Sunday, April 28, 2013

A Plethora of Alternate Classraces for you To Crawl through Dungeons In

So, I really dig Realms of Crawling Chaos (hereafter RoCC) for Labyrinth Lord - it was the purchase of this item that prompted me to start the DCC campaign, together with a smattering of play in Dave Younce's and Jason Paul MacCartan's games and Daniel Bishop's Christmas module from last year ("The Thing in the Chimney" - adroitly run for me and Jurgen Mayer by Josha Petronis-Akins).

Since DCC is kinda my rules-set of choice these days, and I've been poring over interesting ideas in the never-ending quest to keep the folks coming to play, I have been much pondering over the White Ape, White Ape hybrids, Voormis, and Deep One hybrid ("Sea-Folk") in RoCC.  As I have argued in other fora in the past, in DCC there's really no reason IMHO why you couldn't slap any "race" you wanted on a bunch of stats and wing the skills etc. from there (provided the class is right for you).  So, if I had a high Strength and Stamina Warrior and wanted a White Ape, then hey, call him "Gruthorn the White Ape", have his occupation be "Banana Warden" or whatever, and off you go.  Some approaches to occupations outside of the traditional medieval ones are simply outstanding, to my mind, and the core rules sort of encourage with a sly wink that characters should go with the mood that moves them.  Hey, read it how you want to.

Anyways, with this in mind, and my eye on several neat posts on the DCCRPG community on G+, here are links to a bunch of alternate classes or races that have utility and could show up in a game near you, soon.  Or not - I've noticed a good deal of puritanism so far although my circle of DCC gamers is small.

Serpent-Folk, Deep-One, and Orc

Centaur

Drunken Monk

Wild Mage

Kenku (note: several other races hidden in nearby links wink wink)

Lizardfolk

Monk

Ninja

There's even a campaign  around there somewhere where here, in which the Judge allows a motley crew of races culled from a wide variety of TSR stuff from way back.

Also, don't forget about Crawl! fanzine #6 which has a Gnome, a Ranger, a Paladin, and a Bard.

I only link these because I hate elves.  I hate them.  At least, the Tolkienish elves, except the ones from the Rankin-Bass Hobbit movie.   The Magic Candle had interesting bald, weird looking elves.  Anyways, I don't judge you elfy types.  It's all good.

If you know of more, please feel free to add a link in the comments.

Also, I just saw this which I like to think about. A method to generate non-standard races for play during the funnel.

Thus came the Mole-Man

My own race, the Deep One Hybrid

The Robot re-coalesced into demireality.

Warforged

The Samurai is lost in the aether maybe returned to us, with honor and much wisdom gleaned from the nebulous realm of non-existence

Thanks to you, sir, for your Tiefling

There's a thing called Transylvanian Adventures on RPGNow, includes a bunch of new classes.

A pretty cool Druid for you

My very own Tomb Rustler

A loose framework for the anti-halfling Tcho-Tcho Marauder! It eats all your white ganglion paste and Long Pork Short Ribs


Mystic Bull's Tokar - shaggy maned stout hunter gatherers from THE GOD SEED AWAKENS

I saw a Weird Scientist happen the other day

A Talislantan Thrall Warrior

My own Skate Hero, zipping around and olly-ing over stuff

The works of +Daniel Bishop are rife with  new races; I think maybe it's a point of honor for him to include new ones in the things he publishes.  The Creeping Beauties of the Woods series is now in its second installment and has a Faerie Animal that is chock full of potential!  I want to play a chaotic Fox Spirit heavily corrupted by plague in memoriam to the rabid critter I killed to death with a coffee mug last year, but I digress

Crawljammer #1 has a Lizardman Mercenary and the requisite occupations

I have it on good authority that the Crawljammer! #2 has a Technomancer (it's now in my RPGNow cart)

Also, rumour has it that Crawling Under A Broken Moon  fanzine has a Technologist class, and it can be had for purchase over at THIS LINK.  Lords of Light!  Let's Ride!

Tales from the Fallen Empire is a setting book for DCC, including 6 new classes and a revision of the Wizard - on the wishlist but soon to be picked up.  It includes a Man-Ape, so it's a must-buy next paycheck for me.

Daniel Bishop posted another race on his blog which looks fun, The Zariah

My toil is unceasing, far from home, I present The Moon Dweller Psionicist

Behold the coming of The Scrappler!

A thewsy Barbarian

Age of Ruins has a Henchman set up for second-string survivors (not a full write up)

If something's not on here, it's mostly because I don't own it yet (for example in the case of the Tales of The Fallen Empire source book)

I am gratified that this list is evidently useful - spread the word to all yer friends! (also, it may need a break down and rebuild as it's getting unwieldy and may become a print thing also)

New Stuff... Every so often.

So, I've been running a Dungeon Crawl Classics campaign on Google+, with its awesome Hangouts feature. I settled on the Barrowmaze megadungeon by Mssr. Gillespie.  The administering and thinking about this campaign peaked out (piqued out?) maybe a month ago, and now it's on a simmer instead of a rapid boil.  I've met a lot of great gamers (just great people generally) and had a great deal of nefarious fun.

The Barrowmaze itself ought not to need any introduction and crystallizes a great number of things I felt as a wee young tike all o' 8 years of age, ugly blue plastic dice in hand, idolizing my brother and feverishly fumbling through the Fiend Folio.  Scourge of the Barrowmaze lets me chortle and plot and connive in the way that I imagined my brother's friends did long ago, and I find that it's helped me as a player, although I rarely am able to play as a PC these days.  Now that I have the DCC ruleset mostly under my belt and understood, I have painstakingly rather loosely converted the Barrowmaze's random encounters into an easy to use DCC chart! To save myself a good deal of .pdf page flipping and verbal pauses ("Ehmm... Uhm...  Bear with me guys... Almost there...  Mmmm...")

Here it is, and enjoy it if you like.  I had started to make a conversion of ALL the monsters in the first book to DCC stats but when I set up the spreadsheet and counted 'em all up it came to 89 different monsters or so and then my evening tea wore off and I passed out.

Thanks to Jeramy Deram and his conversion document, that was as good a guide as any you could hope for.  Feel free to give constructive criticism, or what-have-you.  And to Paul Wolfe who inspired the idea and gave a good headstart.  By way of crowdsourcing, if'n you are interested in helping me convert the rest of the BM1 monsters to DCC, then gimme a shout out here or on G+.  I could make the spreadsheet publicly available, I suppose... (note, it's in Word 2003 format since I suck, but I guess I could make it a Google Doc if any fish bite this hook).  This would spread the word on the Barrowmaze slightly farther, save some poor be-knighted DCC judge some footwork, and bring the end and doom of some hapless PCs slightly ahead of schedule.

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