The Tao of Sandbox; the Te of Railroad

If the DM has conceived of a series of events - any series of events - which have not been directly brought into play by virtue of the players initiating action, then that game is NOT a sandbox, it is a railroad.  If the DM has been anything except the "manager of the sandbox" ... if the DM has determined that a given set of events ought to occur because that DM wishes to be creative, or wishes to act as a "player" of the game, because that DM wants to insert his or her own ideas, then that game is NOT a sandbox.

When I run a game, my attempt is to bring the context of a full world to the players, to the best of my ability.  That includes NPCs who want to use the PCs to their own ends.  That includes having wizards who might have created unique un-dead.  It includes ordering the interests of gods and city-states, and, occasionally, things happen like earthquakes and floods.  The world moves whether or not the PCs move with it.  

Opportunities can be squandered.  The PCs can be sitting in a tavern somewhere, drinking fine ale, when events catch up to them....and those events can be natural or unnatural.  The world doesn't sit still, no matter how much you might wish it to.

And, I am sorry, but this is a sandbox, and no one - no matter how smart or how well-meaning - gets to change the meaning of that to fit their own mantra.  That is what it meant when I first heard the term in the 1980s; this is what it still means now.  

The DM's role is to interpret the player's decisions, to place the logical obstacles between the player and the player's goals, and to describe the world and the inhabitants of that world to the player.  Any other action is a deliberate misuse of the DM's power, to selfishly direct other persons, friends and families, to enact out the DM's fantasies in a situation where the DM has all the power and the players have none.

See, in my world the GM is not a slave to the players, and the players are not slaves to the GM.  It may be radical, but I am not playing these games to escape life, or to escape a sense of powerlessness.  I like my job, love my family, and have, overall, a pretty damn good life.  The real world doesn't make me feel powerless, so I don't need the game to help me escape that feeling.  From either side of the screen.

I play these games to explore.  I am interested in making the world tick, and I am interested in what the players do.  I am interested in both their actions and their reactions.  I am interested in their creativity.

This works because, not surprisingly, this is also what I am interested in as a player - I have no desire to play in a world that does not similarly breathe.  And this, to me, is part of managing a sandbox.  An important part.

Frankly, if I tell the players that I am willing to run whatever sort of game they want, but I don't do this work, then I am full of shit.  

If they want to explore the world of crime, but there are no other, bigger fish in the pond when they enter it, I have failed them.  If the fish, big and small, do not have plans of their own, then I have failed them.  If the wizards who knew where stuff was, and who were willing to pay to get it, which got mentioned in the opening module, are not still out there - and they do not hire someone else to get those same items (some of which the PCs might now have), I have failed them.  If the various gods and powers can be taken for granted because they do not pursue their own interests, then I have failed them.

It is not my goal to fail my players.

While I agree that it is wasted effort to plan the world too far ahead (and by this I mean, what occurs in the world without the PCs involving themselves in it in some way), this is not because I will force the players to some specific action to make my work worthwhile, but because I know I will not, and thus make the work wasted.

I'll tell you how I got introduced to the word "railroad", as it applies to role-playing games:  DragonLance.  No big surprise there, I imagine.  But the term did not apply to how a scenario started, it applied to how the scenario played thereafter.  and that's important because no one - no matter how smart or how well-meaning - gets to change the meaning of that to fit their own mantra either.  This is what it meant when I first heard the term in the 1980s; this is what it means now.  There's no coincidence in that; I first heard the term "sandbox" in opposition to the word "railroad" in the context of discussing these modules.

An interesting thing about modules:  The first module I ever used was Gary Gygax's The Keep on the Borderlands.  I have used it many times since, and it is still the best module TSR ever produced in my opinion.  There are, of course, things I didn't like about it at the time....particularly the idea that the DM should steer the PCs back if they go too close to the edge of the map.   Time has mellowed me on this somewhat - there's nothing wrong with the GM providing this kind of context, provided that they do not follow it up by forcing the PCs back to their story, or merely cause the world to end at the map's edge.

Growing up, I wasn't wealthy.  Far from it.  Buying gaming material was rare.  Originally, I ran games from copies of the books owned by my friend Keith, and laboriously hand-copied by myself.  When I ran modules - including White Plume Mountain, the A-Series modules, and Ravenloft - it was because the players involved bought them and asked me to run them.  Nobody in their right mind would consider this railroading.  What railroading meant, in that context, was to disallow solutions that were not foreseen by the module's writers, or to force events in the module to occur as the writer had envisioned.  For us, modules were frameworks only.  They were meant to be bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated.

