Adventures in Urutsk

Over the past few weeks, I've been playing an online game that takes place primarily in The Grand Tapestry's world of Urutsk.

Urutsk is a couple of things.  First, it appears to be one of only a handful of examples that I'm aware of, of a person having a particularly well-developed fantasy world as a child that they never abandon, and that they continue growing and expanding and creating for into adulthood.  Other examples of such worlds, and their creators, are the Brontë sisters' shared worlds of Gondal and Angria, Henry Darger's worlds of Glandeco and Angelinia and his Realms of the Unreal, and MAR Barker's world of Tékumel.  Like Barker's Tékumel and JRR Tolkein's Middle Earth, Urutsk also seems to include one or more constructed languages that seem to be more or less linguistically complete.

Second, Urutsk is a post-apocalyptic science fictional game setting.  Information I've learned in-game suggests that the time period my sessions have been taking place in are approximately a millennium after some kind of interstellar cataclysm.  In this way, too, its similar to MAR Barker's Tékumel and to his Empire of the Petal Throne game, to Kevin Crawford's Stars Without Number game, and I'm sure to any number of other stories that take place on an alien planet amidst the post-cataclysmic civilization of human(-ish?) people whose ancestors once built societies on dozens or hundreds of planets across the galaxy.  Luigi Serafini's Codex Seraphinianus, Larry Niven's Integral Trees and Smoke Ring, and Jack Vance's "Miracle Workers" are also all set under similar conditions, and so by a process of convergent evolution or multiple discovery, have noticeable parallels to the world of Urutsk.

I'm creating a bit of a record now, because when I started this online game, I expected it to be a one-off, or to last only two or three sessions.  That's been the general fate of the online games I've played in, where either scheduling problems or the difficulty of arranging and running online sessions has led to something more like tournament-style play than to ongoing campaigns.  We've played ten sessions together so far though, and we seem likely to be able to continue for awhile.  As a result, my memories of the earliest sessions are now a bit sketchy.  I'll probably keep the more recent session reports brief as well, but since this is going so well, I wanted to preserve a small portion of it.

SESSION 1

The first session begins with Merope the troglodyte-speaking woodcutter, Fantine the sickly guild beggar, Magdalene the grave digger, and Florence the poison-resistant healer awaking inside a large red box along with a dozen or so other 0th-level commoners.  The box is something like 20' to a side, and its occupants awake lightly dressed and entirely un-equipped.

In this session, Fantine was initially my favorite character, so she led most of my team's actions.  Knocking on the walls of the red box quickly revealed that doors would appear when searched for, and the first door opened into what looked like an alleyway, facing a brick wall.  Fantine was the first of several brave souls to venture outside, revealing a world of great brick buildings, smoke stacks, and plumes of black industrial smoke.  Fantine felt comfortable in this familiar-looking world, but the many of bewildered commoners wondered if the other walls would open into the same world, or even if this door would reliably lead back to the seemingly-Victorian realm, so they all returned into the box and shut the door.

When the door was re-opened, it was not into a Victorian alley, but instead into a strange open roadway.  Several wheeled metal carriages sped past at unbelievable speed, and I believe that at least one peasant was lost when he stepped outside and was struck by one of the horseless carriages.  Other carriages veered out of the way, trying to avoid the box that had suddenly appeared in the middle of their path, and a spectacular collision and explosion resulted.  The peasants noticed that they were surrounded by some kind of coliseum filled with a great audience, and that they were being approached by shouting men in some kind of black uniforms.  If my memory serves, another peasant was lost to a gunshot wound delivered by one of the uniformed men, although he may have been saved by first aid after the door was closed.

The next door that was opened led into a bright and vividly colored jungle, but the first two commoners who stepped out of the cubed were burned by the heat and acidic humidity of the air, and one of two possibly died after being touched by a poisonous leaf that wafted down from one of the many trees.  Once their companions were back inside, the group quickly closed the door on those inhospitable environs.  Florence the healer may have attempted to save one of the injured explorers.

