the problem with making each class unique by having a list of abilities that players can unlock as they complete tasks related to their archetypes. The game doesn’t have levels per se, but it does have players keep track of what they’ve accomplished in the game world, and if it’s related to their archetype, they get to try for improved skills, hp, and more special abilities. Simple mechanics, story-focused but still retains the flavor of “classic” character classes from DCC, this was much better than my advantage/disadvantage and Deed Die/Luck Die/etc. stuff. PCs are not too overpowered but also not too squishy either.

The one thing I’m not sure about is the cost of equipment in S&B; some items seem wildly overpriced. But that’s easily tweaked, and frankly, with only ten item slots, PCs can’t be buying a lot of stuff anyway unless they hire retainers to carry equipment. The game seems less interested in inventory management than games like Cairn, partly because the archetypes are a bit more powerful and problems can be solved more readily through combat (which is true in DCC too).

All in all, I’m glad I tried my hand at homebrewing my own “Cairn Crawl Classics,” but I think if I want to play DCC with faster, more streamlined rules, I’ll use S&B to do it. Frankly, I’m so excited by a faster, rules-lite DCC, that I kinda want to play a one-shot with S&B characters and a DCC module. I imagine it could be incredibly fun, fast, and still feel very “DCC,” just without some of those sluggish mechanics.

(One last thing for those of you thinking, “What about the funnel?!” Because S&B includes “Backgrounds,” players could still play zero-level PCs in a funnel, using the equipment included as part of their PCs’ backgrounds, and then, if they complete something related to one of the archetypes (they most definitely will in a funnel, unless they die), they could “level up” to that archetype, get the archetype equipment and special ability, and be ready for “level one” modules. I could even see them answering the “Origin Question” on the character sheet with an answer from their funnel adventure, making the funnel and character creation even more story-focused than it is in the original DCC game. And not only that, you could easily use DCC occupations instead of S&B’s backgrounds, so gongfarmers could still be a thing!)

[This play report contains spoilers for Dolmenwood’s Winter’s Daughter adventure module. First part of this solo adventure is HERE.]

The snowstorm only hindered them for a bit. They were so close to Sir Chyde’s burial mound when the storm began that they found it and groped their way to the stone entrance.

Joremey was ready. He wanted to find the Lady, find her ring, be a hero. He led Lady Pouncemouse and Obb through the door, prying it open with a crowbar so they could get out of the snow and cold.

The tomb kept the snow out but not the cold. Obb managed to shake off the frigid air, but Joremey and Lady did not, further adding to their exhaustion (and hindering their ability to fight and do damage). Still, they were glad to be out of the snowstorm as they entered the tomb and descended twenty feet down stairs caked with dust. Everything was deathly silent, and there was a dank smell in the air. Moisture and mold pervaded the space. Lighting one of Joremey’s torches, Lady held it and led the way.

She stopped at a square room made of stone blocks. It was musty and wet, and the first thing she noticed were the four plinths, one in each corner of the room. Atop each plinth was an object covered in mustard-yellow mould. Her eyes lit up at the thought of treasure, but as soon as Lady stepped into the room, the objects floated into the air and screamed at her in shrill voices:

“Heathens! Repent, ye sinners! Godless fairies, godless heathens!”

The objects–a silver chapes, a wooden cherub statue, a holy book, and a thick liturgical candle–launched themselves violently at Lady, trying to strike her dead.

Luckily, my PCs won initiative, so Lady booked it across the room to a doorway on the right side, Obb and Joremey following quickly behind (Joremey’s plate armor clanking noisily). As soon as they fled into the other room, they heard the objects shout, “Serves ye right!”

Huffing for breath, Lady led them all down a ten-foot hallway to another chamber, a circular room that seemed less hostile (at first). This room was also constructed of stone blocks, but there was a chill atmosphere as they entered it. On the southeastern side of the circular room was an empty marble plinth (3′ across, 1′ high) with a full-length mirror behind it on the wall. The mirror was framed in silver and faced a set of stairs on the opposite wall (northwest side of the room).

The stairs were stone-carved with the archway over them also carved of stone to look like tree branches hanging over the entryway. Next to the stairs was another hallway leading out of the room.