White Plume Mountain came out in 1979.  Players have been asking to explore it for over 30 years.  Can it be used to railroad?  Sure.  I had a DM do that to me, once - my first experience with the module, actually, and before I read/ran it myself - but only because he was inexperienced and didn't understand yet how to run the game.  I have encountered remarkably few "Bad DMs" in over 30 years of gaming.  Lots who were inexperienced, sure, but that isn't the same thing. 

It is easy to say "Don't use modules; use these tools instead, no matter how long it takes", but the tools offered - books on history and speleology - aren't really doing it right either.  No.  If you want to run the game, you'll need to explore caves, head out to jungles, and walk in the Arctic   until you've wrestled a polar bear and fought for your life, you are not really doing it right.  Because either indirect experience has value, or it does not.

My own adventure, The Thing in the Chimney, starts with the PCs awakening in the Great Hall of the Cinderclaws' lair.  Is this railroading?  By some lights no doubt it is, but it was written to follow-up an in-game situation where the PCs consigned themselves to Fate and leapt between worlds.  Player choices led to the adventure, but they did not need to lead to that specific adventure or that specific location.

To my mind, it doesn't always matter where you start, but it does always matter what agency you have to affect things once you have started.  You have to start somewhere.  

The funny thing is, if you read the linked-to "opening module", you will note that the PCs are explicitly started somewhere, and even if we are not told where the players are presumed to know, because they are told that they can go elsewhere if they do not like it. But, if you read this post, and agree with its basic premise, that would make the opening module a railroad.  Because it is a black and white, on and off switch, as defined by Alexis.  And that opening irrevocably flipped the switch to "railroad".

But you are running your game wrong.  Papa knows best.

Back when I was writing RCFG, I wrote this as part of the introduction:

While the GM has absolute authority to determine what the game milieu is, one of the common player goals of RCFG is to influence what the game milieu will be.  In other words, while the GM determines the past and present of the game world, the future is created through the collaborative effort of the players (via their characters’ actions) and the GM (by determining what the effects of those actions are on the game milieu, as well as what effect various non-player characters, monsters, and natural – or supernatural – occurrences will have). 

This distinction cannot be overstressed – It is the GM’s job to provide context and consequences for player character decisions; it is not the GM’s job to force the player characters down a narrow “plot”!  The GM who grasps (and follows) the philosophy behind this game avoids falling in love with the milieu as it is.  Instead, he or she is eager to see just how the players will attempt to change it!  It is the success, or failure, of these attempts that RCFG is about.

While role-playing games are cooperative efforts with no real “winners” or “losers” (so long as everyone is enjoying the game, anyway), leaving a lasting mark on the campaign world is often the closest to “winning” that one can get!

A gaming group may devise another social contract if desired.  Usually, though, a GM who consistently attempts to railroad player characters, who is unwilling to accept player decisions related to their characters, or who consistently undermines (rather than challenges) the goals of players and characters alike is more hindrance than asset to a gaming group.  If talking about the problem doesn’t help, the group is encouraged to seek a replacement for such a problem GM.

The funny thing is, I still hold this to be true.  

Nobody is beholden to me when I sit down to play, and I am beholden to nobody else.  It doesn't matter which side of the screen I am on.  I have lots of hobbies.  I have lots of things to do.  I make time for this hobby because I am passionate about it, but my sitting at your table while you GM does not mean in any way that I have ceded all power to you.  

We are sharing power, working together to make this game work.  True, you hold one type of power, and I another, but that is because we hold the power required to meet our roles in the game.  And, if you do not meet yours, or you attempt to usurp mine, our game will be short-lived indeed.

I expect that you will not interject your ideas into my actions, but I also damn well expect that you will interject your ideas into the world you present, its NPCs, its gods, and its monsters.  Do your best to make the world alive, vibrant, and as deep as you can.  Do your best to tempt me from my goals, because the world is like that.  Allow NPCs, gods, and monsters to attempt to subjugate me.  Then allow NPCs, gods, and monsters to seek entry to my service, because that's what happens in a living world.

The game is not just the player's actions, or just the GM's adjudications, it is the back-and-forth between the two.  If the GM is unwilling to do his part, for whatever reason, the game is less than it could be.  If the GM is unwilling to do prep work until you tell him what to do, and then you either have to play while he flies by the seat of his pants or until he does the work, the game is less than it could be.  If there are not enough things going on in the world to tempt you away from your goals (successfully or not...you need not give in to temptation) then the game is less than it could be.

