Hello everyone! Today we present a design diary by Bob Brinkman that discusses how Caverns of Thracia tells a story with its dungeon design. But first, a couple other short updates...

DCC Day is Saturday July 20! DCC fans, visit your local participating store to get your freebies and exclusives!

The DCC community is always creating something fun. If you're a fan of Weird Frontiers and other weird west settings, check out "Massacre Grounds," which is the first Kickstarter by Cranky Clydesdale Publishing. This DCC-compatible 0-level funnel sends the characters to Fort Righteous and the desert frontier...with many interesting personalities on the way. Learn more on Kickstarter!

Aaron Kreader did an amazing job illustrating all the stretch goals (which you can find under the Achievements tab)...then illustrating more of them once you cleared the first batch! Those illustrations tell a story. He's put together the GIF below that scrolls through all the stretch goal illustrations. Give it a sec to load then check it out...

And now let's hear some thoughts from Bob Brinkman, who led the DCC conversion of Caverns of Thracia, on how Caverns of Thracia tells a story with its dungeon design...

By Bob Brinkman

I’ve always been a firm believer that exploring a dungeon can be just as fun as fighting through the creatures that inhabit it. There is an element of storytelling that goes into the creation of an adventure, and Caverns of Thracia is a master class in design. An adventure this large, with so much history crafted into it, could easily become overwhelmed with exposition for the judge. Indeed, often in similar adventures there are pages upon pages of background text to be read prior to their being run.

 

Not so with Caverns of Thracia. Admittedly, there are introductory notes that give the judge a basic understanding of the world that the PCs are about to enter, but the majority of that history unfolds during play, allowing the judge an opportunity for discovery alongside their players. This isn’t merely a case of a multi-level dungeon, but one with multi-layered history ripe for investigation and discovery. Several times bits of history would dawn on me at the same time as my playtesters and we shared those singular experiences of discovery, like no other adventure I’ve run in 40+ years.

 

Of course, there is more to Caverns of Thracia than its storied lore. The encounters run the gamut from the ridiculous to the sublime, from humorous, to abjectly terrifying. One moment, the party is locked in a life and death struggle with a long-imprisoned priest of a dark god; the next session, they are bartering with a gigantic gnome in order to be granted passage across his bridge. Flesh-eating lizardmen and matronly minotaur cows inhabit the caverns in a fashion that not only makes sense, but follows a logical progression versus the “funhouse” nature of many older adventures.

 

As a judge, never knowing what the next session would bring was an absolute delight. There are so many places for a party to investigate, so many paths to follow, that each session brought something new and different… and the seemingly endless options kept the players guessing the entire time. The twists and turns of the cavern’s passages evoke a true sense of dread in the players, with there being little hint as to what might be around the next corner. 

 

When death struck the party, and it most certainly did, such moments carried an unusual level of gravitas. It often wasn’t merely a case of a single character falling in battle, but a character’s death coupled with a full-on rout due to being unprepared for what lay ahead.

 

Caverns of Thracia is more than “an old school dungeon.” It harkens back to a time where playing through an adventure was just that: an adventure for both the character and their player. It is not enough to rely on your dice, here the creativity and quick wits of the players are put to the test alongside their paper & pencil surrogates. This an adventure to be experienced, not merely diced through.