Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG - Core Rulebook (Hardcover)

You do not begin as a hero. You begin as a farmer, a chandler or a gongfarmer with a sack and a bad idea, and you begin with four of them at once. Most will die in the first dungeon. The one who crawls back out is the character you actually play, and by then you have earned him.

Dungeon Crawl Classics reaches back past the modern fantasy shelf to the paperbacks that started the hobby: Jack Vance, Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Michael Moorcock and Clark Ashton Smith. Magic is strange and personal rather than a tidy shopping list, monsters are unknowable rather than catalogued, and treasure is worth exactly the trouble it took to reach it.

Under the hood the game runs on rules any d20 player will recognise, with the corners knocked off. Warriors invent their own manoeuvres through Mighty Deeds of Arms, wizards fuel spells by burning their own bodies and slowly warp under the corruption that follows, and clerics who lean too hard on their god will hear about it. Every spell has its own table of results, from a feeble sputter to something that bends the world. A dice chain of d3, d5, d7, d14, d16, d24 and d30 keeps the table guessing.

This full colour hardcover of roughly 480 pages holds the complete game: character creation and the zero level funnel, the four core classes plus dwarf, elf and halfling, hundreds of spell results, a bestiary, judge advice and a starting adventure. Art by Doug Kovacs, Erol Otus, Peter Mullen, Jim Holloway and others gives it the look of a game unearthed rather than published.

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