Also in that intro, I had included a quote from H.G. Wells, from The History of Mr. Polly:

If the world does not please you you can change it.  Determine to alter it at any price, and you can change it altogether.  You may change it to something sinister and angry, to something appalling, but it may be you will change it to something brighter, something more agreeable, and at the worst something much more interesting.

When I read Alexis' post on definitions, I cannot help but be struck by his reference to redefining rape.  In that bit, he notes that people try to redefine rape both to claim that it does not exist (and this has direct bearing to the series of blog posts in response to -C, and some recent back and forth on Really Bad Eggs with "Socrates is Mortal")  and that rape means whatever they don't like.  Alexis' redefinition of sandbox and railroad seem much akin to this sort of redefinition of consent and rape.  In all of these cases, there is an attempt to shut down the conversation on the basis of you're using words wrong and if you don't accept my definition, it's because you just don't get it; you're part of the problem.


Here's something else that all of these positions have in common:  Everyone is wrong but me.

Are you buying this shit?  Because I am not.  

Present me with a world.  If I want to change it, I will.

The Tao of Prep Work

A long time ago, I had intended to include a blog post about converting modules for use in sandbox-style gaming.  Recently, I have had some back-and-forth with the meme that, should White Plume Mountain appear somewhere in the campaign milieu, players lose all agency.  Or all creativity.  Or are only able to react to the GM’s presented story.  This was all wrapped up with a claim that creating dungeons is a form of wankery, and that dungeons are what’s wrong with this hobby.

That I disagree with these ideas is putting it rather mildly.

In my conception of the game, play is a volleying of ideas between players and GM, with each both reacting and acting upon each other.  The GM’s responsibility is to give sufficient context for the players to make meaningful choices, and then to present the consequences of those choices as new context for the next volley of player choices. 

The fictional campaign milieu, however it is devised, and including its inhabitants, is the primary context that players have.  The ruleset is the secondary context, with the players presumably understanding that the rules are a model of the world, and can be altered as circumstances demand to model the world better.

Now, it has been said that “necessity is the mother of invention”, which is another way of saying that creativity often occurs as a reaction to some problem.  Far from restricting creativity, having something to react to often increases it.  Consider all of the novels, poems, songs, paintings, films, etc., that are specifically inspired by, or reacting to, something else.  Now, consider all of the same that develop in a vacuum, reacting to nothing.  I cannot think of a single example of the second set.

Reaction need not be creative.  You can react – or act, for that matter – by rote.  But reaction is not intrinsically less creative because it is in response to something else.  In fact, the reason why simply watching a movie is not generally viewed as a creative process is because it is passive.  You do not react.

If, on the other hand, you watch a movie, and your reaction is to feel that you could do better, that is creative – so long as you actually go out and do it!  Edgar Rice Burroughs claimed that he started writing as a reaction to the novels that were then available.  No one was writing what he wanted to read, and he thought he could do better.

So, imagine that you wanted to slap White Plume Mountain into a sandbox campaign milieu.  What to do?  Well, first you need to remove the intro parts that refer to how the PCs get involved.  Then you need to go through the module and change anything you think should be changed, so as to fit the campaign milieu.  Then you need to place it somewhere.  Then you need to decide what “footprint” it has on the local area.  You may also have to update it from time to time to keep up with campaign events.

Me, I would place the theft of the three great weapons into the far past, and make mention of White Plume Mountain early on.  The players can either decide that they want those weapons, and decide how to go about it (at any level), or ignore it, or do whatever else they like.  The presence of White Plume Mountain removes no agency from the players whatsoever.

Some players may choose to tackle White Plume Mountain “because it is there”.  Well, that’s a meaningful choice, too.  It is as meaningful as choosing to raise an army, create a great collection, or waylay travelers in a forest.

Please take a moment to read this “module” “that shatters the illusion that the DM ought to control the events of the game”.  Were you under the effects of that particular illusion?  Reading this blog, do you imagine that I am?

Nothing in the "module" is in any way invalidated by the inclusion of White Plume Mountain in the GM’s prep work.  Conversely, though, the GM’s prep work may be made considerably easier by the module’s inclusion, and the module itself might carry resonance with both GM and players who have heard of it.  Some GMs create campaign milieus modeled off of real world history to create exactly this type of resonance.

Prep work is not part of playing the game.  But it is part of the game.  Creating dungeons is no more self-indulgent wankery than is creating maps of a fantasy version of Europe for your campaign, devising trade tables, or devising means to randomly determine resources.  Nor is the purpose different – in each of these cases, the GM is attempting to create a context in which meaningful choices can take place.  And this has nothing to do with keeping players on a chain, or a paternal “father-knows-best” attitude.