The following door opened only a crack into a world of waist-deep snow.  The peasants feared they were too lightly dressed to survive the frigid cold of that world, as their initial glimpse showed lights only in the far distance.  Unfortunately, the weight of the collapsing snow kept the door from closing properly, and the cube itself began to grow uncomfortably chill.  Another door was opened, revealing some kind of cave.  Fantine and her companions joined an expedition into the cave, while another eight or so peasants stayed behind in the cube to try to re-close the door leading into winter.

The cavern Fantine and her friends entered was poorly lit, but a tunnel that possibly led to the surface was visible across a great crevasse.  The peasants decided to attempt to descend into the canyon, in the hopes of ascending the other side, and then taking the tunnel to the surface.  They located a wooden scaffolding that might have been left over from some kind of mining operation, and began climbing down.  As they did, they were assailed by a dozen or so blue creatures that had bodies like monkeys, but with beaked turtle-like faces.  Merope the wood-cutter acquitted herself admirably in combat, but Fantine the beggar, having only 1 hit point, was felled by one of the weird beasts.  First aid, possibly delivered by Merope or Florence, resuscitated her from her injuries.  Fearing that this cave was too dangerous, the commoners returned to the red cube to check on their friends.

They arrived to find that their fellows who had stayed behind had managed to close the door on the icy realm.  The snow turned out to be only frozen water, fortunately, and not frozen methane or helium, and so the commoners had been able to brave it for a few moments to hand-shovel the snow back out of the doorway and shut the door firmly.

Another door was tried, this one leading into the interior of a building.  When Fantine and some other peasants found a window, they soon realized they were hundreds of feet above the ground inside a tower so tall it scraped the sky itself.  They also soon met a balding man with injured feet who called himself "John McClane" and who appeared to believe that he was hallucinating the peasants.  The peasants followed McClane as he explored the hall and adjoining rooms, but after more gunfire from McClane's enemies, they decided to return once more to the cube.

The final door the peasants tried opened into a fairly featureless white hallway, but quick exploration turned up a locker room.  Each peasant pressed their palm to a door to open a locker, and each found supplies related to their profession, including some white coveralls, a computer tablet, and a gun.

At this point, the session ended and we all leveled up.  Merope became a fighter, Fantine and Magdelane became thieves, and Florence became a cleric.

SESSION 2

In this session, and for the rest of the sessions that take place in Urutsk, I was one of only two players.  We each chose one character to advance.  I chose Merope, whose 0th level characteristics reminded me of JK Rowling's depiction of Voldemort's mother, and my fellow player chose Slunk, a wood-elf charlatan and snake-oil salesman.  Merope graduated from being a 0th level Dungeon Crawl Classics woodcutter to being a 1st level 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons fighter.  She also rolled for a random characteristic on the Arduin Grimoire's "Special Abilities" Chart.  She got +1 with all axes and -3 against all dragon's breath, which seemed appropriate for some kind of reptile-loving forest-dwelling recluse.  Slunk became a warlock and swore a pact of allegiance to Lord Worm, a demonic entity aligned with elemental silt.  (I later learned that all magic users and magical creatures in Urutsk are associated with one of a few dozen elemental bloodlines.)  Slunk also acquired a familiar in the form of a holographic projection of a woman from his tablet computer, quickly dubbed "Clippy."

Shortly after deciding his intention to make a pact with a magical entity, Slunk received a vision of Lord Worm, a silt-blooded demon king.  Slunk discovered that he too had an elemental silt bloodline, and soon swore a pact to Lord Worm, gaining various magical abilities in the bargain.

