A slightly different review post today, being a review of a short adventure published by Goodman Games for their Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar setting. As with all my reviews, this is play-informed; I ran the adventure last week at Kraken, with a total of six players. Curious patrons can find my pregens attached to this post – I wasn’t able to source a Lankhmar PC generator in the many excellent DCC websites, so you’re welcome to these!

In short, No Small Crimes is excellent, and offers many things that we can steal and adapt for a location-based one-shot.

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Patrons have also got the eight pregens and one-sheet of rules that I used to run this adventure below – if you’d like to try running it yourself, be sure to check it out!

DCC Lankhmar?

Dungeon Crawl Classics is Goodman Games’ homage to old-school dungeon adventures; it looks a lot like an OSR product, but for me it plays quite differently. Wizards have random tables for each spell (that make magic refreshingly swingy), there are critical and fumble tables, and classes have powers and abilities that appeal much more to my more modern sensibilities. I have no time for old-school OSR stuff, but I’ll play or run DCC in a heartbeat.

The Lankhmar boxed set adapts it to Fritz Leiber’s sword and sorcery world, one of many fantasy TTRPG adaptations. Specifically, you play desperate thieves, in a world where the Gods are fickle and terrifying (no clerics here) and magic is corrupting and dangerous. It fits surprisingly well – Lankhmar is very wedded to an old D&D sensibility in me, and DCC as a system gives it lots of juice. No Small Crimes is included as a starter adventure in the boxed set, so you should find it relatively easy to get hold of.

I should cover a bit of actual review here – it’s 12 pages of tight dungeon crawling adventure. The art is excellent (DCC products always have great art – with the Doug Kovacs’ map a standout), and the writing is tight and legible while still providing evocative boxed text. You’ll get a fun one-shot out of the box for this, so it comes highly recommended.

The Plot

You decide to burgle an old house, belonging to an ancient sorcerer. Upon entry, you get shrunk to the size of mice and have to find a cure for your curse and escape.

That’s it. Well, that’s not all of it, quite. But having such a simple basic plot allows individual tweaks and elements to shine. So, there’s an old alley cat that’s broken into the house. What would normally be a distraction is now a terrifying monster. The sentient rats of Lankhmar below are also exploring the house – again, a trivial matter normally, but they’re very dangerous now you’re the same size as them. Every room has lots of interesting traps and discoveries to interact with – it’s a playground for inventive players, albeit a very dangerous one. There’s two ways to resolve it, sort of, too – they can break the curse’s focus, and/or drink the potions that return them to normal size. Did I mention there’s a bronze automaton that would be a challenge even if the PCs were normal sized?

So, it’s a fairly simple toybox dungeon – but where it stands out is in how tightly it’s put together. Almost immediately, my players learned there was a potion that could cure them, and used a feather to “parachute” down and tackle the rats in the basement (well, one player bravely parachuted down to draw their fire while the others crept down the ladder). The cat’s inevitable arrival is foreshadowed by a series of encounters – returning to the kitchen from said basement, my players found a terrifying giant furball! 

Stuff to Steal

So, like true Lankhmart burglars, let’s look at what we can steal or adapt for our own games!

Firstly, the general design of it is ideal for a tight location-based one-shot. Breaking it down, there’s 13 rooms, with combat encounters in 4 of them, plus the wandering monster of the cat. Every room has stuff to interact with, though – from a rat-god idol that will curse them if they steal its ruby eyes, to a tabletop covered in mouse traps. Most of these aren’t immediately apparent – but they’re flagged in the description. So there’s an indication in the boxed text that there’s interesting stuff there, but until the PCs actually interact with it, it doesn’t trigger. I’m not saying this is revolutionary design, and in fairness it’s there in many of the excellent DCC modules, but it’s worth remembering when you’re planning your locations – give options for the players to explore, and interesting stuff that happens when they do.

Next, let’s think about the cat. Having a powerful monster stalking a location is a great way to ramp up the tension – and the way this adventure deals with it is easily stealable. Each room the PCs enter has a clue of the cat’s presence from a separate table, independent of where they are – this goes from tracks, to a mutilated pigeon, to a furball – to actually seeing the cat’s shadow. Consider this in a dangerous forest haunted by a dragon, or a manticore – it’s an easily adaptable trick to add interest to a location. There’s also – because of the countdown – an opportunity to try and use the stuff they find in locations to help – my players tried to lure the cat using the mouse traps (they fumbled their stealth, so it didn’t work, but it was great that they got to plan it!)

The rats from Lankhmar below are an excellent example of a dungeon faction – they’re effectively a rival adventuring group, albeit one a little bit more antagonistic than normal – and they have their own motivations which link to the location’s background. They add a bit more interest than a wandering monster, and are great location antagonists where you don’t have any interesting native inhabitants. For example, in that dark cursed forest – it doesn’t quite work to have a tribe of forest goblins there, unless you’ve got a solid reason why the manticore hasn’t eaten them – but a raiding party out to get the fruit of the holy tree before your PCs find it is far more interesting. Maybe you can even join forces to tackle the manticore before you kill each other?

Finally, the house has a degree of collapsibility – in my game, we had so much table banter and fun exploring the ground floor that we skipped the first floor and went up to the top floor where the sorcerer’s sanctum is. They missed some encounters, but the whole concept of the adventure still stood – so think about having some  cool locations that can be skipped or avoided if time is tight if you’re running at a convention.

So, if you’re looking for a one-shot that’s quick to run, you can’t go wrong with No Small Crimes… I’d also add that, unusually for me, I could run it right out of the box after reading it. Normally for con games I write up some notes and have them to hand – I didn’t do that here, and it worked really easily. Have you stolen stuff from published adventures? How successful was it? Let me know in the comments.