Prep work is not play.  You can include anything that strikes your fancy in your prep work, and it still will not be play.  Prep work cannot make decisions for players.  Prep work cannot railroad.  Until you sit down at the table, with actual players, it is not play.  Prep work commits no sins.

And, if I was a player presented with the afore-linked introductory “module”, my first question to “If this part of the world isn't your cup of tea, strike out for warmer seas, or jungles, or deserts, or polar climes” would be, “Cool.  Where are we now?”

Because it has to be.

The GM is my character’s eyes, ears, nose, sense of touch, and taste buds.  The GM supplies my character’s knowledge of the world and of history.  Until the GM has presented something, how can I make any meaningful decisions?

You know where the monsters are - you do not need me to tell you.  The monsters are in the wilderness, they are in the mountains and hills, they are at the bottoms of lakes and lagoons, they are in caves and at the bottoms of ravines, they are in the sewers of the largest cities ... and well you know, where there are monsters, there will be treasure.

No, actually, I did need you to tell me that this world includes monsters, mountains, hills, lakes, sewers, and cities.  And, if the kind of campaign I want you to run includes hacking and slashing them, I need you to tell me what I can see so that I can find those things.  I need you to tell me what I know of the world so I can do the same.  If you set your campaign in a fantasy version of Europe, perhaps you did so just to avoid having to overtly present that information, but you are dreaming if you imagine that you are offering nothing other than a blank slate.

And if you are offering nothing other than a blank slate, it might be preparatory to a role-playing game, such as a session or sessions in which the parameters of the game are devised by the group, but until there is context, there is no role-playing game.  Before context, there is only prep for the game.  Group prep, solo prep, whatever - it's still only prep.

If you prefer to play something more 'civilized,' let me remind you there is an entire world of crime open to you.  Become murderers, become arsonists, become racketeers or smugglers, examine for yourselves all the dark arts of flouting the law and living fast on your feet for fun and profit!  Or if that seems immoral and undesirable, consider the possibilities to be found in catching criminals.  Bounty hunters are always in short supply and the act takes courage and inventiveness.

Then again, perhaps collecting other things strikes your imaginations better - rare objects, books, art, magic items, what have you.  Create a library, create a zoo, travel the world wide gathering together all you need to make it the greatest ever.  If you seem in short supply of ideas, there are always mages aching to make your acquaintance, to pay you hard coin for things they know they need and know where to find.

All of this is context.  All of this is the GM presenting information about the world, so that the players can make creative and meaningful choices.  Pretending otherwise is pure hypocrisy….especially if it is pretending otherwise so you can weep over the people who don’t get that this is a game in which you can do anything.  D&D (or DCC, etc.) is not about solving mazes or puzzles, but solving mazes and puzzles can be a part of it, if that is what the players desire.  Remember “I'm prepared to run any sort of game you wish”?  The world is made neither larger nor smaller by one mountain being called the Omu Peak or by another being called White Plume Mountain. 

Free RPG Day

http://www.goodman-games.com/FRPGD13preview.html



Free RPG Day is Saturday, June 15! This year’s Free RPG Day module includes two adventures for two great games!

For DCC RPG, the Free RPG Day module features The Imperishable Sorceress, a level 1 adventure by Daniel Bishop! As the adventurers pass through a mundane door, they are startled to find themselves unexpectedly in a frozen landscape. A distant woman’s voice whispers a welcome, and the characters are thrust into a tale of spirits and ancient secrets.

For Xcrawl, the Free RPG Day module features The 2013 Studio City Crawl, a level 6-8 adventure by Brendan LaSalle! This is the first published adventure for Maximum Xcrawl, the upcoming Pathfinder adaptation of Xcrawl. Maximum Xcrawl: Studio City Crawl is just a tiny taste of all the amazing adventures to come. Strap on your sword, call your agent, and get ready for victory and a lifetime of red carpet interviews and Scrooge McDuck money, or defeat and death, or worse: a one-way ticket back your old job at the mall!

Available FREE at participating stores on Free RPG Day!

"Challenging Games"

For me, a challenging game requires that there is a chance for failure as well as a chance for success, and that the degree of failure or success is not an on/off switch. There has to be a palette of outcomes that depends upon the choices made by the players to determine just how much you win, or just how badly you lose.

