Having sworn off fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons, I brought Dungeon Crawl Classics and “Lair of the Lamb” to the high school D&D club to start the second year. After the tediousness and difficulty of rolling fifth edition characters in the previous year, it seemed to me that having a zero-level funnel would make for a quick start, and a “training period” for the rules. There would be a char-gen session (rolls: 6 abilities, hp, birth sign, background DONE) and then some learning of combat rules, including the long critical & fumble tables, and death experiences. I brought photocopies of the crit charts. I made little colored post-it stickies for every item in the dungeon, to be placed in the slot encumbrance system. I figured we could even start playing the first day, and we did. The first PCs were named “Joe Mama III” and “Eric.” The player behind Eric was new to TTRPGs and searched for a light switch in a dark room a few minutes into the dungeon; he had no preconceptions about the setting. Enough kids showed up for two tables the first day, and most of the veterans shied away from the new system. The 5E table spent their entire session partly rolling characters.
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| The Zocchi dice are playing the role of rubble |
During the second week, my players managed to get very angry at a chicken-seller, and Eric was slain at the end. That player never returned. The 5E table managed to finish their characters and run one scene. A few teachers joined my table. I had realized that the scratch-off 0-level character sheets I had gotten in the DCC starter kit would be a very good tool for the game. One of the teachers got a character with a ‘3’ luck score, and became “Ovaltine the Unlucky.” The fifth week, none of my student players showed, and all the teachers sat in at the 5E table. We managed to start and finish a battle (the culmination of a short adventure), at least. From that point on, my table was the only one available, as the other teacher GM did not offer any new 5E adventures.
All but one of the students joined my table, the exception holding out hope that his semi-heroic campaign would be restarted (he had brought back his character from the previous year, and adored the mini I had painted for him). For a while I wondered if I’d made a mistake choosing a non-superheroic and even non-heroic system. The vibe of DCC adventurers certainly jibed with the students’ playstyle of being general scoundrels. Was I wrong in not offering them an escape of less-than-ideal real-life living conditions, a chance to be heroes in a more pleasant fantasy world? The students, however, are participants in their own fantasy constantly, as they nearly all play contemporary video games. (The holdout showed me his stats at the end 2023: he averaged more than eight hours per day for the entire year on a single platform.) They got to be NBA and NFL superstars, kung fu masters (Mortal Kombat & the literally cartoonish Smash Brothers), and spec-ops (Fortnite & Overwatch) on a daily basis, power fantasies all. Maybe the grimness of the dungeon was not the most psychologically healthy, but they did a good job solving the OSR problems of the Lamb.
A new kid joined with the idea of making a necromancer, and there just so happened to be an advancement in the dungeon that would give him the ability to level in that class. The mercurial magic that he rolled gave us an explanation for players’ appearance and disappearance, as one of his spells sent people randomly to a sequestered plane. Another completely new player joined, a girl, whose character was soon maimed (“Rolffa Half-Foot”), and who eventually stopped adventuring with the group, because her parents made her quit playing the “nerdy” game. Joemama III was killed by being too risky near the Lamb. He didn’t return for the rest of the year, either.
I had fashioned a Lamb miniature out of quick-drying clay and a mini cow skull. It was almost as gross as I had hoped.
The Lamb was put down by a strike from Ovaltine the Unlucky, that also ended up spearing and ending the other PC “Anuk (the Unluckier)” during the killing blow. The students decided to use the monster’s intestines to rescue a woman in a pit, discovering and aborting the baby lambs inside the monster as they extracted the viscera. Some wore the prize guts as they escaped the lower level of the dungeon. Yeah, I picked the correct system.
Highlights from the second level included the unlikely finding of a secret door, the huge relief finding a cache of arms and armor and more light sources, gaining the first magic weapon, and ambushing the talkative ghouls. There was great joy in determining an animated statue was definitely “racist,” as it wouldn’t stop attacking the demi-humans. The cheery player behind “Darkheart” from year one returned to the table, and kicked a wall of death in his first session, promptly killing his character, but freeing the party from the dungeon. (The student had been gone from school for months because he had been attacked in the lunchroom and concussed, for allegedly “talking shit” about the attacker’s girlfriend.)
