DCC Sampler

Our Sunday Morning game is a sampler. We, but mostly me, pick a published DCC scenario that looks interesting, and we play it. It is a "campaign" of a sort in that there is continuity among the characters from week to week, but the story line is loose. Really loose. What I said in the kickoff email I sent sums it up pretty well: "I plan to start with a funnel and go up from there. Subsequent scenarios would be chosen based on what seems like the most fun, with secondary consideration given to how we plausibly connect it to the overall story arc. Standard DCC rules apply, but if you have an experimental character type you read about in some e-Zine somewhere, that’s fine as long as it is fun for everyone at the table."

And it's been fun for everyone at the table (or they just like donuts and coffee). That email went out over a year ago. Since then we've consumed more caffeine than is natural and more scenarios than I can keep track of. We have explored the DCC standards as well as MCC, The Shudder Mountains, and Star Crawl Classics. The looser approach resulted in two parties that I don't think I'd see in a more structured campaign. The A-Team included a humanoid mosquito, a cat-woman from Venice Beach, a gangster (think Westside Story not bloods and crips), a by-the-book gold-loving dwarf, and a scientist with a striking resemblance to Doc from Back to the Future. We managed to plausibly connect the scenarios by using an interdimensional skull ship from Julian Bernick's Expedition to Algol and later the space-faring pleasure cruiser from Tuesday Night Fiend Club's Electric Friends. The backup characters became a separate party and took on missions that seemed too odd even for the first party. The B-Team included a thief-turned-paladin, a Christmas elf, a fighter who favors bill hooks, an emerald golem, and a cleric with cybernetic upgrades.

We actually started out with a few funnels and picked the pluckiest of the survivors to move on. Without being constrained by the need for a coherent plot line, we just had fun. This Judge never said "no." More than just having fun at the table, it gave me the opportunity to take a deep dive into the usually clever and often astounding publications from Goodman Games and more than a few third-party publishers. In looking for something fresh (by which I mean gonzo) to bring to the table each session, I read two or three scenarios for each one that I actually ran.

So must all good things come to an end (at least temporarily). On New Years Day with mimosas in hand (even moderation is best taken in moderation) the party took on its last adventure to give way to a brand new campaign in Weird Frontiers. This one will be a more traditionally structured campaign, but I'm sure no less gonzo in its own way. But, every once in a while, I'm sure I run across a scenario that cries out for a turn at the table, when I do, we'll be right back in the skull ship . . .