DCC #29 The Adventure Begins

Super Tuesday saw schools in our district closed, so that meant no afternoon plunge into the depths of Dwimmermount this week.  At home, however, when not playing Eye of the Serpent (UK5), The Lost City (B4), or a heavily modified version of The Veiled Society (B6), my kids are each running D&D games of their own.

My oldest has currently locked onto Master of the Desert Nomads (X4), where we just blazed through a troop of about 100 bandits who picked the wrong caravan to mess with (Annelise the elf flew above them dropping flaming oil, while Clydell the dwarf used a newly acquired Girdle of Giant strength to hurl boulders from a nearby hilltop), but my younger kid has latched onto a product from a more recent decade: Dungeon Crawl Classics #29 The Adventure Begins.

Wow, this is a really nice collection of short, level 1-2 adventures ... all dungeon crawls and each with something unique and memorable.

My 9 year old is happily guiding us through "When Kobolds Fly."  We are using B/X rules, grabbing Moldvay, Mentzer, or Labyrinth Lord, whichever happens to nearest to hand, in the rare situation that we have to refer to a rule (and none of you geezers get to whine about version compatiblility ... she's 9 and handles it with ease).

I'd easily rank it among my favorite collection of adventures, and I strongly recommend picking it up if you are looking for something with just a little more meat than the One Page Dungeon format and more in line with the best issues of Dungeon Magazine.

Below is a pic of our character sheets -- don't get me wrong, I love a fancy retro character sheet as much as the next guy, but here's how we did it in 1984 -- and yep, all four PCs are elves!

We even rolled randomly for our starting spells ... Floating Disk, Light (remember, elves can see in the dark), Read Magic, and Hold Portal (no more useful than an iron spike) ... that's right, the crappiest possible set of level one utility spells ... not a Sleep, Charm, or Magic Missile anywhere it in batch ... and it's been an absolute riot to play!  Once we routed some kobolds by propping a dead carrion crawler atop the Floating Disk and dashing past screaming, "Don't let it look at you!  There's death in its eyes!"  Good times.