Mail Room: XCrawl Classics

This is an odd game; a Running Man meets Mad Max meets Auto Duel-style "death sports dungeons" game. It transforms the DCC rules into a parody game of the genre, where teams of dungeon crawlers take on dungeons for audiences in this corporate death sports league world of madness and magic. It feels a little like "DCC meets Shadowrun," in a way.

The characters feel like street gang members. The selection of classes is very narrow and specific, with the specialist class being overloaded into several roles. There are guns in this game, though they are just a handful of "street-style" weapons.

I would have liked to see more non-human classes, options for elves and dwarves, and a few more fantasy races, such as trolls, demons, goblins, kobolds, mimics, and other classics. Elves can only be a trickster class. XCrawl emphasizes that you are a professional athlete in an XCrawl League, a celebrity, and working your way up the ladder of fortune and fame.

The game needs a class expansion, though any DCC class could be dropped in just fine.

This is the same ground covered by Umerica, though this game is more Max Max, Fallout, and Gamma World and less magic and fantasy. The guns and gear in Umerica are superior, along with the tech and world design. I love all the atlases and details on this world's political factions and societies. The world feels like a real place and a step above the parody; though each faction is a pretty obvious parody, it all holds together well.

The guns in Umerica are excellent, and there is a vehicle combat system. The armor system differs entirely from DCC and XCrawl but can be converted. Umerica relies on its expansions to be a complete game, whereas XCrawl gives you much to play with.

In Unemrica, you are survivors and faction members, and the tone is less tongue-in-cheek than XCrawl. XCrawl feels more like the one-shot, convention parody game where you can play as a movie star and laugh it up. Umerica has parody elements, but it is darker in tone and feeling.

XCrawl is a strange game, but I am looking forward to it.

Gamma World Melee Damage

I love Gamma World, but...

The game using a 1d6 per point of constitution scale for hit points and keeping the original B/X level damages is a mess. With a laser pistol doing 5d6 damage, standard B/X style melee weapons were feeble. The STR adjustment to injury in the first and second editions was STR-15, or STR-6, for a negative modifier.

Vibro-daggers (10 hp damage) and vibro-blades (25) leveled the playing field, but still, there was very little threat from the primitive weapons. This pushes the "loot economy," where the first few rooms need a supply of high-tech armaments just to keep combat balance in check.

Part of me feels they did this to keep high-level AD&D parties viable. By the time an AD&D party is visiting Gamma World, you will need creatures with the 8-12 HD range to challenge the party. The artifacts feel suitable for that level of play too.

Mutant Future kept this hit-point scale for compatibility. It is still my favorite version of the Gamma World style game because of its interoperability with Labyrinth Lord. This game has that perfect mix of the low-tech world and the lost ruins of old that I love, and it is directly compatible with Gamma World, so all your favorites can return. It also has a strong encumbrance and gear system, and you get that low-level "feel" of adventure.

But still, the low-end damage problems with primitive melee weapons remain here as a legacy compatibility "feature" of the main game. You could argue that the world is so dangerous, "only the toughest survive," but I would still want melee weapons to do more damage. A dagger takes 14 successful hits to take out a CON 10 character with 35 hit points; with misses factored in, that is long combat. With 30-second combat turns and a 50% miss rate, that is a 15-minute battle and kind of boring.

There is a 10% chance per level of gaining one attack per round (Mutant Future), so that is a factor, but it still does not really fix the issue. Many D&D-style games try to balance high hit points and low weapon damage at high levels with multiple attacks, power moves, or other damage scaling tricks.

I would be sorely tempted to add a die of damage per +1 damage modifier and introduce a breakage rule on the low end of the 1+ damage modifier (modified by construction materials, which could be lowered to zero). So an 18 STR character is doing 4d8 damage with a longsword and has a breakage chance of 1-4 for a weapon made of ordinary materials. Now my Ookla the Brute character will pick up stop signs and break them over people's heads. With DEX, I would modify missile weapons that rolled dice for damage and leave fixed damage to high-tech guns alone.

Alternatively, I could award those extra hit dice on a per-adventure basis, start everyone off at 1 HD, and increase these up to CON HD at a rate of 1-3 HD per adventure as the characters get in fights, train, and "toughen up." Without messing with the base B/X damages the "bonus HD progression" seems like the best solution. keeps the original damage scaling, and would start most characters and noncombatants off at 1d6 hp.

Though instead of a hack, I wish the weapons and monsters were balanced for a more traditional zero-to-hero experience, where everyone started at 1 HD and leveled up normally. Then again...

Mutant Crawl Classics (MCC) gets the zero-to-hero right regarding damage and monster scaling. This is the standard B/X style progression, though the game does many of the Dungeon Crawl Classics standards, such as mutations being like DCC "spells" with charts and shamans who can access the ancient power of AI Patrons (like gods). This is much like Gamma World in terms of a high-tech destroyed world.

MCC's sister game Umerica also has the same B/X style damage scaling and exists on a lower-tech scale than MCC. Umerica also has a better gear section of weapons, armor, and other gear, so it feels like a more survivalist-oriented game, almost like an Aftermath or post-20th-Century ruin game, but still with the gonzo attitude.

All of these are great games, I would just like a few tweaks on the hit points and damage to the ones on the Gamma World side to get them in line with B/X and not have them make normal melee weapons so weak.

