Star Crawl (DCC)

One of the best things about Dungeon Crawl Classics (DCC) is the community of creators and how crazy and cool this whole scene is. You have this "fan-zine" mentality to many of the projects and products, and the art in these products is just as off the wall as the games themselves.

With many D&D 5 and 5E third-party products, I feel the professional publishers have moved in and taken over the space. You need a degree in InDesign, full-page bleed layouts, tens of thousands of dollars of art from professional artists, dozens of play-testers, and lots of money and influence just to enter the market. You get pushed out of any attention or feedback as a small fan creator.

You can look like a small-press fan publication in the DCC community and be taken seriously. Ensure your typos are taken care of, and the book is laid out well and organized. The art? I love the art in these books; it is very amateurish but lovingly so. For many pieces, you laugh and tell yourself, "this really is horrible," but then you laugh and get the joke.

The art isn't horrible; it is beautiful. This is something I could do. I can dream too.

And you see the art as inspiring.

It sets you free.

This is embracing the early days of the hobby when a kid in their garage would put out a typewritten newsletter and dream huge. And many of these products attract so much interest they can successfully Kickstarter later, pour quality art and layout into the game, and attract prominent OSR artists to help people see the dream. So when you support these fan products, you see them as they develop and get in early to watch them grow.

Star Crawl

From the intro:

Star Crawl is the result of my home DCC campaign and what follows grew from the incredible experiences I’ve had running games with the Tuesday Night Fiend Club. The game is geared towards wild, fun play and letting the players go nuts. What I’ve written is focused on providing a loose guide for play rather than rigid rules surrounding travel, encumbrance, and economy. I hope you have as much fun playing Star Crawl as I have had writing it.

This game is gonzo crazy cool. It is a "what if" DCC and Mutant Crawl Classics (MCC) characters ended up in a space society in the far future. Or what if they started there. Or what if they wander through a magical gate and decide to live here. It doesn't even care where your original class comes from, what game, or what world.

Star Crawl is designed to accommodate characters, classes, and races from any DCC or MCC games. The classes presented here are intended as star borne options to expand your universe a bit. There is no reason you couldn’t have a party consisting of a DCC Wizard, a MCC Rover, a SC Medic, and a Cyborg from Reid San Filippo’s Umerica. The original SC campaign party consisted of all DCC characters who ended up in space, with new SC characters added over time.

Freedom.

If your DCC campaign has an adventure where the characters investigate a crashed gonzo alien starship, and somehow the party manages to fly it away and end up in space? Star Crawl has you covered. You will fly from strange to strange worlds, fight evil, and have crazy adventures. Similarly, with an MCC or Umerica game characters, find a similar starship and head out into space.

And then your adventures come off as homages to campy and horrible sci-fi movies, played through the lens of DCC, and it is perfect. The game plays like an OSR classic, everything is deadly, and the random tables throw chaos into the game. You are also not taking everything so seriously, laughing, and having a good time.

The intro adventure in Star Crawl feels like a tip of the hat to the pirate attack on a luxury liner in The Fifth Element, with players doing a funnel as doomed passengers. You can do similar hilarious funnels based on the colony investigation of Aliens, a War of the Worlds style tripod walker attack, a scientific exploration into a pyramid of the ancients, a Star Trek away team disaster, a Flash Gordon style aerial battle, the final battle of Star Wars (but with a boarding party trying to blow the reactor by hand lol), or any other classic sci-fi scene where dozens of clueless idiots die their way through a hilarious first mission trying to achieve an impossible goal.

This game reminds me of the days when the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide told you how to port your games into Gamma World or Boot Hill, and the game's creators felt the game should be yours to have fun with. Nobody really cared if it made sense or if they feared breaking immersion, the writers of the game wanted you to have as much fun as they did.

I love this community and the company publishing these gems. They are some of the most creative and insane adventures and games out there, not caring how they look, but completely focused on fun and supporting your creativity and input.

The game is yours.

Play, referee, or participate as a creator, the choice is yours.