Dungeon Crawl Classics: Pinball Crawl Classics

https://www.backerkit.com/call_to_action/891f2362-d05c-43a2-857f-417bb038207d/landing

I really like the idea of Pinball Crawl Classics, a series of DCC and MCC adventures based on classic pinball machine art and the imagined stories behind those games.

For a while, I felt DCC was leaning too hard into adventure remakes, and the game had felt stale. I love the deluxe treatment of classic adventures, but one can only have so many megadungeons before they start to feel a bit overdone. They are all fantastic and incredibly crafted, but I longed for something different and new.

I felt myself drifting back towards BX, BXA, and 1E.

DCC is always fun, but the classics call to me like a siren's song.

https://www.amazon.com/Art-Atari-Tim-Lapetino-ebook/dp/B01I1YU47U

Adventures around the art of pinball games? What a silly and cool idea. This reminds me of the box art from classic Atari games, where each one told a story you brought to life in your head as you played. There is a jump in that time where "you made the story in your head" that captures the essence of the era perfectly, and we did the same with pen-and-paper games.

Yes, the games were just collections of blocky pixels, but our minds did the rest.

Yes, D&D was just six 3-18 stats, a class, level, and some hit points, but our minds did the rest.

We never needed the "3d VTTs" of today, the pages-long character sheets, the character builds as complicated as a tax form, and all the layers of depth and detail that end up robbing your imagination of its ability to craft stories in your head.

Wizards' D&D is designed to strip the game of all imagination and turn it into an online character sheet. Pathfinder 2's character sheet is filled with hundreds of boxes for mostly pointless modifiers. There is a myth about a camera taking a piece of your soul when you have a picture taken. With modern games, you lose a part of your imagination when you have to fill out a soulless, complicated, mechanical character sheet, and we dream of "builds" and "power gaming" rather than story and make-believe.

This one project has reignited the love I thought was fading from the game and tells me the team there "gets it" when it comes to the magic and make-believe of the old-school games. Goodman Games understands the myth and magic of old-school games far better than many of today's soulless recreations that get the rules right but the inspiration eludes them.

The game we loved is more than a word-for-word recreation of the rules.

It is the era and the myth of the time, with the digital mind trap of technology stripped away, and imaginations free to create worlds in our awakened dreams.

They get it.