Mail Room: Umerican Survival Guide

Where Mutant Crawl Classics is more "Gamma World" this is way more "Mad Max." There was a period in time with Gamma World (2nd to 3rd Edition) when Mad Max influences were strong and you could see that reflected in the rules, but Umerica takes Dungeon Crawl Classics (DCC) and shoves it directly in the trash heap of Americana and lets it roll around in the giant landfills of plastic culture, television insanity, roadside mythos, and that oh so sweet half-century period from the 1950s to the year 2000 where America was the world.

It is pure Route 66 Post Apoc Trash Punk in its french-fried greasiness with a soggy wax-papered cheeseburger on the side.

And it is glorious.

Everything here is mostly compatible with Dungeon and Mutant Crawl Classics (MCC), with the exception of the armor system in the Umerica Survival Guide (USG) being a piece-based salvage system and the classes in MCC being slightly weaker than their USG counterparts. You could balance that in a number of ways, like giving MCC characters (assumed to be from primitive tribes), 3d6 ability bonus points, extra hit points - or whatever.

Umerica has gritty firearm rules, whereas MCC is more the sci-fi artifact laser pistol style of weaponry, so there is a technology level difference (though it doesn't matter too much since everything is equally deadly). You could mix these games and equipment lists and frankly, it would not really matter that much. One game could be the expansion for the other. All three games could be expansions for each other.

Fun With Timelines!

Mutant Crawl Classics stays closer to the DCC lore, and even DCC itself could be considered a far-future post-apocalyptic game itself, given Appendix N influences and all. If I were to put this game on a timeline, Umerica would be the game furthest back in time:

• Umerica - The world is destroyed tomorrow.
• Mutant Crawl Classics - Eventually the world is rebuilt into a sci-fi paradise, and then destroyed.
• Dungeon Crawl Classics - After all that, people forget and the world goes back to fantasy.

So Dungeon Crawl Classics is the end-timeline game 9000 years in the future. Or if you assume the TSR-isms of the standard accepted notions:

• Dungeon Crawl Classics - Oh, isn't this D&D, oops!
• Umerica - The world is destroyed tomorrow.
• Mutant Crawl Classics - Okay, this is sci-fi now.

Or you could do this with the timeline:

• Dungeon Crawl Classics - This was once D&D. No robots in my campaign, please!
• Umerica - The world is destroyed tomorrow.
• Mutant Crawl Classics - Feels like Gamma World again.
• Dungeon Crawl Classics - Back to Appendix N, yeah, this is post-apoc fantasy!

And it doesn't matter because, in the end-of-the-world maniac gonzo fantasy reality of the DCC-verse all timelines are collapsing and crossing over, and you could have Umerican motorcycle games fighting MCC death-robots on a volcano where a party of DCC townsfolk is headed up to investigate the "strange thunder on the mountain."

And I am sure there is a way I could put Umerica last on the timeline...

• Mutant Crawl Classics - This was actually where Earth started, as a destroyed sci-fi colony.
• Dungeon Crawl Classics - Now this is both D&D and post-apoc sci-fi.
• Umerica - The world became Earth, and got destroyed tomorrow. Damn it!

Or they all happen at the same time in three parallel universes and they all cross over. Just make sure the DCC-with-robots and the DCC-no-robots worlds are two separate things. Or not. Some people do not like robots in their fantasies.

Me? S3 was a thing, and back in the day sci-fi and AD&D crossovers were a huge deal.

Tone

The only thing to consider when mixing MCC and Umerica is tone. MCC assumes a destroyed sci-fi civilization, like a Gamma World setup, so the classic Americana influences should be toned down and replaced with more of a "mad science" sort of destroyed sci-fi culture feeling.

With Umerica, you are face-first in the dumpster of trash nostalgia culture. Now, you could assume that this sci-fi world started to go on another of their "retro is cool" recycled nostalgia craze culture kicks (sounds familiar, huh), and that sci-fi world became a high-tech, retro-loving, mass-market mess. So you could have both in the same world, parts more commercial, with the underlying strange high-tech society underneath that created this veneer tribute culture refuse pile.

I do like this idea the most since it has the built-in story of a "master controller" caste of the high-tech Gamma World-like overlords, while the mess of the surface world is this artificial post-commercial trash pile. Yes, they had laser and microwave weapons in the far future, but because of pop culture, they still made 20th-century replica firearms because that is what the nostalgia-crazed population wanted. Matter replicators underneath the world, fast food restaurants based on EZ-Bake Ovens on the surface.

A sci-fi civilization that was driven mad by trash nostalgia. I love it.

Not familiar at all. No.

But it does make me feel good.

Or you could have both but kept apart, and assume the MCC areas of the world rejected that culture, while the Umerica areas of the world are just this weird because of all the psychotropic drugs still around that were put into the water supply to make people more receptive to buying and consuming nostalgia culture. Because, you know, that would never happen in real life. And you know, the map of the world does not need to be the same, you could random hex-crawl the whole thing and toss out the road atlas. That high-tech future society and the great disaster shifted things around.

In short, figure out what your gaming group likes, more Mad Science or more Mad Max, and play that game. If they like both, then put these games in the rules blender and have fun.