DCC Day: Hubris

Of all the settings published for Dungeon Crawl Classics, I like Hubris the best. This setting includes several new thematic classes that support the world, as well as optional rules, new gear, and the book then provides loose descriptions of the world's areas, each accompanied by a lay of the land chart for random features, an encounter table, and several sample preset location descriptions.

We also get new spells, gods, and patrons! We have a bestiary, tables for random towns and adventure sites, and a bunch of very cool tools to make running the setting and keeping it feeling strange easy. 

"His intent with Hubris isn’t prescriptive (there is no Mike Evans’ World of Hubris Lorebook) but rather a stew of horrors and nightmares offered up as fodder for the imagination. Like that moldering box of Heavy Metal magazines up in your weird uncle’s attic, Hubris is meant to inspire." - Hubris, a World of Visceral Adventure, page 3.

The whole book is a fever dream of insane ideas and over-the-top craziness.

The only downside is that if the entire world is this over-the-top and insane, you may struggle to distinguish the normal from the fantastic. This world is already set on 11 on the crazy dial, and it almost has a Gamma World meets Rifts meets Dante's Inferno feeling to it with mechanical murder machines walking around as characters, demons, and mutants everywhere.

A core tenant of DCC RPG is that every monster should be unique. No more kobolds sacking merchant caravans, no more armies of orcs, no more cookie-cutter dragons. In DCC, whatever is threatening your PCs is some ancient horror, utterly foreign, utterly unknowable, and utterly terrifying. When you dismiss the familiar you make games magical again. - Hubris, a World of Visceral Adventure, page 3.

I can see towns and villages walling themselves off from the crazies outside, just trying to live an everyday life amidst the madness and squalor. Doing this and creating a healthy suspicion of outsiders can get you the contrast you need to run effective horror and fantastic world games.

I like having that contrast. Humanity is just trying to huddle up and stay alive. Inside a town, it could feel like a typical Middle Ages fantasy town. Outside the walls? All bets are off. This place is crazy outside the walls. This keeps the towns from looking like a Star Wars creature cantina, and holds what is outside the walls still insane, scary, unknown, and fantastic.

You could do "wacky world" with a town, and have murder machine bartenders and half-demon innkeepers, but that makes the extraordinary the ordinary. This is my problem with modern D&D, every character race lives together happily and is no different than each other. Nobody is special. It is all animal crackers, various shapes and tastes, all the same.

To do a crazy world like that correctly, you need to channel some of the Heavy Metal movie, and turn up the savage dial to 11. Just to live, you need to be a constant epic and kick-butt, over-the-top force of nature. The world is a terrible, brutal, dark place where death is easy, and survival goes to the strong.

And like the forward says, the world isn't a setting, but a box of inspiration.

If you want a good idea of a purely over-the-top version of a DCC world, Hubris is about as good as it gets.