Crawljammer: Universal Escapades, Part 1

One of the first things that caught my eye when I realized there was more to D&D settings than basic fantasy was Spelljammer.

I mean....c'mon.

However, after running a 5e campaign that eventually petered out because I was going through some medial health stuff that kept me from being able to run a consistent schedule, I had found a game that appealed to me a lot more than 5e. Dungeon Crawl Classics.

The DCC Community has lots of settings--you can do just about anything with it. Once I found Crawljammer, the deal was done. I had to run this.

Every issue is a treasure.

I knew I wanted to run a CrawlJammer campaign, but the question was, how to get there? This was going to be my second campaign ever, and the first that wasn’t just fantasy tropes. I felt that it was smartest to start the characters on Earth (Aerth, as we refer to it), so that the entry to space would be a surprise—so I needed a module that I could use to catapult the players into the larger universe in its conclusion.

Enter: Frozen in Time!

MODULE SPOILERS FOLLOW

Excellently written by Michael Curtis (one of my favorite RPG writers), Frozen in Time (FiT) can function as a funnel or a level 1 adventure—since my players all had funnel-survivors from previous one-offs, I decided to it was time for them to get their feet wet with actual DCC classes.

The adventure begins with the players being recruited to investigate a mysterious glacier, the face of which has recently crumbled to reveal mysterious 'eyes' that spew a green smoke. Upon investigation, they realize these 'eyes' are actually tunnels into the glacier itself, where they're immediately confronted with technology far beyond anything people from a pre-industrial world could have any familiarity with.

We played the module out, essentially, just like it's expected to be: The players explored, poked stuff, got into some fights, and found some cool loot.

The module's fiction is based around the idea that this glacier is actually the well-hidden sanctuary of a time-traveling wizard/ne'er-do-well who has been storing the various gains from his illegal activities. His hiding spot worked so well, in fact, that he died a while back and no one has found him. Along with the dead wizard, the crew found a group of 'specimens' kidnapped by the wizard and frozen in stasis: a walrus man from the nearby tundra, an ant-man from the future (maybe a nod to Gamma World or another post-apocalyptic game/Appendix N source?), and several others. As the explorers do their thing, the hideaway's power systems are failing--and the captured specimens are freed! They are, of course, confused, pissed off, and ready to attack whomever they see.

It's at this point that I tweaked something Michael Curtis put into the module. He includes a human male (or maybe just human, I don't recall if he specifies a gender) among the group of stasis-trapped monsters and suggests that the GM figure out what to do with them. I feel like the most-likely intention is that this guy can become a member of the party, especially if someone has been killed so far. That's always a nice thing to include in modules that I wish more folks considered.

My pivot was to use that Do What You Will Man as a plot device to get into space! When he came out of stasis, he quickly saw the party as potential allies and explained that his name was Jaxon and he'd been tricked by some 'asshole wizard' with a spiked drink and was now waking up in this strange place. BUT--he was also pretty sure that the wizard would have kept 'his ship'--and if the crew would help him get to it, he'd help them get out of this place before it came crashing down on their heads.

I'll fully admit that was pretty ham-fisted. Why does Jaxon 'know' that the wizard would have kept his ship? How could he possibly know where it is? Sure--grasping at straws--but it definitely made for fun action as the party ran through a crumbling wizard's tower, avoided a very pissed off T-Rex, and then ran across the glacier to find what looked like a Grecian ship secured to the back of it!

The party jumped on, freed the ship, and it–Dun Dun Dun–flew into the sky!

Once the excitement of escaping was past, Jaxon began to feel sick--he realized that whatever the wizard had drugged him with was also acting as some kind of poison or allergy to his system. And where did Jaxon know he could get the healing help he needed?

Why, Venus, of course!