DCC house rules for a campaign without clerics
Appendix N
I run a tabletop role playing game called Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG (DCCRPG) for a group of friends every once in a while. If you’ve never heard of DCC, I’m sure you’ve heard of D&D. DCC is the same sort of thing as D&D, but much less famous and more weird.
The designers of DCC wanted the game to feel more like early versions of D&D written in the 1970s and 1980s, rather than modern versions. A related design goal was to try to make the game truer to what they call “Appendix N” fiction, meaning the set of fiction books that inspired D&D’s creator Gary Gygax. (Gygax listed these books in an appendix of the original Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master’s Guide)
As I’ve learned more about the design of Dungeon Crawl Classics I learned that the designers often used Appendix N fiction as a guidestar. When confronted with questions like, “Should we include such-and-such thing in the game?” they asked themselves “Well, does it appear in any Appendix N stories?” And if it didn’t, they usually left it out, with some exceptions.
The Cleric Character Class
One of those exceptions is this: There are very few characters in Appendix N stories that act anything like the D&D character class of the Cleric. In D&D, the Cleric is a fundamental archetype, being a religious zealot who is able to channel supernatural energies from his deity to his companions. He’s something like a cross between a combat medic, a spiritual advisor, and the Spanish Inquisition.
For my new DCC campaign, which I’m calling “Nyrwood” after the forest where the story starts, I decided I wanted to experiment with removing the Cleric from the game, at least as a playable character class. So I wrote up the some house rules that we’ve been playtesting for the past several months. So far it’s been working pretty well, I think.
If you have any feedback from reading this - or better yet, actually trying it in your own DCC game - I’d love to hear it. Email me or just leave a comment here if you prefer.
