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Dungeon Crawl Classics #0
Legends are Made, not Born

"It was a time of darkness and destruction, a time of dread...Humanity's history tells us such times produce heroes and heroines, dedicated to turning back the darkness"

As you might guess from the number of this, Dungeon Crawl Classics #0, "Legends are Made, not Born", this is something of a gimmicky adventure. But it's a pretty good gimmick.

Characters pretty much have started at 1st level in D&D since the beginning. But in AD&D, in I think the Greyhawk Adventure book, there were rules for 0th level characters. That is, characters who are still training to be members of that class.

This was mostly dropped in 2nd and 3rd edition (though there are rules for multiclassed 1st level characters, which can be tweaked to give you 0th level characters). But 3rd edition introduced non-adventuring character classes, or rather, classes for everyone, called NPC classes. The Commoner (for the average person), the Expert (for people who are good at things), the Aristocrat (for noble or rich types, who generally get some swordplay training and/or education), the Warrior (for common fighting types) and the Adept (for hedge wizards/wise woman types)

The NPCs classes aren't quite as good as PC classes, most notably, they tend not to have any special features, and their hit dice aren't quite as good. So they get rated 1 level lower than their PC counterparts. That is, a 2nd level NPC is basically the equivalent of a 1st level PC class combatant.

This adventure has the players as 1st level members of an NPC Class. It seems trouble is afoot in their village, and with no one else to stop it, it's up to them.



The Adventure Itself


On the surface, it's pretty simple. The town the PCs are from has long been under an extortion racket run by an ogre. Because the town is quite small and doesn't have any real fighters and the demands from the ogre were paltry (ale and sheep), they gave in. However, he lately sharply increased his demands, now wanting some townsfolk. At this they drew the line, but not before the Ogre kidnapped 2 of the citizens.

So a group of townsfolk gather to assault the Ogre's lair and rescue their friends. As mentioned, since the town is rather small and lacks any adventuring types, it has instead gathered a handful of daring regular folks.

There's basically 2 ways of entering the lair, the front way or the back way. Both has its advantages/disadvantages. If they do manage to take out the Ogre, they are only about halfway done. There was a reason the Ogre's behavior changed, which I won't go into, so as not to spoil things, but they will discover it as they explore the Ogre's Lair further.


The adventure itself is not all that combat heavy and is fairly short. There are also a fair number of traps and while there aren't puzzles per se, there is some stuff that involves thinking clearly, not rushing in. So while there may not be a lot of role-playing in it, it's not purely a hack & slash adventure, either.

It's not a long adventure (even by 32 page module standards), maybe 25 keyed locations, total, probably playable in about 3-4 hours. (I believe it was originally designed for a tournament game at a convention)


If you've ever played or run D&D, you'll know that low level adventures can be deadly, because characters often have single digit amounts of hit points, amounts which can generally be done in one blow. 3.x ameliorated this somewhat, by giving characters the maximum amount of hit points at first level.

However, NPC classes tend to have low hit dice (the number which gets rolled, or at 1st level, maximized), which brings the problem back to the fore. This issue has been addressed in this module. Most of the various baddies are crippled somehow, so a hit kill isn't impossible, it's unlikely.

Quite a bit of the module is on the pre-generated characters. Part of the reason the premise of the module works is the nature of the characters themselves. While not cheating per se, the characters have been tweaked a bit to make them more viable. For instance, there's one Commoner out of the 6 character classes, but to make up for that classes lack of hit points and attack ability, the character also happens to have a 18 strength and constitution and has the toughness feat, so he actually has 11 hit points (4 for a commoner, 4 constitution, 3 toughness).

Most of the other PCs have more normal stats. But some do have advantages - for instance, one of the Expert is supposed to be a apprentice wizard (who hasn't taught any magic). But as an expert, she has the "Use Magical Device" skill and a borrowed wand of magic missiles. The other Expert is a wannabe alchemist, and has a handful of alchemist stuff, like alchemist's fire and thunderstones and such.

Each PC also has a fairly detailed background/personality. Which is a nice touch, and the illustrations of the party are generally pretty consistent among the different artists.


The town and the surrounding area is given a couple pages of detail. Mostly the local tavern and a couple of shops and some prominent locals that the PCs might want to talk to, like the local retired adventurer (who lost an arm fighting the ogre years ago) and the local hippie/druid who is presumably too stoned to go with them, but can give them some magic berries..


Looks and Such


This has the same clean layout of all the Dungeon Crawl Classics, which is similar to that of the old TSR modules. The artwork is quite good, including a couple nice pieces by Jim Holloway, who gets to make some slightly comical illustrations of the PCs trying to fight the various monsters. I like all his work, but he's at his best when he is whimsical. I also liked the end illustrations of the party posing together (sort of) but I can't decipher his signature.

Unlike a lot of DCCs, this doesn't have any illustrated handouts. The dungeon maps are classic style, but the map of the town does look computer generated (Campaign Cartographer 2 would be my guess), but is functional.


Final Thoughts


I really liked this. Like I said, it is sort of gimmicky, but it's a clever gimmick that is well implemented, a solid A. While the adventure is fairly short and isn't easy to integrate into existing games (since it's for such weak characters) and is best suited for a one-shot or tournament (for which it apparently was originally designed), it would be a great starting point to a campaign (though some care would be needed crafting viable 1st level NPC classed PCs like the pregenerated ones). And you could simply use the town in your game, and the pregenerated PCs as interesting NPCs for players to run into.

(the quote at the top is from a song by Messiah, but is actually a sample from some movie or another)