Joremey was quite interested in that mirror and went right up to the plinth, faced the mirror, and looked.

Lady, for her part, was interested in the stairs and the beautiful tree motif carved into the stone archway. Obb followed Lady and peeked into the nearby hallway as they went. What they didn’t see was poor Joremey, so transfixed by his glance into the mirror that he turned still as a stone.

In fact, he really WAS frozen in place!

“Joremey, lad! Come see!” Lady called, noticing that on the stairs there wasn’t a hint of dust (unlike the rest of the tomb) and that at the bottom there was a watery shimmer in the light from her torch.

But Joremey said nothing.

“Cat got your tongue?” Lady teased, turning around and seeing immediately that Joremey was now frozen solid.

“Stay back from the mirror!” she warned Obb as they both skirted the wall of the room to reach Joremey without looking directly into the mirror. They pulled at him, but he was utterly frozen. Together, they managed to lift him up and pull him away from the mirror, but it was no use; he was still cursed.

Obb broke out his pan pipes and tried to play a tune, hoping it would break the spell, but it appeared this was holy magic and not fairy…

“Best to head back to Lankshorn,” Obb offered. “Let Fr. Dobey handle it.”

But Joremey was much too heavy for little Lady and Obb to carry. They could try dragging him…

“Let’s strip off all his stuff,” Lady said, “he’ll have to be glad we’re taking him back even if he leaves his gear behind.” They stripped him of everything but his traveling clothes, and heaved him up in their arms. He was heavy, and they couldn’t move very fast… Could they outrun the screeching objects in the first room?

They tried, but this time, initiative was not on their side. They lost and the objects attacked.

“Back for more, eh? Ye heathen fairies!”

Two objects (the candle and the book) hit Lady, and one (the chapes) hit Obb. Lady went down (taking five damage, more than her total), and Obb couldn’t help but drop Joremey without Lady’s help. Terrified, he simply fled for his life, but lost initiative again, meaning two objects hit him (the chapes was joined by the cherub). He took five points of damage and fell to a crumpled heap. Poor Joremey was frozen like a statue on the floor, while his two comrades lay dead on either end of him. The holy objects–satisfied that they’d destroyed the heathen interlopers–returned to their podiums.

Now Joremey must rest here, frozen seemingly forever in the tomb of Sir Chyde unless some other adventurer should find their way into the tomb and rescue him…

Yikes. That was an ugly defeat. I suppose if initiative had gone differently, my party might have made it out alive, but as it was, they did not. I thought fleeing the first time was the right call (four objects vs. three PCs didn’t seem like good odds), but once Joremey was frozen from the mirror’s magic, things got much dicier. OSR-style gaming is not for the faint of heart!

I do really like how simple the mechanics are. Combat (though deadly) is quick, and my characters were able to explore and make choices without too many rules or fiddly skill rolls getting in the way. Exploration means describing character actions and seeing what the modules says they see/hear/smell/etc. It’s very narrative in that way, very immersive.

For group play, if one of my players investigated the plinth and mirror, and I knew looking into the mirror caused paralysis, I would telegraph that danger. I might say that he gets an ominous feeling as he approaches the plinth and looks around. Maybe say that he feels especially cold as he comes nearer the mirror, “freezing cold,” or something similar.

But for solo play, I wasn’t sure how to handle that since I can’t really “telegraph” danger to myself. Perhaps I should have rolled dice and used my oracle to determine whether Joremey approached cautiously and avoided getting frozen. Having him simply “be cautious” while knowing (as the player) that the mirror is magical feels like cheating. This might be a case where letting the randomness of dice determine a PC’s fate should’ve been the way to go. As this is only my second “solo play” session, I can’t be too hard on myself. I’m learning as I go.

Now that my trio of adventurers is dead/paralyzed in an ancient tomb, I have two choices: send some of Joremey’s cousins off to find out what happened to him OR start with a totally new adventure and character(s).

I’m somewhat inclined to go with the second option… I’m already envisioning a human thief who meets a human or breggle fighter in a tavern and together they go adventuring… Fafhrd and Gray Mouser, Dolmenwood-style!

Till next time!