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Remembering the Good Old Days: A Review of ‘Dungeon Crawl Classics #0 – Legends are Made, Not Born’

Jeff McAleer

Mar 24, 2013

Game Name: Dungeon Crawl Classics #0 – Legends are Made, Not Born

Publisher: Goodman Games

Author: Chris Doyle

Year: 2005

Players: Two or more

Ages: 12+

Playing Time: This will depend on what subplots the characters explore

Pages: 32

Genre: Fantasy RPG adventure

Retail Price: $6.99 PDF

From the Goodman press release: “For the past few years, an ogre that lairs in a cave near the wilderness town of Dundraville has demanded tributes of ale and supplies. The villagers were happy to comply, lest the brute attack them or destroy their property. But recently, the ogre changed his demands. Now he wants gold, building supplies – and captives! When the ogre walked into town only to have his request denied, he flew into a rage. The brute dragged two townsfolk off to his cave, to be eaten for sure! The villagers have no heroes to protect them – so someone must rise to the challenge! Six determined townsfolk have taken decided to take justice into their own hands. Can these village commoners defeat the ogre in his own lair before their fellows are eaten?”

Legends are Made, Not Born was produced before Goodman Games produced the retro Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG. So while it can be used for just about any fantasy RPG game, the mechanics used in this adventure refer to d20 3.5 rules. But don’t let that stop you! It’s not a big deal to modify any adventure to your own RPG of choice and this is one is no exception.

This adventure is very well laid out and organized. I’m a fan of organization and I like it when I can quickly scan a page and find exactly what I’m looking for. Although there aren’t any hyperlinks for sections or topics, there is a table of contents and the headings for each topic are large and easy to quickly scan as you browse the PDF.

Let’s dig in. The adventure notes that six villagers have decided to take justice into their own hands. Well guess what? You are those six villagers. Or rather, this adventure is designed for six characters of zero level. That’s right, you’re all a bunch of inexperienced villagers who’ve had enough of the ogre’s bad manners and are ready to show him the business end of your newly acquired weapons. You can either come up with the characters or you can use the six that are provided at the back of the PDF. The six pre-generated characters are fully equipped and ready to go. They even have a richly described personal history and some motivations for each one.

If you don’t want your players to be local townies, the PDF provides you some ideas to get your players involved. You can be weary travelers who are spending the night and learn of this calamity. You can state that one of the player’s family members lives in the village and was kidnapped by the ogre. Or, you can have of your players kidnapped by the ogre and it’s up to the others to save their comrade. This last scenario works best if you have a no-show player who attends a subsequent session. That’ll teach him or her not to miss a game night!

The PDF also provides a handy list of ten rumors. And what do we know about rumors, class? Correct! Not all rumors are true and that’s why they’re called rumors. This certainly adds spice and intrigue to the adventure and players would be well advised to not believe everything they hear as they gather intel before heading out in search of the ogre.

The backstory and the ogre’s place in this adventure were well thought out. I’d love to tell all you game masters about it, but I can’t be too sure that your players aren’t reading this column as well. I won’t spoil it for anyone. However, I will throw out some teasers to whet your appetite: sheep, a violence-hating hobgoblin with a penchant for farming and gourmet cooking, the requisite skull-shaped hill, demonic activity, and of course the ogre in question.

Besides the story, there were a few other nice things about this adventure. There are NPC/monster tactics described for both night and day encounters as well as tactics for several possible combat scenarios. This makes it quite nice to pick up and run this adventure without too much fuss. And have I mentioned subplots? There are several subplots and interesting NPCs that the players can discover and deal with that aren’t crucial to the main story line but are nice sidelines nonetheless. These possible subplots come with their own mini backstories as well. Lastly, some demographics are provided for the town of Dundraville as well as descriptions of some major buildings and NPCs found there. Again, these building and NPC descriptions were fleshed out very nicely and give enough of a background so that you don’t feel like you’re only dealing with stats.

Overall, this was a nice adventure; nothing that’s going to grab your attention visually, of course. But if you give it a chance, I think it would be a good starter adventure for a long term campaign where you develop new characters into legendary heroes. The art was so-so and reminiscent of the modules I used to pick up in the 80’s. The maps reminded me of the graph paper scribbles I’d make in junior high while I was supposed to be paying attention in class. Not great, but functional. This adventure is also “lazy game master friendly”. So essentially, an unprepared game master could pick this one up and run a fun game with minimal prep time.

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Jeff McAleer

Founder/Editor-in-chief of The Gaming Gang website and host of The Gaming Gang Dispatch and other TGG media, Jeff tackles any and all sorts of games but has a special fondness for strategy, conflict sims, and roleplaying games. Plus, he's certainly never at a loss for an opinion...