Merope and Slunk exited the locker room and began exploring.  In one room they found some emergency rations and ration cards as well as some med kits.  They also found evidence that the crew might be abusing stimulants, and a quick peek inside a ration revealed twice the safe daily limit of stimulants available alongside one day's worth of food.  In another room they found some humans in similar white coveralls who revealed that they were on a ship, and had been for their entire lives.  Merope and Slunk decided that they were dealing with the degenerate inhabitants of the original crew of a generation ship and decided to look for some form of shuttle craft or escape pod.  Consulting both Merope's tablet and Clippy soon revealed that the crew only controlled a relatively small area of the ship.  They also discovered that Merope's handprint would open any door with palm-reader, while Slunk's elven hand was denied access for some reason. 

A bit more exploring revealed a kind of interstitial space, a kind of scaffolding of walkways the appeared to run behind the walls and between the levels of the ship.  Slunk and Merope tried climbing down a couple of levels, outside of the crew-controlled area, in search of valuables.  I think our reasoning was that anything salvaged from an abandoned portion of the ship would be valuable to the occupants who no longer had access to that particular supply.  Once in the uncontrolled portion of the ship however, they were quickly set upon by a towering centipede-like robot.  Slunk was injured, while Merope was quickly felled and had a near death experience.  She used what she thought was her dying breath to tell Slunk to run.  Slunk decided to stand his ground however, and fired an overloaded blast from his stun pistol, seemingly knocking the robot out of commission.  Slunk's CPR, and a bit of good fortune, brought Merope back from the brink of death. 

Slunk helped Merope into the first room they could find on this lower hallway, where they found a number of crates labeled "Cedar."  With Merope still at death's door, Slunk opened a crate and found a foil packet filled with some kind of glowing liquid, which he poured into Merope's mouth and encouraged her to drink. Merope did, and recovered a bit of her health, she also mutated becoming mildly radioactive.  Her physical stamina permanently increased, and she became mildly resistant to injury.  She also gained a kind of Ren-and-Stimpy-style detail vision that allowed her to inflict more damage with her attacks by striking her enemies' weakest points.  The mutagenic liquid frightened both Slunk and Merope, so they decided to look for treasure in another room.

As they re-entered the hall, they saw that the giant robot was reviving itself.  Merope put her newfound detail vision to work and fired her security gun at the robot.  The super-heated round splashed liquid metal after striking the creature, revealing the source of the strange damage to some of the walls Merope and Slunk had seen earlier.  Slunk called upon his patron and shot malevolent blasts of elemental silt at the centipede.  Between these two attacks, the robot deactivated again, although this time the pair was unwilling to believe that it was permanently disabled.  They continued attacking its prone form for another 20 minutes before rolling it off the walkway and into the bowels of the ship below.  Merope managed to break off a few of the creatures legs to use as a short sword, a long sword, and a pry bar.  Slunk was able to pocket a few of the shinier bits of the machine to try to trade later.

Concerned that the noise of this encounter might bring additional combatants, the pair abandoned their plan to look for valuables and re-ascended to a higher, and safer floor.  They located a security office and used Merope's clearance to enter it.  Inside they found a variety of colored jackets that seemed to reveal one's crew rank, along with a couple of gas masks and tear gas canisters, and a safe place to rest for the night.  Merope settled on a purple command jacket, although a panel of the jacket, located where a name-badge might be placed, turned orange to identify her as security personnel. Slunk discovered when he wore a blue jacket this panel turned green, and in a green jacket it turned blue, so he left the green jacket on.  The pair felt a bit better disguised and protected in their new jackets, and decided to take a long rest to recover from their injuries.

Wizards of the Coasts' Monsters I Want to Fight - Thallids (part 1)

Fallen Empires is one of my favorite Magic: the Gathering sets, and the thallids are probably my favorite monsters from the set.  Fallen Empires is set on an island, Sarpadia, which is undergoing a period of cooling that's being caused by an apocalyptic foreign war.