It must be possible to obtain enough context to make rational decisions, and the consequences of those decisions must follow from the context and the choices made. NPCs should be mostly trustworthy, but follow the 10/80/10 rule, where 10% would never betray a trust, 80% could be motivated to do so if the right levers are found, and 10% are scum.

There should be lots of small-risk, small-reward jobs, quite a few high-risk high-reward jobs, and a few low-risk high-reward jobs.

There should be enough cleverly hidden rewards that all of "the treasure" will not always be found. Certainly, treasure does not teleport around behind you until you find it in convenient parcels that match your wish list.

Poor planning and/or bad luck sometimes means your cost in resources is greater than the benefits of an expedition. Conversely, good planning is rewarded, and good luck can bring you startling success.

There GM should be on the side of the players, but not sway his decisions or his die rolls on that basis.

Played by the book, any Gygax-era D&D will produce a challenging game. There is no need to "toughen up" anything; that was the expected play experience. Likewise, examine treasure placement in any of the original modules. A lot of treasure was not "intended" to be found - it was there to reward the odd bit of clever thinking or good fortune that might occur in play. Read in particular the advice in B1 about placing treasure, where it is made explicit that a good dungeon will have treasures that are not found.

(In fact, it is a critical failing of certain analyses of older modules that all treasure is assumed to be found, despite explicit statements to the contrary.)

To me, a challenging game is one where you take charge of, and ownership for, your victories or failures. Of course, a challenging game requires a fair GM who is as interested in meeting the challenges imposed by adjudicating the players' clever ideas as it does players who are interested in meeting the challenges of the GM's campaign milieu.

YMMV.

Now In Print.....

Mystic Bull has this puppy in print now at Lulu, and has reduced the pdf at RPGnow.

I have two adventures within, Icon of the Blood Goddess and Mermaids From Yuggoth, all as part of my fiendish plan to have more DCC RPG adventures available by me than by Harley Stroh.

(I kid of course.  The more DCC adventures by Harley Stroh, Joseph Goodman, Michael Curtis, Jon Marr, Paul Wolfe, etc., that are out there, the better it is for us all.)

But I still think you'll like the adventures in this book!

Condolences for John Adams

John Adams of Brave Halfling Publishing and his wife recently lost their baby daughter, who was due in July. As a parent of three, I can only imagine how devastating this must be.

In my contacts with John, he has always impressed me as a genuinely good person, someone who is passionate about what he does, and about the people around him.

I know that it would mean something to me that people cared enough to do something, even if it can't undo a loss.

So, on Sunday, at 9 pm Toronto time, I'm going to send something to John and his family.  The card will just be "We sympathize with your loss, and we want you to know that we are here for you.  From your friends in the DCC community."

Because, really, we are a community.  Or we should be.

If you want to contribute, great.  I'll be using PayPal, and what I send will be based on what I can afford.  You can add to that amount by sending a donation to ravencrowking at hotmail dot com.  Your donation will go to sending condolences, and no other purpose.  Cut-off time is 8 pm Eastern Daylight Time.  Any contribution, small or large, is welcome.  There will be no list of contributors, because it is better if it comes from all of us, even those of us living paycheck to paycheck or who don't use PayPal.

I don't have any better idea.  I feel the need to do something.

Spread the word.  Let's get this done.

$1 Off at Purple Duck Games

You can get $1 off on AL4 or AL5 right now, by gaining the secret code from the Purple Duck blog (http://purpleduckgames.blogspot.ca/2013/04/april-14th-20th-2013.html).

Feel free to let others know!

Have You Seen My Children?

Did you like The Thing in the Chimney, my unofficial DCC holiday adventure from last year?  Well, I'm giving away more.

On my birthday, August 4^th 2013, I am going to release another free unofficial product that I will email to anyone who posts to a blog, writes a review, or posts on Google+ or similar, about any of the following products:

AL1:  Bone Hoard of the Dancing Horror (Purple Duck Games)

AL3:  Through the Cotillion of Hours (Purple Duck Games)

AL5:  Stars in the Darkness (Purple Duck Games)
CE1:  The Falcate Idol (Purple Duck Games)
CE2:  The Black Goat (Purple Duck Games)
CE3:  The Folk of Osmon (Purple Duck Games)

Mermaids From Yuggoth (from In the Prison of the Squid Sorcerer by Mystic Bull Games)

Icon of the Blood Goddess (from In the Prison of the Squid Sorcerer by Mystic Bull Games)

Tomb of the Squonk (part of Pulp Weird Encounters #1 from Mystic Bull Games)

