DCCRPG World Tour 2016 - Well of Souls with the Norwin Game Knights

A judge enjoying little nacho cups courtesy of Game Knight Jeremy

Ever since the summer I've been running monthly Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG events with the Norwin Game Knights.  While we've had a few "grown ups" at the tables, most of my events have been for the 12 and under crowd.  My daughter Carrie has been recruiting some of her friends from school to start showing up, and we even pulled off a short Crawling Under a Broken Moon campaign.  But running games for packs of wild tweens can get a bit rough!  

So for this month's event I declared that I would be judging for the thirteen and up crowd, and that someone else could take on the tween'sponsibility.  Lucky for me that last night I was able to outsource some of the Judging responsibilities... to the next generation of gamers!

Two of my players from previous games, Evan and Matthew, came prepared to run their own events.  This was a special moment for our club, as it was Matthew's first time running an RPG in public, and Evan's first time running an RPG ever!  

• Evan ran Portal Under the Stars, a quintessential quest found in the back of the Dungeon Crawl Classics Role-Playing Game rule book.  
• Matthew ran Gold in the Hills, a Basic Fantasy Role-Playing Game adventure from Adventure Anthology One (free download!)  

Even though they technically ran adventures from two separate OSR systems, the similarity of DCCRPG to BFRPG allowed both game masters to use pre-gen 0-level characters from the Purple Sorcerer website.

Evan's purchased his DCC rule book on DriveThruRPG and had it printed 

This arrangement worked out wonderfully!  There were eleven players looking for games, and between the three of us we were able to keep the table sizes manageable.  Evan and Matthew each had three players, and I had five.  

Father and daughter game mastering!

Even my daughter Evie had four players at her No Thank You, Evil RPG session!  All in all, counting judges and game masters, there were nineteen RPG'ers playing with the Norwin Game Knights.  We've come a long way!  

That dang puzzle!

Well of Souls

For my part of the evening I ran Well of Souls by +Carl Bussler as part of the DCCRPG World Tour 2016.  While not the most deadly DCC adventure (only four of sixteen character perished), its certainly one of the most challenging... mostly due to that infernal puzzle in the second chamber (NO SPOILERS!)  Actually, the group had a hard time just climbing down the well to begin with... here are some highlights:

• +andrew lyon won "best character names" with Billion, Tedford, and Rufus.  Sadly Rufus was killed.

• After most of the party had climbed down the well, led there by Farid the guide, Rambo and Annie (both played by Ryan), declined to climb down.  Since she had one of the Tablets of Fate, Annie the Orphan climbed down eventually.

• While everyone other than Rambo were exploring the area just beneath the well, Rambo decided that Farid had to climb down to be "bait" for some of the cave lurkers. But instead of letting him climb down, Rambo pushed Farid over the edge of the well, hoping that the guide would survive the sixty-foot fall.  He didn't.

• The very next chamber of the room, the "big puzzle" room, shut down the entire quest.  Over an hour was spent in this room, as the party battled wave after wave of skeletons after failing each attempt to solve the puzzle.  The party did discover that oars (treated as 1d6 damage causing weapons) were the most effective battle-gear to be wielded in combat.  

• We ran out of time just after the group figured out the solution to this adventure.  Thank you Michael for finally solving the puzzle!

Here are a few of the more interesting Quotes:

• "I wanna be something more than this!" - I asked Michael to have his character (Lennie the Barber) make some kind of epic declaration before leading the party to glory.  This is what he came up with.

• "We're going into the dungeon but we're not taking Rambo with us?" - Craig asked, completely bewildered.

• "He's rolling '6d10', there's NO WAY there can be a pattern!" - Andy stated to Jeremy, who kept looking for a pattern between the numbers generated by the spinning wheel. 

While an enjoyable evening, I don't think we had the "A-Team" for complex puzzle solving.  Next month I'll make sure to bring an adventure more focused on slaughter, destruction, and war! 

See you all at our next event on Friday, April 22nd!