Mob of Morons Kill Low Level Necromancer, Save Village; Hurt Selves, Sheep and Dog

ONE OF THE BEST CON RPG RUNS EVAR.







above cover illustration stolen and vandalized without permission.  click on it to get to the publisher website







So, in an unusual move, I actually played in an RPG at a con, pre-gens and all.  Usually, I don't due to what I sensitively call the "spastic kamakazi moron" effect that selects the players in such games.

Well, to be fair, it was also run by one of my oldest and dearest DM (and friend), and he had talked it up beforehand.   And yes, it was the poison coolaide of DCC (Dungeon crawl classics) , and DAMN...that is some tasty coolaid.

See, I had pretty much decided not to have anything to do with a massive tome  "old school" $50.00 game for a variety of reasons - not least was the fact that it was a massive thick tomb, with a huge proportion of pages dedicated to MAJIK THAT IS WILD AND KAOSEY AND RELLY ZAPZAP! (more about this later. Looking at it in the context of the game, it works well, go figure)

Still, the starting premise of the game pulled me in.....balance the characters by random chance and darwinian winnowing rather than elaborate tradeoffs, advantages and limitations. In short, start four characters as a level zero clodhoppers, and go into the dungeon. See who comes out, pick a class. NOTE:  these are NOT 0 level adventurers -you know, 0 level clerics, magic users, etc.  They are zero level humans (or elves or halflings, whatever; but still zero level.  They have a career background (randomly determined) which MAY be (say) an apprentice mage or cleric, but you really really have none of the skills and benefits of that class.  You pick a class when you get to first level - or you've died, and it is moot.

Interesting !  And, low level play has always been a love of mine.  And BOY are you low level.  No class (in every sense of the word) almost no equipment, no skills, no spells no special abilities, little hope; however, you might have a hammer or pitchfork, so roll on !.  And boy was it fun. 

 Sort of played like what would AD&D be like if say, maybe Gygax AND Arneson and Hargrave played Arduin with George Romero and a bunch of 1980's games workshop metal punks while cranking Hawkwind and chewing on a mouthful of berserker mushrooms.  Well, maybe not Hawkwind. I'd hate to discourage anyone simply becuase they hate Hawkwind.  Maybe BOC.  But the rest ?  Yes.

More to come. As a teaser, the Eeeeevil necromancer had his epic kill em all spell disrupted by being hit by a thrown dog..

Yeee-Ha !

And that floridly purple prose is in fact only a mildly dramatized description of earth, our earth, the real one, at he end of the Permian period -well before dinosaurs, the age we mostly associate with the big fin backed psedoreptiles. No kidding, everything multicellular nearly died then -from 80-95 % of all species, land and sea, large and small, snuffed it in a much bigger extinction than the one that did for the dinosaurs. And life took a Loooooong time to recover.

Temperatures were suddenly forced to rise in the middle of an already catastrophic glaciation by massive volcanic activity...massive: tens of thousands of square MILES of lava erupting. Google "Siberian traps"; they may have raised the temperature as much as ten degrees over a few centuries -which did nothing to improve an already fragile ecosystem. Weather went crazy, and massive glacial melts poisoned the already vastly reduced coastal areas with cold fresh water, which created anoxic conditions and disrupted the atmospheric oxygen cycle -O2 levels dropped dramatically to the point where sea level O2 was equivalent to modern O2 concentration at 10,000' elevations -from a baseline what was 20-25% higher than today...in a few centuries.

The remainder was polluted with Co2 and Sulfur dioxide; and then the Methan mats on the seabed started melting -in some cases explosively -driving up the methane levels. Things were dying everywhere. Even the coal beds are interrupted at these geological strata -suggesting that the forests were dead all at once,with little regrowth, and likely being broken up by high levels of decay fungus rather than creating the coal producing loam that an active forest would.

And then, for the cherry on top, speculation is that a massive asteroid or comet hit the planet, creating the Gulf of mexico and starting the breakup of the supercontinent. Perfect, no ?


Bad time to live, easy time to die. And so, I naturally thought, why not stick the PCs there ?