• Level 1: Umur Pearlhammer
• Level 1: Ethys Haffoot
• Level 1: Erin Wywood
• Level 1: Hilda Breadon

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Here we goooo! My surviving Portal characters have leveled up (links above) and so it is time for their first story as true adventurers. Which also means that it’s time for me to play the full breadth of Dungeon Crawl Classics’ excellent rules. I’m super excited, which you can probably tell by the frequency with which these posts have been coming. Don’t expect this same pace forever, but for now I’m still, shall we say, gung-ho about this project.

Before I jump into the narrative, though, there are a number of topics I want to cover, namely: a) why I chose Doom of the Savage Kings as my Level-1 adventure, b) a modification to the leveling and experience system from the core rulebook that I’m using for my solo-play stories, and c) my addition of Level 0 retainers to the party to serve as backup characters (and possible fodder), and finally d) when and where this adventure will take place relative to The Portal Under the Stars, and  one veeerrrrrry significant event that will have occurred between stories.

Doom of the Savage Kings

One of the joys of discovering DCC a dozen years after its original release is that there are literally hundreds of published adventures, plus a metric ton of supplemental materials (some of which I’ve linked to in the character level-up posts). I admit that choosing a single module as my jumping off point was difficult.

Eventually, I decided on either The People of the Pit or Doom of the Savage Kings. Why these two? Primarily because both are in the Tome of Adventure, Volume 1, a collection of the first seven adventures published for DCC by Goodman Games that I own. I admit that I don’t really understand their numbering conventions… Why is Doom #66.5? But whatever. They are written by two of DCC’s most revered progenitors, Joseph Goodman and Harley Stroh, respectively, so I felt like I would be in good hands with either. I sat down to read both in their entirety to decide.

Not surprisingly, both are great and sound epic. I chose Doom for two reasons. First, it was easier to envision the group of 4 PCs (plus retainers!) moving into the events of Doom over People given that I wanted the PCs to leave Graymoor behind. Second, The People of the Pit seems… complex, and I read some forum posts that suggested that a Judge would need to modify it, possibly heavily, before running it successfully. Given that I’ll be struggling through the full complement of rules for the first time, I thought it wise to stick to something simpler. Which is not to say that Doom is a simple, linear module. Quite the contrary; Doom of the Savage Kings is a sandbox with a lot of options for the PCs to explore.

Experience and Leveling

Something that bothers me about every level-based TTRPG is the idea that PCs can make a sudden jump in abilities with a snap of the fingers. Wizards learn new spells, Warriors become significantly tougher and learn new moves, Thieves understand more complex locks, all in an instant, usually the second that a random monster dies. It breaks all immersion for me. In my mind, new abilities should be earned by taking the experience of the adventure and applying it to dedicated training or some other event. My fiction blurbs for each level-up post demonstrate the sort of story that makes sense to me.

Leveling up in Dungeon Crawl Classics is based on experience points (XP), calculated from encounters that the party survives. Moreover, each level requires subsequently more XP, so the gap between leveling up gets longer. The system is straightforward, and I haven’t heard a single DCC player complain about it. On one hand, then, I feel squeamish about fiddling with the standard leveling system before I’ve even tried it. On the other hand, I’ve played a ton of games using similar systems and it’s my solo game, so screw it… I’m fiddling.

One of the many, many things that charms me about DCC is the adventure design. Gone are long, epic campaigns in massive, published tomes. Almost every adventure in DCC is self-contained and around 30 pages or less (sometimes half as much), including backmatter, maps, items, and monsters. It is incumbent upon the Judge and players to weave these adventures together into a larger narrative, exploring individual quests and emergent threads as they come. There is a good video by Matthew Colville describing why I prefer this approach.

Since I started playing Pathfinder 2E, I’ve become a fan of milestone leveling over XP-based leveling. It doesn’t solve the “Voila! You now have a bunch of new powers!” issue, but it at least allows for characters reaching levels at good story points versus immediately after, say, killing the fourth giant centipede in a tunnel. The primary downsides of milestone leveling are a) the absence of rewards for players who take side quests or who want to fully explore the setting, and b) a potential for uneven progression from level to level if a party takes a shortcut (or doesn’t). I’ve been lucky to GM and play in groups who fully embrace roleplaying and character development, and all have leaned heavily towards a milestone system without these downsides getting in the way.

Combining ideas from those previous two paragraphs, the system I want to try is leveling based on adventure completion. It was the core rulebook that first planted this idea in my head, because it says, “As an optional rule, consider allowing any 0-level characters that survive their first adventure to automatically advance to 1st-level and 10 XP.” I’m planning to stick to published adventures for this first DCC foray, and since all of them are relatively consistent on length, they provide their own story milestones. Moreover, there is built-in downtime between modules so that I don’t have to make up some goofy reason why they gain new abilities. The idea I’m considering is one published adventure to reach Level 2, two to reach Level 3, and possibly three or more for higher levels. Knowing my own proclivities, I suspect that I’ll have individual quests and narratives for each PC between adventures, and these will be included in the level-up process somehow.

Just in case, I’m going to track XP in the background as I play to see how well my system matches the published advancement table. If I’m wildly off in either direction, I’ll adjust.

Level-0 Retainers

Something that surprised and concerned me when reading possible Level-1 adventures for my party was that every single one of them suggested more than four PCs. Indeed, Doom of the Savage Kings states “this adventure is designed for 6 to 12 1st-level characters.” Yikes. Once again, I wish that I’d included more peasants in Portal.