* * *
The “Reborn,” having escaped the horrors of the White Temple’s dungeon, fled far from the city of Lon Barago, for they knew the White Priests would have their revenge if they stayed after killing The Lamb. During their flight, the party heard tales of a band of sadistic adventurers called “The Head Collectors.” They had the oddest of names: Kyriee’ of the Eight Fingers, Samuél Dinosaur-Ducker, Sami the Cowardly Fox, Ragnar the Quiet, and Xopa the Selfish Shell. This foul-mouthed bunch were rumored to have killed a blood demon, burned down a village and a mansion, failed to protect a caravan against raiders, let a witch into a fortress, loved a shrub, and teleported through time and space.
But that wasn’t what interested the “Reborn,” no. It was the story that the Head Collectors had disappeared in a place called … the Slaughtergrid. It didn’t sound very safe, but it was supposed to hold great treasures. Probably. Our heroes heard other stories about the dungeon. A man got out once, it was said, but he was changed forever. There was also the tall tale that the Slaughtergrid had eaten a town! Some old coot told them that a shield is a weapon, in the Slaughtergrid. It was almost as though some unseen force guided our party toward the ‘Grid. As usual, Arthur’s blink was acting up, and Akina, Thödius, Jax (né Modrin), Rolffa Half-Foot, and Ovaltine the Unlucky disappeared when the necromancer tried to raise up his little dead critters (and he failed, adding insult to injury).
* * *
It was here, in the second mini-campaign of the year, that the hold-out player finally rejoined. I had arranged that he could play the mutated version of his character trapped in the Slaughtergrid (see my review), who would then attach to the party. The students relished killing their own former characters (or those of players that annoyed them). The kids laughed a lot at the mutations. The player whose PC suffered premature aging during the first year had the same thing (on a d100 table!) happen to his second year “main.” The players were surprised when the humanoids parleyed with the PCs, requested that the invading characters stop murdering them inside their home. From this encounter a détente was established, opening the lowest level and the possibility of escape.
All of the other teachers dropped out, by this time. Three more new players joined, one bad sport who was only there to fuck with the other PCs, luckily for only one session. A very good sport joined, a senior who’d heard about D&D but had never had the opportunity to play before. He rolled up Hiro the Slug as his wizard’s familiar, whose spit turned the tide of more than one battle, and was hit with a rhyming curse for one of his mercurial magicks. The student would compose short rapped couplets whenever he would cast. An older sister joined, a very mild girl who I taught. She named her toadstool person “Sunny.” Sunny had a lot of difficulty with her deities, and sometimes Sunny was cruel and vicious.
The students had been through two OSR lethality gauntlets. The first was ameliorated by having the backup pile of sacrificial victims as replacement characters. Deaths had come from hiding in feeding troughs, challenging the Lamb straight on, pulling the acid shower lever, touching the trapped skeleton, swimming while under attack, pulling down a ceiling, getting stabbed by fellow party-member, and kicking the death trap. The second go-round allowed for insta-resurrection, with mutation.
The ultimate session of the second year saw the PCs battle “The Turtle,” the retired PC of the cheater from the prior year, who as an NPC had taken control of the shit and the slime and ruled the lowest level of the Slaughtergrid (replacing the misogyny monster). I openly cheated with The Turtle’s rolls in that conflict, and the vets understood what I was doing. The action economy, some nice spell rolls, and mighty deeds did in the foe, even though more than one “semi-hero” ended up face down in shit during the battle. The mushroom, the foxling, and the slug-master graduated.
I ran a one-shot on graduation day. One stalwart (rising senior) showed and five neophytes to RPGs played through part of The Incandescent Grottoes. They were creative–”Could we make these monkeys trigger the traps?”--and willing to experiment. None would join the club the next year, though.
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| A failed lure; they thought they were getting Uno! |
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