The Thing in the Chimney

Angels, Daemons, and Beings Between (Dragon’s Hoard Publishing)
The Revelation of Mulmo (Dragon’s Hoard Publishing)
The Imperishable Sorceress (Goodman Games, Free RPG Day)
Well of the Worm (Goodman Games, DCC rules conversion of Harley Stroh's adventure, DCC #76.5)

There will be other adventures published between now and then, and as they are published they will be added to the list.  Be on the lookout for:

The Arwich Grinder (Crawl! Fanzine) - This one keeps getting pushed back, so only Rev Dak and a few playtesters can actually comment on it......
CE4:  The Seven Deadly Skills of Sir Amoral the Bastard (Purple Duck Games)
Gifts of the Only (Brave Halfling Publishing)

Why am I doing this? 

First off, I love DCC and I want you to blog about it, write about it, and otherwise help to keep interest about it circulating in the InterWebs.

Second off, these brave publishers took a chance with my work, and I would really like to help them drum up sales for these products.  There should always be a DCC product in the Top 10 at RPGNow IMHO….whether it is the newest release from Goodman Games (and The Sea Queen Escapes is excellent, by the way!) or Purple Sorcerer (ditto Lair of the Mist Men) or Brave Halfling (ditto The Witch of Wydfield).

Third, writing is a lonely occupation, in which you throw your children out into the world, and they never let you know how they are doing.  If you have seen my children, I’d like to know.

Finally, taking a page from J.R.R. Tolkien’s hobbits, I’ve decided to give presents on my birthday.  If this is successful, I might even make it an annual tradition!

How do you qualify?  Follow these simple steps:

(1)  Write something about one of the above products.  Remember that the list will be updated as new products are released.  Love it, hate it, how it played for you, whatever.  What you say is up to you.

 

(2)  Comment on this post with a link to your new piece of writing.  If you’ve written on two or more of these adventures in the past – and I am looking at The Iron Tavern and Tenkar’s Tavern here, although there may be others – you can link to those posts.  If you’re using any of these adventures as a DCC World Tour stop, that would be really cool to hear about.

(3)  Send me an email at ravencrowking at hotmail dot com with your email address.

What’s the Prize?

Because of the low turnout, the prize is a single patron, but one which is fully fleshed out:  Hizzzgrad, Daemonic Lord of Crawling Things.

New Adventures!

http://www.rpgnow.com/product/113799/AL-5%3A-Stars-in-the-Darkness-%5BDCC%5D?filters=0_0_0_0_40050_31817

EDIT:  First review
EDIT:  Second review

AL 5: Stars in the Darkness is now live from Purple Duck Games.  I am very happy with this adventure, and hope you will be too.

In millennia past, the ancestors of the elves protected the stars as they followed their courses, for there are wolves in the outer dark.  Yet what manner of creature would dare to consume stars as though they were sheep in the field?  And what has become of the ancient starherds who once stopped such monsters?  

For such a monster is back - Urstah, the Star-Drinker.  Stars are disappearing from the night sky, and with the loss of those stars, luck is being drained from the world.  Your luck.  

Dare you enter the caverns, face the star-drinker, and release the stars in darkness?



Stars in the Darkness is a DCC adventure designed for four to eight, third level characters, that can easily be dropped into your campaign.  In it, characters seek to stop an ancient evil from arising, with possibly devastating effects should they fail.  

This is an epic adventure where the actions of the PCs affect the very cosmos.  To fail is almost unthinkable.......But can you succeed?

One of the things that I really like about the Dungeon Crawl Classics system is that it encourages adventures which, in other systems, wouldn't occur until characters were very high level indeed.  If I had been writing for other game systems, this module would have been designed for 12-15th level characters!

Although it is not yet out, The Revelation of Mulmo (Dragon's Hoard Publishing) is written, edited, playtested, and is in final art and layout.

This adventure contains 60 encounter areas (!) in and under an "abandoned" elf fortress that may well hold the key to bringing a dead comrade back to life.

Or it may contain grisly death.

This module comes complete with an appendix of extra patrons, completely developed except for patron spells, with which to delight or bedevil your players.

Linking the two modules?  Elves.  If you are tired of seeing elves merely through the lens of J.R.R. Tolkien, then these two modules will give you everything you need to present a race with a higher past and a darker present - and one well in keeping with the literature of Appendix N!

(Not that there are no nods to the Good Professor....but they are twisted nods.)

I worked very hard on writing these, and have had two great teams helping to bring these adventures from concept to (in one case, almost) finished products. 

I really hope you like them.