Figure 1 - "Thallid" by Ron Spencer

Figure 2 - "Thallid Devourer" by Ron Spencer

The cooling period that Sarpadia is undergoing is similar to Europe's Little Ice Age, circa 1550-1850, when crop yields fell, some northern areas became uninhabitable, and sea ice became a navigational challenge.  Unbeknownst to anyone on Sarpadia, their cooling period doesn't have any natural cause - it's the aftermath of the Brothers' War depicted in the Antiquities set.  The Brother's War was a WWI analog, featuring very large scale combat using magical and mechanical superweapons, and involving massive environmental despoilation due to resource extraction, manufacturing pollution, and the after-effects of the fighting.

Figure 3 - "Night Soil" by Sandra Everingham

In the Fallen Empires set, shorter summers, longer winters, and lower crop yields have forced the Sarpadian elves to find a new food source (supplementing what was presumably a diet of game, berries, edible shoots, and other arborial fodder.)  The elves have started cultivating edible fungus, but their experiments have gotten away from them, giving rise to a new lifeform, the thallids.

Figure 4 - "Night Soil" by Drew Tucker

The thallids are motile fungi of at least animal intelligence.  They have escaped the elves' attempts to domesticate them, started competing with the elves for their traditional food sources, and become a danger to travelers and villagers alike within the forest.  (The closest analogy I can think of is if, in response to global warming, we bred modern cattle into something like hippopotami, who then escaped their pens and began rampaging across the countryside.)

Figure 5 - "Feral Thallid" by Rob Alexander

Thallids seem to possess a collective intelligence, similar to ants and other social insects, which seems appropriate for fungal lifeforms, considering that the mushrooms we see are sometimes only the most visible tips of mile-long underground organisms.  Also like ants, or at least like leaf-cutter ants, thallids appear to collect fodder to compost and let rot, with the fungal growth from the rot piles serving as both a food source and a reproductive medium.  Different thallids specialize in different tasks, and a number of them appear to be specialized for combat.  As represented in the cards, thallids also reproduce by budding off smaller undifferentiated versions of themselves, called saprolings.

Figure 6 - "Night Soil" by Heather Hudson

Figure 7 - "Thorn Thallid" by Heather Hudson

I love the idea of thallids.  They're a bit like Christopher Priest's triffids, but their fungal, rather than vegetal, origin makes them seem even more insidious and menacing.  In response to climate change, the elves tried to create a new food source, and ended up creating their likely successors.  They bred an enemy that was utterly independent of them, indifferent to them, and able to outlast them in the coming winter.  Not only could the elves probably not defeat the thallids, (and for the thallids, anything less than a total defeat is tantamount to a victory), but their war against the thallids made all their problems caused by climate change worse.  They still needed more food and a long-term plan for survival, but now they also faced a serious competitor for land, living space, and whatever fresh greenery remained.

Figure 8 - "Thallid" by Daniel Gelon

Figure 9 - "Thorn Thallid" by Daniel Gelon

The appearance of the first thallids seems to have been decided by the individual artists.  Ron Spencer's "Thallid" and "Thallid Devourer" (figures 1 & 2) and Sandra Everingham's "Night Soil" (figure 3) have a very ropy, knit-together quality that makes the thallid body appear to be just an appendage of a much larger organism.  Spencer's depictions are, I think, my favorite representations of the thallids, and they strongly shape how I think of them.

Figure 10 - "Thorn Thallid" by Mark Tedin

Drew Tucker's "Night Soil" (figure 4), Rob Alexander's "Feral Thallid" (figure 5), and Heather Hudson's "Night Soil" and "Thorn Thallid" (figures 6 & 7) combine both an insectoid and reptilian feel.  Tucker's saproling, in particular, looks almost frog-like, while Alexander's thallid has a feline quality.  I especially like the animal quality of these images, because they make the thallids feel potentially cunning, like they might be smarter than us without being sentient, at least about the things they know best.

