DCC Sword and Sorcery (1)

     So...Castles&Crusades may not be a thing for my group, at least for a while: we have games stacking up like airplanes on runway waiting for the thunderstorms to pass. I am blessed in that my gaming group--there are six of us--has multiple people who want to GM. I tend to be the forever-GM (which I honestly don't mind), but now we have a guy who ran 5e Saltmarsh and who is building out Star Trek, a guy who ran the DCC funnel Hole in the Sky as well as a 5e Sandy Petersen campaign Dark Worlds, another guy who is currently running the 5e version of The One Ring (and who also ran a short Stormbringer game), and another guy who GMd for the first time and ran the Mutant Crawl Classics funnel Hive of the Overmind. "An embarrassment of riches," as they say. So. Many. Games. 

    I have been running a small 2-3 player Dragonbane game on Sunday mornings, and it's been fun. Chaosium's Basic Role Playing engine is my favorite TTRPG system, and Dragonbane has a lot of that DNA. I could easily run a high-fantasy campaign using this system and be perfectly entertained (and entertaining). With that said...Goodman Games, and their DCC brand, is wonderful. Their system has just enough crunch so that rolls matter, but it is not overly mechanized like D&D 5e is (someone on Reddit said "What was once narrative is now mechanical," and that's stuck with me). And these frigging people basically give their stuff away on Humble Bundle! I have more than 100 DCC modules and game supplements now, and I am chomping at the bit to use them. 

    I have run a few games using DCC. Last spring and summer, I ran a game--maybe five or six sessions--and I've run a live-game funnel as well as two modules. It's an easy game to run, and it is extraordinarily funny: bad shit just happens, all of the time. The magic is very swingy, which is an aspect one of my payers (the guy who loves being a wizard) doesn't like. One bad roll and poof! You can be well and truly fucked. So that's something we are working on, seeing if we can get the system to run the way we like to play, but honestly, it's one of my favorite games ever. 

    So I've been messing around with how to run a Sword&Sorcery campaign; something that feels a bit like Conan, or Kane, or any number of other blood and fire books/movies that I love, and I'm made a few campaign constraints. No demi-humans, for example. Limited class choices. No clerics. Low magic. A few healing mechanics I've adopted from DCC Lankhmar. Stuff like that. I'm going to set the game in a bastardized version of Howard's Hyboria/Xoth. I want to have a desert wastes sort of feel; like Afghanistan or something.