Crawling Through “The Vertical Halls”

Coming back from NTRPG Con loaded with goodies, I started going through things I hadn’t read yet and putting stuff in order. Glad I looked, because I discovered a lost treasure! When I was putting stuff into the zine boxes, I found a great level 2 adventure for DCC RPG called “The Vertical Halls” from Phlogiston Books and written by Gabriel García-Soto that for some stupid reason I never got around to reading before this weekend.

Spoiler Alert: It’s pretty damn epic. I loved it from beginning to end. The interior art by Francisco Tebár and Valentí Posa is especially great.

I don’t want to spoil anything too much, but there is a lot to work with here. The adventure can literally fit into any kind of scenario. For your ‘typical’ fantasy campaign, you can place it as is into any mountainous region. It could really work well in a Shudder Mountain campaign for sure. You could crank up the weirdness factor and put it into something like the Purple Planet, too! Make the town a ruin an go Crawling Under A Broken Moon. It could fit almost any setting if you do just a little adjusting, I’m sure.

It starts out simple enough: your adventuring group enters the town of Shadypass where, like they do, the villagers are all acting a little odd. Some investigation leads you to the main event and I’ve yet to see a creepier or more disturbing setting. Excellent throwbacks to some Lovecraftian goodness and the best part is that the author has taken some ‘typical’ monsters and put their own spin onto them. Great stuff! I can’t wait to get a party inside and make them squirm!

The PDF and Softcover combo are available on RPG Now. Definitely one to pick up and I am anxiously awaiting the next product this studio will be releasing!

DCCRPG – The Dread God Al-Khazadar Review

The Skyland Games crew has been busy these last few weeks! Mike and Kevin attended North Texas RPG con, which we will likely need to write a longer recap about later, but here is my tiny review: if you go to cons for the gaming, NTRPGcon is definitely worth the trip! Saturday was also Free RPG Day, which marks the 4th anniversary of pretty much the best FLGS of the modern era: The Wyvern’s Tale. Mike and Kevin ran a table of both Mutant Crawl Classics and Lankhmar each, and an awesome time was had by all.

But on to to the main event for this blog. I picked up several awesome souvenirs from NTRPGcon, most of which we’ll be reviewing here. The latest DCC module came out that weekend, and it is not to be missed! If you plan on playing this adventure instead of running it, you may want to stop reading now. The review will contain some spoilers!

The Dread God Al-Khazadar is a 24 page module that starts in the famed city of Punjar (could be any city really…Lankhmar?) but quickly the party is transported to an entirely different world. Once there, the party encounter Zardu and Zarya, two natives who may be used to provide information about the world, function as replacement PCs, or in an appendix-N-themed style, love interests for PCs. The author includes some mechanics like +1d when defending their true love and possibly losing luck points if separated from them. This could encourage some really interesting role-play during the adventure and is unique to this module.

There are a lot of great new creatures and side-bars that detail different aspects of the world, including a hex-map in the inside cover that shows various details of the region and would allow for several sessions worth of material. I would not recommend this one for a single 4-5 hour convention slot, as you would have to make so many edits, it would feel rushed and wouldn’t do the source material justice. This could have easily been expanded into a boxed set in its own right like Chained Coffin and Purple Planet. In the hands of the right Judge, it could be mini-campaign.

My favorite aspect of this adventure is the end. It is a bit of a twist and a very compelling choice that actually made my jaw drop when I read it. No spoilers on this, but just know that your players will be talking about this adventure for a long time, no matter what they choose!

I own nearly all the DCC adventures and this has probably been my favorite read since Fate’s Fell Hand. This is a must-own adventure. Daniel J. Bishop knocked it out of the park!