There’s a real art to a good dungeon. Not just a series of rooms full of monsters, but an interconnected, intriguing puzzle box of things to discover, poke at, and break.
Goodman Games has been making some of the best ever for years now, as part of its Dungeon Crawl Classics series. They’re unapologetically old school—weird, scary, and absolutely bursting with creativity. So I’m excited to see that Humble Bundle is offering a huge bundle of DCC books, including some of the coolest adventures it’s released over the last decade and change.
These are all written for the Dungeon Crawl Classics system—Goodman Games’ gonzo take on the original D&D rules—but are easily adapted to any system built for retro dungeon crawling, such as Old School Essentials, Mörk Borg, Shadowdark, or Knave.
The 98 item tier is the standout here, offering all the adventures in PDF form, plus the DCC core rulebook, supplements, and assets for virtual tabletop play, for $18 / £13.43. I know we’re probably all a bit jaded to massive bundles at this point, but that really is a wild amount of stuff for the money.
A lot of my favourite ever dungeons are in there, including:
- People of the Pit: A disturbing journey down into the lair of tentacle-worshipping cultists.
- The Croaking Fane: A temple to a demonic frog god that still crawls with his slimy progeny.
- Frozen in Time: A genre-bending adventure that sends caveman into a secret haven of sci-fi superscience.
- Sailors on the Starless Sea: A deadly introductory adventure designed to weed out the weak from your party, and reward survivors with some brilliantly memorable setpieces.
But honestly, if you fired an arrow anywhere at this lot, you’d be guaranteed to hit something good—it’s an intimidating amount of high-quality modules.
Unusually for Humble Bundle, I’d say there’s also more than one tier worth considering with this one. The cheaper 46 item tier ($10 / £7.46) still gives you more adventures than you’ll probably ever get the chance to run and, importantly, still includes the DCC core rulebook, so you’re not left without a go-to system to use them with.
Even the five item tier—available for just $1 / 74p—is sensibly put together, offering a cheap way to grab the core rulebook along with a couple of great adventures.
The more expensive 99 item tier is where things do get a little odd. For more than twice the price of the 98 item tier, the added benefit is four physical books—but they’re adventures chosen at random. I know RPG fans love rolling the dice but it seems odd to take a gamble on which of the many adventures you’ll get a hard copy of, especially as anyone buying this is probably already comfortable with purely digital ownership anyway.
The bundle is available for 9 more days at time of writing, so it should be going off sale on January 22—so if you’re keen to plunge your players into a campaign full of inexplicable strangeness and surreal terrors, make sure to pick your tier before then.
Read the full article here
