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 5th
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.)
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| 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.
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| SHARKBOY! |
Good write-up!
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