DCC Road Crew Game at the Edge House (Sanctum of the Snail)

Leighton and Alice Connor are friends of mine. Leighton is another member of Hex Games, and my co-author on Leopard Women of Venus. Alice runs the Edge House, a progressive Christian campus ministry at the University of Cincinnati. I love the Edge House. It has a great welcoming vibe and is a comfortable atmosphere for creative works. I’ve drawn a number of comics in the House’s upstairs. There was an RPG group that met regularly at the Edge House, but they’ve recently lost a number of players, and the group’s kind of fallen apart. The RPG group wanted to attract new players, the Edge House wanted to attract new students, and Leighton and I wanted to run some Dungeon Crawl Classics, so everything conspired in our favor. Even though Cincinnati is over 3 hours away from Toledo, I was excited to drive down to run some DCC for a new audience.

Alice spent the preceding week promoting the game day by both fliers and word of mouth. By the time Saturday, September 15 rolled around, we had 11 people signed up, enough that Leighton and I could spilt them into two groups and run two different tables. We decided to Run “Sanctum of the Snail” from Crepuscular #1 because we were both familiar with the adventure (Leighton was my editor), and we wanted to able to compare notes with each other afterwards to see how each group handled things differently.

Our players were all young college students, men and women, and they were delightful. None of them conformed to the typical negative gamer-caricatures. Those post-millennials were super-cool to the two jaded old Gen-Xers running their games. Great people. All of them were avid D&D players (mostly 5^th edition), but none of them were familiar with DCC. We were excited to introduce them to the “more awesome” hack of D&D.

Our sessions ran a little over 4 hours, with a break in the middle for pizza and Indian food. Of the 18 zeds at my table, only 4 managed to survive until the end. Leighton’s table were luckier, and managed to escape with something like 9 or 10 zeds intact. Both groups managed to avoid running into the Chthonic Snail (unfortunately). Both were disgusted by the giant tapeworms, and both groups found the secret armory. Also, both groups totally avoided the sepulcher and missed the magical axe therein. (No group I’ve ever run has bothered exploring the sepulcher.) 

LC working his magic.

All the players had a very fun time, and there was a lot of cheers and laughs from both tables. I hope we converted at least a few of them to DCC. I passed out the DCC bookmarks I had, as well as copies of the Free RPG Day Third Party companion. I had an extra copy of the DCC Quick Start Rules, so I awarded that to the player at my table who still had one of her characters left and had the highest remaining Luck score (16!).

Leighton and I considered the game day a great success. We exposed several new players to Dungeon Crawl Classics, we helped a bunch of gamers find each other, and hopefully the Edge House will be able to get a regular game group together again.

SHARKBOY!