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Dungeon Crawl Classics is a tabletop role-playing game like Dungeons & Dragons, but more heavy metal.

The goddess Pelagia gets barely five words of description in the DCC Core Rulebook (“Neutral goddess of the sea”). I thought she deserved more, so I wrote this 17-page supplement detailing her creation myth, the philosophy of her religion and the special powers of her priesthood.

I also changed her alignment from Neutral to Chaotic, for reasons explained in the book.

This is the second edition, with revisions to the text and new artwork and layout. https://strangequarkgames.itch.io/the-priesthood-of-pelagia

I bought this hoping to receive a comic telling the story of the Haft Khan-e Rostam. What I got was a disjoint connection of scenes from the story with repetition, missing scenes and an incoherent narrative. It’s like someone watched a movie about the Haft Khan then fell asleep and had a dream about it and wrote down the bits they could remember as soon as they woke up.

Contents:

Page 1: Title page. OK. Page 2: “Here begins the First Triel” [sic] Page 3: 3 frames. Repeats exactly the same text as page 2 for some reason, but with different spelling errors. “Rostam, the mighty, rode into the uneknow” [sic] Page 4: “As Rostam journeved [sic] through the Seven Trials, a mighty lion east [sic] its fierce gaze upon him.” Is this still the first trial? Not really clear. Page 5: “Sure enough, the demon of the desert emerged with fury in its eves [sic] and an ax in its han” Page 6: We didn’t find out what happened with the demon but now it has vanished and “in his third trial” Rostam faces a fearsome dragon. Page 7: “On his third trial [is this a different third trial?], Rostam rode on through darkening wood.” This is also about a dragon, even though Rostam already smote the dragon until it was no more. Is this the same dragon or another one? “Rostam held his gleaming blade aloft”. That’s where we leave this challenge, without finding out what happened to the dragon. Page 8: Rostam meets a snake. “Brandishing his sword, Rostam bellowed a challenge to the”. This challenge ends in mid-sentence. Page 9: “His foe vanquished, the White Demon tumbled to the earth” What? First mention of this demon. Where did the demon come from? Was the “foe” the snake or the demon? “Thus did Rostam lead Prince Kavus and his men, at last, from the forsaken cavern.” What? Who is Prince Kavus? First mention of this cavern. Speech bubble “Come, my prince—yaa, you are free” spoken by the prince, not Rostam. Page 10: “Rostam stood in sorrow over the fallen White Div”. Is this the same demon as the one on p.9? Not really clear. Page 11: Back cover with blurb. Page 12: This “12-page comic” has no page 12.

The story is a jumbled mess that makes no sense. Surprise, surprise, this is AI slop. At the bottom of each page is text that says, “Created in Photo-to-PDF One Click Converter. Download here: https://firehawk.ai/phototopdf/”

I love the combined cover/map. Original and effective use of space. Artwork is gorgeous.

The layout is beautiful! Even before reading the text, it’s possible to see at a glance intro, tables, encounter areas, stats. Great use of boxes, colour, fonts.

Imaginative interpretation of the title: the staff is not just a found object or goal of the quest, it is the location in which the adventure takes place. Allows the adventure to be dropped in to any campaign without any elaborate setup.

Slightly bonkers setting, great Appendix N vibe. Nice balance of puzzles, traps and combat. Would work very well for DCC or Moldvay Basic.

Overall, looks like a great adventure. I would use this.

Critique:

• If the party succeed in obtaining the Eldritch Staff, what are its powers? The same as the Spirit?
• Just a thought: might it be better to put the intro text and random encounters on the back page, so all the numbered encounter areas are together on the inside spread?
• Minor nitpick: a few grammar errors (singular-plural accord between nouns and verbs) and strange punctuation choices (unnecessary comma, semicolons where a comma would make more sense). Really very minor with no affect on playability.

I loved the overall look and mood of this module. The choice of colours, fonts and artwork contribute to the creepy atmosphere. I liked the weirdness of the front cover and the way the back cover looks a bit like the précis on the back cover of a novel.

The adventure itself consists of a backstory, a set of tables and a final encounter. It could make a fun side-quest. The encounters are mostly classic tropes, which is fine, but it would be nice to have a few “unique” encounters.

Critique:

• It feels more like a toolkit than a complete adventure. The GM will either have to do some prep to flesh out the encounters or improvise as they go.
• Some of the colour choices are hard to read (black on dark green). Full-colour layout makes it hard to print at home.
• If you are using full text justification, consider also hyphenating, to avoid excessive spacing between words (ideally, choose software that can adjust the inter-letter spacing as well as inter-word spacing).