Thankfully, DCC comes built with the idea of retainers or henchmen, extra characters traveling with the PCs with the promise of steady pay and a share of the treasure. It hadn’t really bothered me that most games treat adventuring parties as the full group of travelers until I considered retainers. Now I’m slightly incredulous at the idea that four lone villagers would consider moving from dangerous locale to dangerous locale with no help and no hangers-ons. Of course people would join the PCs, either hired or because of the party’s growing celebrity.

I’m going to hopefully learn from my Portal mistake and not skimp on the Level-0 characters joining the party. I’ll make 8 total peasants, and these will both provide the PCs some extra help during Doom and possible Level-1 back-up characters if Umur, Ethys, Erin, or Hilda die. Unlike Portal, I’m not going to work too hard to flesh out all 8 of them in the narrative. Instead, they will be very much in the background unless called upon to be more. In addition, they will not be from Graymoor, but instead from the village of Doom of the Savage Kings’ setting: Hirot.

Here are the 8 redshirts accompanying the party:

Will any of these Hirot peasants survive to Level 1, much less become the hero of future tales? I can’t wait to find out!

Story Timeline & Events

Finally, I want to take a breath to consider what’s happened between the end of The Portal Under the Stars and the beginning of Doom of the Savage Kings. As outlined in each level-up post, in the two months after returning from that night beneath the Empty Star, each of our PCs in some way reshaped their identities. Master Umur succumbed to the pull of adventure, revealing some sort of mysterious past that sullied the Pearlhammer name in his dwarven homeland. Ethys abandoned the tea-hauling life she had with her now-deceased brother and vowed to leave Graymoor, calling herself Haffoot the Wanderer. Erin, Acolyte of Shul, sequestered herself within her room (to the distress of her family), and meticulously painted one of the suits of scale mail white while communing with her god of the moon. Finally, poor Hilda continued with her life as a baker, spending late nights staring into the magical orb she took from the portal. Unfortunately for her, one night a being stared back, breaking Hilda’s mind and sending her on the path of wizard. All of that took two months, and presumably over that time the four also attended many funerals for their companions, answered three thousand questions, and found themselves celebrities within gossipy Graymoor.

Portal began in early Spring, whatever this world’s equivalent is to March. I’ll say that three more months passed before Doom kicks off, taking them to the end of Summer, the equivalent of late August. In that time, Umur would have fully succumbed to the sword, and tells himself it’s okay because he’s training Haffoot (who shows a remarkable skill with two blades, one of which is Mythey’s shortsword). Erin would eventually emerge from her room, serene and aloof to her family, and rarely singing of anything except hymns to the moon. Over the summertime, our acolyte of Shul would realize that Graymoor has no place for her anymore, and that the portal beneath the full moon was a calling to a different place. When Haffoot proclaims that it’s time to wander, Erin volunteers to accompany the halfling.

In that last month before leaving, Hilda will attempt to cast her Patron Bond spell, perhaps the first time she’s cast anything except Read Magic. She has abandoned her bakery, and now spends all her time with the orb. This spell is a chance to more fully commit herself to Ptah-Ungurath, Opener of the Way, though she doesn’t know her patron’s identity or nature.

It’s a little weird to have my first DCC spellcasting occur “off camera,” but it’s a spell that a) takes a week to cast, b) will provide me a good handhold to Hilda’s state of mind and body as she undertakes the adventure, and c) as I say below, if successful will make her spells more useful. So here goes…

Casting a spell as a Wizard requires a spellcheck, which is d20 + 1 (Hilda’s level, she has no other bonuses or penalties from her Intelligence). She can also “spellburn,” which temporarily reduces one of her physical stats (Strength, Agility, or Stamina) to enhance the spell. Spellburn will be great for Hilda later on because of her high Stamina, however, for this casting she won’t understand the importance of sacrificing her body for her magic. She’ll go into this spell proverbially blind.

Patron Bond’s purpose is for the Wizard to commit herself to the service of her Patron, forming a pact for its service. If successful, she replaces Patron Bond with the spell Invoke Patron, which only takes 1 round to cast and does all sorts of useful things. If unsuccessful, well… that will suck for Hilda, both because she won’t be able to try again for a month and because she will begin to be tainted in horrific ways.

For the spell to work, she needs to roll an 11 or better on d20, literally a 50/50 shot. I’m emotionally ready for either outcome. Here we go…

Hilda rolls… a [17 +1] 18! That’s amazing, and here is the core rulebook text of what happens: “The caster makes contact with their patron and is granted a mark of favor. They receive a prominent mark of the patron on their face. The caster learns the spell Invoke Patron as it related to their patron and may cast it once per day at a +1 bonus to the spell check. Each time they cast Invoke Patron, the caster is indebted to their patron, who will call in the debt as some point.”

Woo! Amazing. Per her Mercurial Magic roll, she will also get +4 to spell checks for her first 3 (rolled on d4) spell checks in the adventure. Whenever she casts Invoke Patron, this bonus will be for d4 rounds (not checks).

That’s about as good as I could have hoped for, and now I must think about her facial, Post Malone-like mark from Ptah-Ungurath. I’ll reveal whatever I come up with in the first Doom write-up.

And with that auspicious beginning… I’m ready to start the next adventure!

Doom of the Savage Kings, Chapter 1