Dungeon Crawl Classics - Starter guide
What is Dungeon Crawl Classics?
Dungeon Crawl Classics starts where most fantasy games end: with ordinary people making a terrible decision. Each player takes a handful of level 0 nobodies, a beekeeper, a gravedigger, a turnip farmer, and marches them into a dungeon. Most of them will die. The one who staggers back out becomes your actual character, and you will care about that farmer more than any hero you ever built from a menu.
The game is a love letter to the stories that started the hobby: Jack Vance, Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Michael Moorcock, Clark Ashton Smith. Magic is strange and personal, monsters are unknowable rather than catalogued, and every adventure smells of torch smoke and bad ideas. Why those names matter to the whole hobby is a story we tell in our history chapter From bookshelf to dungeon.
Dungeon Crawl Classics was designed by Joseph Goodman and published by Goodman Games in 2012. The core rulebook Netherbook carries is a full colour hardcover of roughly 480 pages, filled with old school art by Doug Kovacs, Erol Otus, Peter Mullen and others, and it contains the complete game.
How does the system work?
Under the hood this is a d20 game. You roll a twenty-sided die, add a modifier and try to beat a target number. Anyone who has played modern Dungeons & Dragons will recognise the chassis in minutes. There are four core classes, warrior, cleric, thief and wizard, while dwarf, elf and halfling are classes of their own, the way they were in the earliest days of the hobby.
The famous part is the funnel. You do not create one character, you roll up several level 0 commoners with random professions, random gear and a couple of hit points each. Then you play the dungeon that kills most of them. Character creation takes minutes, so the losses sting just enough to be funny.
Magic refuses to behave. A wizard rolls a spell check every time, and each spell has its own table of results, from a feeble sputter to something that bends the world. Casters can burn their own ability scores for power, and failure risks corruption that slowly warps the body. Clerics who keep asking favours of their god will find that god growing deaf.
Combat has its own toys. Warriors invent manoeuvres on the fly through Mighty Deeds of Arms instead of picking feats from a list. Luck is a stat you can spend to bend a roll. And instead of stacking modifiers, the game shifts you along a dice chain from d3 all the way to d30, so bonuses and penalties literally change the die in your hand.
What do you need to start?
One book. The core rulebook holds character creation, all classes, hundreds of spell results, a bestiary, advice for the Judge (that is DCC's name for the game master) and a starting adventure built for a funnel of fresh level 0 characters.
Fair warning about the dice: DCC uses funky dice, the d3, d5, d7, d14, d16, d24 and d30. You can start without them by improvising with normal dice or a dice app, but the odd shapes are part of the charm, and sooner or later you will want a set. Beyond that: pencils, scrap paper for the soon-to-be-deceased, and three or four friends.
Who is this game for?
DCC is for players who love surprise more than control. If your favourite sessions are the ones where the plan fell apart and everyone is still laughing about it a year later, this game delivers weekly. It rewards Judges who enjoy rolling on tables and saying yes to ridiculous plans, and players who treat character death as a story rather than a defeat.
It is honest to say who it is not for. If you enjoy building a character carefully over twenty levels, if unpredictable magic sounds frustrating rather than delicious, or if losing three characters in one evening would spoil your night, DCC will fight you. Its chaos is the point, and it cannot be turned off.
How does it compare to other systems?
Compared to Dungeons & Dragons, DCC keeps the d20 core but strips away builds, feats and balance, and pours pure chaos into the gap. It is both older-feeling and wilder than 5e, and noticeably faster to prepare.
Shadowdark shares the old school spirit but plays it straight: sleek, modern and tense, with real-time torches. DCC is the gonzo cousin, louder and stranger.
Mörk Borg matches DCC for lethality but wraps it in doom metal minimalism. Mörk Borg is a short sharp scream; DCC is a 480 page grimoire that wants to run your campaign for years.
Where do you start?
Do not read all 480 pages. Read character creation and the core mechanics, skim a few spell tables to get the flavour, and run the funnel adventure included in the book. Have every player roll three or four level 0 characters and promise them nothing.
After the funnel, the survivors pick classes and the real campaign begins. By then everyone at the table has a favourite dead farmer, an origin story, and a healthy fear of doors.
Recommended products at Netherbook
The Dungeon Crawl Classics core rulebook is the only thing you need: the complete game in one full colour hardcover.
Once the funnel has claimed its victims and you want more, the Dying Earth Boxed Set takes DCC to Jack Vance's world at the end of time, with four new classes and magic as currency. You can find everything for the game in the Dungeon Crawl Classics collection, and if this style of play speaks to you, the OSR collection gathers its kindred spirits.