Figure 11 - "Fungal Bloom" by Daniel Gelon

In contrast, Daniel Gelon's "Thallid" and "Thorn Thallid" (figures 8 & 9) and Mark Tedin's "Thorn Thallid (figure 10) have an otherworldly, alien appearance, almost like octopi, but with entirely un-animal-like eyes.

Figure 12 - "Spore Flower" by Margaret Organ Kean

Gelon is the only artist to envision the thallids as stationary, both in his depiction of the thorn thallid and in his "Fungal Bloom," (figure 11) although Margaret Organ-Kean's "Spore Flower" (figure 12) makes the thallids an invisible, but menacing presence, and suggests the possibility of them escaping the forest.

Figure 13 - "Thallid" by Edward Beard Jr

The only early depictions of the thallids that I don't especially care for are Edward Beard Jr's "Thallid" (figure 13) and Jesper Myrfors' "Thallid" and "Thorn Thallid" (figures 14 & 15).  Beard's hairy-looking thallid might be intended to evoke something plant- or moss-like, but it's never really looked fungal to me.  Myrfors' thallids do look like fungus, but they seem tiny and smurf-like to me, and both seem somehow too humanoid, not animalistic enough for my tastes.

Figure 14 - "Thallid" by Jesper Myrfors

Figure 15 - "Thorn Thallid" by Jesper Myrfors

If either Beard's or Myrfors' visions had dominated or become the house style, I doubt I would have liked the thallids as much as I do.  Myrfors offers us another vision of mushroom-headed humanoids, akin to Jeff Vandermeer's graycaps, and a half-dozen similar beasts, including DCC's Shrooman (DCC 426).  Beard gives us a hairy green cyclops, something like a yeti or Looney Tunes' Gossamer.  His vision seems more suited to a single, unique monster than to a whole race.  If Beard's monster reproduces, it seems like it should be at sword-point, when the misfortune of being sliced in half turns into the fortune asexual reproduction.  I might like to fight one of Beard's monsters, but I wouldn't want it to be the template for the other thallids.

Figure 16 - "Fungusaur" by Daniel Gelon

As a bonus I've also included Daniel Gelon's and Heather Hudson's "Fungusaur" images (figures 16 & 17).  These depict a different fungal monster.  Unlike the thallids, the fungusaur is decidedly not part of an ecosystem or community.  It appears to be a unique monster, and one that grows itself, rather than growing offspring, as part of its life-cycle.  The fungusaur is a direction not taken.  While the thallids are not meant to be perfectly human-like in appearance or intelligence, neither are they intended to be mindless brutes, or to single-mindedly pursue their hunger.  What makes thallids frightening is that they might be smarter than they seem, and they already seem unnervingly smart for things that were only ever bred to be eaten.  The fungusaur is a landmark, it is unmissably huge.  The thallids are human-scale, and they are camouflaged.  An individual thallid might be hidden behind the next tree, and an entire forest of them might be hidden just beyond.  Collectively, the thallids are much, much bigger than the fungusaur, but their size is distributed, spread out across an entire countryside.  And while the fungusaur might escape its cave and grow big as a mountain, the thallids have already escaped, and they might grow as big as the whole island, and there might not be enough room for you both.

Figure 17 - "Fungusaur" by Heather Hudson

All images used here are copyright Wizards of the Coast, and used without permission, for fair use purposes.

DCC House Rule - Lucky Weapon

I'm planning to add a house-rule to the Dungeon Crawl Classics games I referee to modify the DCC Warrior's "lucky weapon."  In the rules as written, Warriors permanently add their starting 1st level Luck modifier to attack rolls for a weapon of their choice.

On the one hand, I like that this is a new take on older mechanic's like the Ranger's "favored weapon" or the Fighter's "weapon specialization."  On the other hand, I have the same objections to it that I have to DCC's "lucky roll" - only about a quarter of Warriors get an actually-lucky weapon, while half get no modifier at all, and another quarter get an un-lucky weapon.

