DCC Day: Star Crawl

As a silly little DCC-style science fiction game for quick space adventures, Star Crawl is fun. The art is doodle-tastic, but it has a "notebook scribbles in class" sort of feeling to it, and I really don't mind it. It adds to the feeling that this game was discovered in a Trapper Keeper notebook.

The game even comes with a starship design and combat rules! It also features a simple random world section, a bestiary, psionics, patrons, races, random items, and a sample adventure. This can effectively turn DCC into a space game with star-hopping adventures.

I could envision flavoring this type of game after classic 1950s and 1960s science fiction comics, with explorers from Earth, rocket ships, laser pistols, and bubble helmets. All you need are a few inspirational pieces, perhaps a few Dimension X radio series for ideas, and you're good to go.

Gaming is supposed to be simple, fast, fun, and inspirational! If something works, just go for it and have fun. Worry about the details later, put on your rocket pack, and blast off to adventure!

Star Crawl

These Dungeon Crawl Classics 'zine games are fantastic. The art is primitive, but it has this DIY charm, and I love it for its jankyness. It looks like something drawn by a 12-year-old in a school notebook, but the sci-fi mod for DCC and MCC is amazingly well done and solid. The game is designed to expand, and if you wanted to create a custom weapons and armor list for a genre, it would be an hour's work, and your creations add to the fun.

These are 'zine games. DIY is part of the fun.

DCC is this game that easily expresses any idea with 3d6 stats and a dice chain. It feels like a core set of B/X rules and concepts that people can turn into anything from space games to sitcom simulators. The simplicity and unified dice-chain mechanic, along with the classes that contain genre rules, make a potent combination where all you need to do for genre simulation is come up with a few 10-level classes of the significant archetypes, loosely base them on DCC classes, and give them a few abilities to simulate the genre.

For sitcom crawl, just go to TV Tropes and base them on that. A day's work, at best, for those five types, and it would be a fun project.

So, Star Crawl? Is it a serious game? Does it have to be? It can or it can't - that is up to you. I could play Star Crawl Trek with this and zero-level funnel a group of red shirts on a humorous 'everybody dies' away team mission of death. You could do a semi-serious Trek-style campaign with this system, too, and toss in some randomness from a game like Stars Without Number for system generation, and you are all set.

Retro horror low-budget sci-fi? Star Crawl does that very well. I could play anything from Aliens to Roger Corman with these rules and have it work out great. Limit race selections to humans and ignore the zany art. I like the inclusion of psionics since that is one of those 1980s tropes for sci-fi where you always have the strange, mysterious psionic crew member that nobody trusts.

Could this be done seriously? I don't see any reason why it couldn't. The tone can shift quickly in DCC from zany to abject horror, and once you set the ground rules for a campaign, you play it how it plays. The rulebook may have silly pictures, but art like this inspires me to play this entirely seriously and with a grim and deadly tone more suited for games like Mothership. If I reimagined the rulebook with pictures like the above, this game would turn serious fast. I may need to hack in a gear list to give that part of the game more heft, but that is both possible and an enjoyable project to work on.

The Operation Bughunt game may be better suited to the previous genre, and this is another excellent 'zine game. What is more fun is both these games work together, with Star Crawl handling the more 'aliens and psi-powers' Trek, Lucas, and Firefly side of sci-fi, with Bughunt being the military-style James Cameron Aliens sci-fi. These two games' classes, weapons, and systems mesh perfectly with DCC or MCC, and they all work together. This looks the most slick of all the games here, but that is cool; they are who they are. Looks do not make something better, only different and cool.

I like both games; they are small enough to sit beside each other on my shelf and be used together.

Take a group of space marines or a Trek Crawl away team through Sailors of the Starless Sea? Fire in the hole! A survey team of space scientists in over their heads? Go for it! This is your game - not some group of game designers - and how you have fun is how you should play! The community comes up with fun stuff, which can also be added to your collection. Your stuff, homebrew, house rules, classes, and equipment lists are just as valid.

In fact, reskin any DCC module for sci-fi, and suddenly, you have dozens of complete adventures. Some are already sci-fi, like Purple Planet, so no changes are needed. Do the old 'disable or destroy the ship' trope and get going.

Nothing is stopping you.

Would Cephus Engine be a better game for this? If you like that Traveller 2d6 vibe and huge gear lists where every credit matters, then yes. I would stick with the DCC systems for something more rules-light and story-based, with simple class-based archetypes. DCC makes horror easier, too, since dying is expected and frequent, and character replacements are fast to create. Cepheus is more 'space sim' whereas DCC is more 'space dungeon.' This is still a fantastic sci-fi game and one of my top picks for that generic hex-crawl space gaming I love.

Sometimes, I look at these massive 5E sci-fi games and just get this feeling of designer-self-importance and pretentiousness that these hardcovers with hundreds of pages can deliver. 5E delivers some of the most slick and professional presentations in gaming, but most of it is filler, and it breaks easily when the multiclassing starts. 5E can never be play-tested enough to work correctly. And 5E is falling into that 'corporate gaming' place where the whole hobby begins feeling like layers of grifts.

The whole Goodman Games vibe is like this 'hippies in the back of a van' culture of roleplaying and gaming. It is communal, free-spirited, for the love of the hobby, open, chill, and relaxed. We all get along here, dude. All ideas and people are equal. All art is good. Your thing is your thing.

What defines good?

How fun something is.

If it looks like hand-drawn art, that is part of the secret groovy code. What matters is how it plays and gets along with others, not how it looks. Be chill, get along, respect others, and give peace a chance.

If something is broken? We find a cat to fix it, baby. Or we do it ourselves. Or find someone in the community to help. It's all cool, man.

To survive, our hobby must be more hippie, anti-corporate, groovy, and chill. We are in this together!

Do we need to wait for the store to sell us new classes and options for sixty or more bucks? Or a paid-for VTT with digital content? No way, man, don't think like that! We have many creative and cool people right here! Why do we need to send money to the fat cats on Wall Street? Our gaming hippie commune can do it ourselves, for cheaper and better. Write it out on notebook paper and staple it together, man. That is our rulebook.

It's all good.

Chill and have fun.

Do what you want to do.

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.