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Sunday, July 14, 2013

Mini Review - Transylvanian Adventures - The Winter Home (DCC Adventure)

Transylvanian Adventures - The Winter Home is a strange beast. It is written as a one-shot with pre-gens to serve as an introduction to the forthcoming Transylvanian Adventures sourcebook.

What is Transylvanian Adventures? It's "a supplement for Goodman Games’ Dungeon Crawl Classics roleplaying game (DCC RPG). It is quasihistorical and heavily influenced by Gothic Horror and the Hammer Films of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. The setting is a mythical version of Transylvania at the turn of the 19th century. There are no Elves, Dwarves or Halflings."

Yes, it's one hell of a divergent direction for the DCC RPG. If the full Transylvanian Adventures sourcebook / supplement for the DCC RPG is anywhere near as good and fun as Transylvanian Adventures - The Winter Home, we may just be seeing some alternative DCC RPG campaigns cropping up.

In The Winter Home itself, it refers to the rules included as Quickstart Rules, as The Winter Home plays with it's own variation off of the DCC Rules proper. We get Fear Saves, Dead and Mostly Dead (which replaces the current unconscious and dying rules), healing without a cleric, turning undead without a cleric and Killing Vampires. Yep, this is no longer the DCC RPG you know so well.

The divergence is why there are pre-gens included as well as rules to cover some of the changes in the default setting. They say you can use regular DCC RPG characters / classes, but you'd have to shoehorn the adventure a bit awkwardly into the default assumed setting for DCC (unless your party get's thrown into another dimension - now there's an idea)

For me, I'd rather appreciate this for what it is, an amazing introduction and hint of promises for the forthcoming Transylvanian Adventures setting book and save it for when that book is released. I'd rather use it as part of a campaign for the implied setting. Now, if I was running a one shot at a con or the like, this would be aces.

The atmosphere in this adventure is so thick you can cut it with a knife. This is a good thing. Because if he can pull that off with the full setting book, this is going to be one of the better horror releases for the OSR in general (and the only one for the DCC RPG that I can think of).

Now we just need someone to take the DCC RPG into space ;)

From the blurb:

Transylvanian Adventures is a supplement for Goodman Games’ Dungeon Crawl Classics. It is heavily influenced by Gothic Horror and the Hammer Films of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s.

"The Winter Home" is an introductory adventure designed for the 5 pre-generated characters included in the back. The characters in The Winter Home include 5 of the 8 new classes from  Transylvanian Adventures: the Valiant, Exotic, Half-Breed, Hunter and Reaver.

The adventure is also suitable for a party of 3rd or 4th level Dungeon Crawl Classics characters.

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