This is a beautiful variant cover of the Dungeon Crawl Classics rulebook. Granted, this is the same book underneath, but the strangeness and alien nature of this scene grab me as something different than anything we have seen in the hobby before. It is alien, strange, violent, sexy, perplexing, and has almost an underwater battle quality to it all, as if we were looking in on some fever-dream alien world of sea monkeys battling kelp creatures.
This could be a spirit combat on the astral plane between a powerful Wizard and an alien intelligence seeking to dominate the world.
This could be a spell duel with each caster taking a new form to do battle with.
This could be a normal battle between the party's fighter and a dragon worm, and the viewer wandered too close to the hallucinogenic mushrooms in the final cave.
This could be the final bosses of a dungeon, and you arrive in the middle of an epic fight, where the best you can hope for is to escape with your lives.
Who knows what this is? Make it up yourself.
DCC is the game you want it to be, and it never tells you that you are playing it wrong. It's a game that you can make it what you want, not just what the designers tell you to play. So, D&D's designers took humanoid enemies and alignment away from us because they know better? DCC has an adventure with a chainmail bikini cover, and then sells pride merch in their store. It does not care, and I love it. The divide and conquer "game puritans" can find another game to direct selective outrage at, as this one is 100% just for the fun.
I am tired of D&D and its endless parade of tieflings, githyanki, mind flayers, drow, and other alien races with British and other strangely out-of-place European accents. All the bad guys are good now. The races have been gentrified, spayed, and neutered to be neutral player options. The orc and humanoid monsters are gone, and anything we liked about old-school D&D, the designers now tell us we should be guilty for enjoying.
D&D is not their game to ruin. It is our pastime to pass down and enjoy.
Baldur's Gate 3 was the end of D&D like Avengers Endgame was the end of the MCU. Years of work, build up, cultural relevance, shared relevance, and then a massive release. Past that, nothing compares, and I really don't want to see constant weak rehashes of it all, either. Like the MCU, D&D keeps plodding along for a few years while everyone slowly realizes it is dead, a zombie IP that only the marketers get excited about.
It is time for something different.
DCC is a fresh start for me, harkening back to the early days of the hobby where anything goes. Any version of 5E has this designer's hubris baked in, like it is the designer's job to tell you what options you have, how you have fun with the game, how to build encounters, and how adventures are supposed to be. You will find some in the OSR mirroring that opinion, like their ideas of gaming should be the ones everyone should follow. With DCC, anything really goes.
I have been playing D&D since it first hit the shelves. I have seen games come and go. I have seen endless OSR games trying to recapture lightning in a bottle, telling us the one proper way is their vision. Very few of them can deliver on that promise. Only ACKS II remains compelling because it tries to be different and eliminates the garbage in the SRD that doesn't align with its vision. It creates an imaginative world. It opens the possibilities to me. Too many feel mired in restating the past, and the only one that does successfully is Old School Essentials, since it stays out of your way as much as possible and lets your imagination run free.
DCC does that, too, in its own way of going back to the source material and rebuilding on a 3.5E-style framework. The monsters are not supposed to be endless classic rock repeats put on shuffle. Every module, every beast, and every adventure should be different and new. If there is an ogre in the world, there is only one. Defeat it, and it is gone forever in that reality - get some new monsters.
This is cool.
Do not do what you always do, look for some dusty campaign setting to park yourself in, find the nearest tavern, and wait for someone to walk in, hiring adventurers for the next dungeon. DCC is active, something strange happens, something that cannot be easily explained, and heroes are needed! The dungeons are full of bizarre and deadly things. There are times when the solution will take some creative thinking and non-linear logic.
When I am looking at my game shelves, what am I looking at? Am I looking at things that inspire me or bore me? Does the game take away parts of the lore and history I remember? Is the game visually compelling? Does it excite my imagination?
D&D has fallen into its own look and feel. It is this stuffy, overly manicured, modern hairstyle, 3D-game-looking, thee-thou fake accent, pseudo-modern Ren Faire slop. They got lazy and fell into a McFantasy style, where if something "looks D&D," it "is D&D."
DCC is the antithesis to the modern D&D look-and-feel.
Admittedly, this is more of a display cover to be put on a book stand as a call to action, a reason to play, and something to sit proudly on your display shelf next to your battle-hardened play copies. It is a premium work of art, a tribute to one of the artists I love, and an excellent centerpiece for a DCC collection.
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