The rules as written also mention that Warriors should be able to perform weapon-specific Mighty Deeds of Arms with each type of weapon.  No weapon-specific Deeds are given in the rules; instead it's recommended that each referee write their own weapon-specific Deed for each weapon.  My objection to that is that it's a lot of extra writing before you can even get started.

So, my house rule is that at 1st level, each Warrior chooses a lucky weapon.  Warriors receive a permanent +1 bonus to attack rolls and damage rolls with their lucky weapon, regardless of their starting Luck score.  In addition, a Warrior automatically knows one weapon-specific Deed for their lucky weapon.  (A warrior might be able to learn additional weapon-specific Deeds, but only if they "quest for it.")

As with my house-rule on "lucky rolls," if a referee felt that Warriors with very high Luck scores deserved a larger bonus, that would probably work fine, although in that case, I would probably recommend returning to modifying only the attack roll, since a +2 or +3 damage bonus, in addition to the bonus for exceptional Strength, is quite a lot for the few characters it would affect.

My Pointcrawl Contest Victory

Chris Kutalik of the Hill Cantons blog recently announced a contest to design a location for his upcoming pointcrawl adventure "The Slumbering Ursine Dunes."  Potential prizes included having your location included in the finished adventure, and receiving a wargame from Chris' personal collection.

The winners were announced even more recently, and my entry won second place!

You can read my completed entry by clicking the link below.  If you want to wait to see it in the finished adventure, or at the gaming table, then allow me to leave just the following picture to whet your imagination.

"Castoroides" by Charles R.Knight,via Wikimedia

Public Domain Art - Warwick Goble's "Indian Myths and Legends"

Warwick Goble is one of my favorite public domain artists.  These illustrations are from Donald Alexander MacKenzie's Indian Myths and Legends.
   

"Sita finds Rama among lotus blooms"

   

"Shantanu meets the Goddess Ganga"

   

"Arjuna and the river nymph"

   

"The ordeal of Queen Draupadi"

   

"The return of the heroes slain in battle"

   

"Damayanti and the swan"

   

"Damayanti chooses a husband"

   

"Rama spurns the demon lover"

DCC House Rule - Lucky Roll

In the Dungeon Crawl Classics games I referee, I've been playing with a house-rule that modifies DCC's "lucky roll."  In the rules as written, characters permanently add their starting Luck modifier to one randomly selected type of roll.

My objection to the rule as written is that for most characters, their supposedly-lucky roll is either going to be unmodified, or it's actually going to be an un-lucky roll because they have a negative modifier.  Nearly half of all starting characters, 48%, have no Luck modifiers because their Luck scores are between 9-12. Another quarter, about 26%, have negative Luck modifiers because their Luck scores are 3-8.  Using the rule as written, only about 1 in 4 starting characters have a "lucky roll" that's actually lucky.

So, my house rule is that all characters receive a permanent +1 bonus to their "lucky roll," regardless of their starting Luck score.

If a referee felt that this rule deprived characters with extremely high Luck scores of the larger bonus they'd receive under the original rule, she could choose to let those characters receive the superior bonus granted by their higher Luck modifier.  That change would only affect about 5% of starting characters though, because only about 1 in 20 would begin with Luck scores 16-18.

DCC Peasants in the Purple Worm Graveyard

Last week's game put three players' 0-level peasants in Planet Thirteen's Purple Worm Graveyard.

I tried to make character generation a collective experience. Each player rolled 3d6 in order for the player to their left's characters. After all 12 characters had their stats, each player found their lucky roll, and we went through the various modifiers and bonuses together.

The players certainly embraced the idea that some of their starting characters were going to die, joking that a particular character was doomed or marked for death whenever they rolled low for an ability score or for hit points.

By coincidence nearly every character ended up with a low Agility and a high Personality score. It was totally plausible that this crowd could have talked the rest of the village into gambling their tax on a cricket match, and then blown the game when it counted. The players all really wanted to roll to determine the results of the game, but I hadn't figured out how to decide it at that point, so I simply ruled that they lost.

