New Stuff... Every so often.

So, I've been running a Dungeon Crawl Classics campaign on Google+, with its awesome Hangouts feature. I settled on the Barrowmaze megadungeon by Mssr. Gillespie.  The administering and thinking about this campaign peaked out (piqued out?) maybe a month ago, and now it's on a simmer instead of a rapid boil.  I've met a lot of great gamers (just great people generally) and had a great deal of nefarious fun.

The Barrowmaze itself ought not to need any introduction and crystallizes a great number of things I felt as a wee young tike all o' 8 years of age, ugly blue plastic dice in hand, idolizing my brother and feverishly fumbling through the Fiend Folio.  Scourge of the Barrowmaze lets me chortle and plot and connive in the way that I imagined my brother's friends did long ago, and I find that it's helped me as a player, although I rarely am able to play as a PC these days.  Now that I have the DCC ruleset mostly under my belt and understood, I have painstakingly rather loosely converted the Barrowmaze's random encounters into an easy to use DCC chart! To save myself a good deal of .pdf page flipping and verbal pauses ("Ehmm... Uhm...  Bear with me guys... Almost there...  Mmmm...")

Here it is, and enjoy it if you like.  I had started to make a conversion of ALL the monsters in the first book to DCC stats but when I set up the spreadsheet and counted 'em all up it came to 89 different monsters or so and then my evening tea wore off and I passed out.

Thanks to Jeramy Deram and his conversion document, that was as good a guide as any you could hope for.  Feel free to give constructive criticism, or what-have-you.  And to Paul Wolfe who inspired the idea and gave a good headstart.  By way of crowdsourcing, if'n you are interested in helping me convert the rest of the BM1 monsters to DCC, then gimme a shout out here or on G+.  I could make the spreadsheet publicly available, I suppose... (note, it's in Word 2003 format since I suck, but I guess I could make it a Google Doc if any fish bite this hook).  This would spread the word on the Barrowmaze slightly farther, save some poor be-knighted DCC judge some footwork, and bring the end and doom of some hapless PCs slightly ahead of schedule.

The Crawling Horror of the Playerless DM

Interesting, to me at least, is the fact that while there is a super-abundance of players and games on G+, it can be somewhat difficult to actually get a game going as a DM.  That's my experience, I don't know how it goes for you, Dear Reader.

This is partly due to scheduling, and also partly due to the fact that no one knows me from fuck-all, except a couple of really cool people I've gamed with who are also hip deep in a couple of ongoing games, already.

So what's a floundering and up-coming DM to do?  Is there some method aside from the "attract-players-you-like-and-hope-for-the-best" approach?  It seems to me that my throwing out "game on Wednesday night" is bound to get about a less-than 30% success rate, even with a sound campaign that is well known and atmospheric (i.e. the Barrowmaze), and a system that has a strong foothold in a certain type of gamer (i.e. DCC).

These animated skeletons and the risen corpses of previous adventures are growing bored with sharpening their rusty blades.  Wights and wraiths and ghouls fight a slow and endless war to gain favour with Nergal, Kyuss, Gax, Nyarlathotep... let us say that the list of god-things that scrabble over the salted earth of the marsh is wearying and nigh endless.  What the campaign needs (when it starts) is something, not just the standard creepy horror, but some kind of imminent disaster.

I'm toying with an "apocalypse counter" a la some great Mythos-flavored board games that counts inexorably down to '0' at which time the horrors of the Barrowmaze will simply break free of their constraints of stone and turn the whole of the land around Helix into a hellish wasteland.  The only thing that offsets the countdown is the number of Luck points or XP earned by the party, in some totally unfair and unpleasant ratio.  The only way to stop it, well, I mean you'd need to have read it to know this but .... well, let us say there are clues in abundance if the players will only play.

In my head and campaign notes, I run the luckless meatshields I have at hand through the first few rooms, chuckling at their demise.  To turn them into dungeon dressing, or have them await the next batch of heroes in their undeath, that is the question!