In February 2023 we presented the all-new Purple Sorcerer DCC Quick Deal featuring adventures from Purple Sorcerer Games for the Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG from Goodman Games. One of the oldest third-party DCC publishers, Purple Sorcerer produces free online DCC generators and that indispensable DCC utility, the Crawler’s Companion. Purple Sorcerer’s DCC scenarios feature introductory “funnel” settings with gaudy vistas, melodramatic characters, and deadly perils.
In introducing the Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG to a newcomer, where might you start? Maybe with the distinctive (not to say lurid) DCC swords-and-sorcery tone, inspired by pulp-era fantasy authors enshrined in Appendix N? With its oddball step-dice, like the d16, d24, and d30? Wherever you start, soon you’ll be waving your arms and laughing as you reach DCC‘s most notable/notorious practice, the funnel.
A funnel is a deadly introductory adventure for large numbers of novice characters. It’s easy to generate zero-level DCC characters, which is handy because they die like kobolds. Every player sends four of these fragile, unfledged serfs into some meat-grinder labyrinth. The fortunate few who overcome the odds probably accrete character traits, background details, and motivations scene by scene. At the end, each player advances one lucky survivor to 1st level, and here the campaign begins.
Purple Sorcerer’s Jon Marr published one of the first and most popular DCC funnels, Perils of the Sunken City for 15 0-level characters. Since then Purple has brought forth half a dozen heavily playtested, charmingly bloodthirsty funnels that show a brio, a cheery exuberance in sending noobs to their dooms in caverns, canyons, swamps, ooze pits, haunted Blackwater Manor (where the dumbwaiter is occupied by a diseased raccoon), and (this is true) a Carnival of the Damned with a Tilt-a-Whirl, a snake pit, a petting zoo, a Bone Coaster, and Whack-a-Mole.
A moment of silence, if you will, for the battalions of hapless 0-level not-yet-PCs who have fallen to these delightful dangers. Our customers honored their memory by sending their own neophytes through some of the most popular “funnels” in the game’s history with this Purple Sorcerer DCC Quick Deal.
(These adventures require the Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG rulebook.)
There were four titles (containing ten complete Dungeon Crawl Classics modules!) in our Purple Collection (retail value $45):
- The Sunken City Omnibus collection of introductory adventures (with Perils of the Sunken City, Ooze Pits of Jonas Gralk, A Gathering of the Marked, and Lair of the Mist Men)
- The Sullenlands Adventure Omnibus & Guide (containing Nebin Pendlebrook’s Perilous Pantry, Frost Fang Expedition, and Crypt in Cadaver Canyon – plus a fourth complete adventure, The Bellows of Bromforge, not available for separate purchase)
- Carnival of the Damned
- Escape From the Shrouded Fen