In retrospect, DCC provides a pretty good method for determining this kind of thing. Since unskilled characters roll 1d10 for skill checks, while skilled characters roll 1d20, I decided to roll for each cricket player. 1s are worth no points, and 10s and 20s explode into a second dice.

Using that method, I got a final score of Villagers 68 to Royals 107.

If the villagers had somehow earned a higher score, I suppose it would have meant that the duke and his men cheated. I've decided that the duke is a jerk, so that'd be totally in keeping with his character. We'll see if the players eventually decide to retaliate against him once they're stronger.

Knowing that these players prefer travel through every dungeon counter-clockwise might eventually make for an important design consideration. In this case it meant that they avoided the two most dangerous traps in the dungeon. They also missed finding the failed landsknecht adventurers' abandoned campsite, the Moroccan sorcerer's feast, and the source of those glowing glands in the Moroccan sorcerer's secret study. On the other hand, never encountering the fire beetles meant that they had no idea where the bio-luminescent glands came from. When the players expressed fear that the light source might attack them just as the puddle had, I knew that we really had achieved the "anything can happen" paranoia that DCC is trying to recreate.

The players were incredibly lucky in their wandering monster checks, only encountering one enemy that way. They also got lucky finding the secret door in the statue room on their first try.

I appreciate that the Purple Worm Graveyard instructs the DM to only check for wandering monsters when the players take a long time doing something or make a lot of noise. (Or more regularly in a couple of rooms.) I'm still not fully comfortable tracking turns. I think I had the candles go out after an hour each, but I was also reluctant to strand the characters in the dark when they hadn't really had any opportunity to buy additional light sources.

One thing I tried that I thought worked really well was to not let the players joke or think aloud without their characters acting out whatever they said. So when Hector's player said that he attacked Twinkle for waking him up, I immediately had him make an attack roll. And when Auhsoj's player joked about betraying the Worm God, I rolled a wandering monster check right away (which would have brought a purple worm if it'd come up as a 1.)

I was surprised that Hector's player kind of forgot to ask for a useful vision and instead only wanted permission to take the worm ivory. I was expecting to show him where one of the remaining treasures was. I also tried to communicate that the Worm God just really didn't care if they took the ivory, meaning that they wouldn't be punished, but also that it wasn't going to prevent a purple worm from showing up in the graveyard if they rolled poorly.

Poor Bovice is currently as good as dead, but his player has more free time than some of the others, so we might run some solo adventures later. If he wants Bovice back, I think a quest involving finding the Tomb of the Iron God and then venturing to Tempus Gelidium should be enough to turn him a return trip. If he wants Bovice to stay in the desert, then I'll probably make the distant city Krshal, the city of towers, and let him venture into the Ruins of the Undercity beneath it.

Overall, the adventure was a success. I awarded each character 10 XP and asked the players what they'd like their survivors to become. I decided that the 0-level adventures weren't really meant for exact XP counts or for giving different awards to different players, although I plan to get a bit more exact for the 1st level characters next time. I also plan to allow carousing for XP, but since I forgot my carousing results table last time, we'll have to wait to see what happens at the fête.

Converting the dungeon to DCC rules was pretty easy. The monsters took the longest, but that was mostly because I'm still not fully comfortable with the DCC monster stat block. I switched the "Dungeon Moves" to regular skill checks with DC 6 to get the middle result and DC 9 to get the good result. For most characters that works out to roughly the same probability that the Moves have, although characters with some reason to be skilled had a much easier roll. (Not that using a d20 actually helped Bobby Ray.)

I'm hoping that the Worm God will become a recurring deity/patron for the 1st level characters. I like the idea of an unhuman deity that hates the undead for entirely different reasons than living people do. If so, I'll have to come up with some Invoke Patron and Patron Taint results. I think I can base the spellburn table on the "Worm Madness" table from the adventure at least.