REVIEW: Dungeon Crawl Classics

I've been reading through a borrowed copy of Dungeon Crawl Classics (affiliate link) by Goodman Games. Note that I have not played it. This is a review based on a reading of the rule book only.

If you have played Dungeons and Dragons Basic/Expert/Champion/Master/Immortals Edition or Cyclopedia Rules, you've played Dungeon Crawl Classics; sort of. Like D&D BECMI and CR, you get race-as-class characters in a swords and sorcery type setting.

The juice is in the differences.

The first major difference is zero-level characters. The game strongly recommends every campaign to start with zero-level characters, suggesting each player create 3-5 of these wimpy mooks and wait for attrition and experience points to determine which they play through the campaign. I must say, this is super cool. I really very much like this.

Character generation is pretty much entirely random. See previous paragraph. Each of those zero-level mooks created is pretty much entirely random. Random stats and background and bonus thing. That's maybe not so great for games where players pretty much create one character to play. In this game, with lots of mook-PCs in the mix, it's fabulous.

Wizard duels! Rules for wizard's spell duels is super-neat. I really dig it. The rules are simple and very playable and this would be an awesome thing to steal for use in other games.

OMG, tables! More than half the page-count is tables. I'm not kidding. Cool random character creation background and bonus tables. Really neat critical hit and fail tables. EACH SPELL has its OWN table to tell you what the results of a casting are! There are so many, and they're all so very different, they're pretty much not memorizable. Interrupting the flow of play, of story, to look up tables is bad, bad, terrible. Now, many of these tables are pretty nifty, the fact there are so many of them and not just one core sort-of universal table thing which can be easily printed for super-quick_doesn't-interrupt-story-flow_lookup is, in my opinion, unforgivable and basically makes the game un-playable, as written. Your mileage may vary. It's probably pretty hackable to ditch many or most of the tables, but then you may as well play D&D BECMI or CR or Labyrinth Lord or, or, or.

That's pretty much all I took from reading the game. Fortunately, the zero-level character thing and the wizard's spell duels thing are fairly easy to steal and adapt to other games. As far as I'm concerned, everything else is trash. Fortunately, I borrowed the book to read it.

$39.99 for a 480 page rulebook, hardbound, is not at all a bad price, but I'm glad I didn't pay it.
$24.99 for a 480 page rulebook, PDF, is a horrible price and I'm glad I didn't pay it.

All that said, it's an Open Game License product, but, apparently nothing in the core book is released as OGL material. Maybe you can, but I haven't found anything even close to System Reference Document available for free download, or for purchase, anywhere. What does that mean? I don't know. Maybe they actually mean something closer to the EABA Open Supplement License.


***

I've also been reading through Dungeon World (affiliate link) (find it free at Sage LaTorra's GitHub repository or, for text-only and frugal printing, at Adam Fairweather's GitHub repository.) I've so far been super impressed with it and, wanting to know more about it, I searched out it's origins. It's based on what appears to be much lesser-known game by a different publisher, Apocalypse World (affiliate link.) I'm cheap and I couldn't find a non-torrent freebies (couldn't find any torrents, either) so I bought a copy. I'll review these two games at a future date.