Goodman Games

Spent much of last night's session doing some arrpee in a large city (using Punjar as the model; Barrowmaze is in the city of the dead), then went back to delving into Barrowmaze for a few minutes to grab some quick treasure. Things were going fine until they descended into the maze by a different path from the main mound, and were set upon by some giant centipedes. Pretty sure that the Labyrinth Lord giant centipedes are probably not as nasty as the DCC ones, but my party's all level 2 (plus a couple "red shirt" men-at-arms and a peasant torchbearer) so I figured, they can deal.

Wow! That poison is AWESOME. Complete memory loss?! Very cool.

So, has anyone else ran into this in their game? How did you handle it? Particular for casters... that could have huge implications for a wizard or an elf. In fact, the elf did fail multiple saves but allowed her to not forget the magic missile spell she'd just learned (and traded a powerful artifact for). But every character but the cleric failed a save versus the poison so there's some pretty serious memory loss going on. And how did you deal with the fact that a cleric can choose to heal the poison? The entry in Appendix P doesn't seem to contemplate that the poison can be "cured" ... it says "no recovery."

One last thing, Bless is pretty powerful. I allowed the cleric to spellburn over an entire month of fasting, and melt down several platinum pieces to form a new holy symbol and bless it. Now it's permanently +2 to spell checks... that definitely made the cleric a loooooot more useful.

Wow you were generous. Did the cleric find some kind of ritual to be able to create this magic item?

It's a function of the bless spell... he spellburned a ton of physical stats to be able to do it, and rolled well. If you roll high enough the bonus is permanent. But you can't use the spell again for another month (and I may make it much longer)... and he had to use some pretty expensive materials.

There's some debate about whether clerics should be able to spellburn or not, but ... I don't see the big deal. I made him fast with nothing but a tiny scrap of bread and water for a whole month to simulate the physical withering... that seemed fair.

That sounds like a cool story, so I can't help but think it was a good decision to allow the spellburn by the cleric. The result is essentially a magical holy symbol consecrated in the name of the cleric'c god, I can't imagine the god being displeased by that.

As for not allowing spellburn for clerics... Seeing what it took to spellburn on this spell, I don't see this happening in the heat of the moment during combat. "Hold, Mr. Ogre, I must take a month's fasting to gain some meager advantage against you during our fight." The point being, it's not likely to happen too often.

Yeah and... there's also a big responsibility that goes with powerful artifacts. Of course evil baddies will want to destroy it. And woe unto him if he displeases his deity for some reason.

Of course, the practical effect of +2 to your spell check results is that it cuts down on a fair bit of spell check failure... which means not much deity disapproval. Can't wait for him to roll a 1, though, that's going to be amusing. It better not be when he's trying to heal the neutral/chaotic elf with Azi Dahaka as a patron... that crucifix might just melt.

Can you imagine the crying that will ensue? Ahh, sweet player tears....

The way disapproval works in vanilla DCC is that you roll 1d4 per "pip" on the roll that resulted in disapproval, and the lower results are the easiest to deal with. So, it is actually better to roll a natural 1 then to get disapproval on, say, a 5 or 6 (5d4 or 6d4 on the chart). When disapproval range grows, it matters not a whit that the roll would otherwise succeed, either, so that +2 will not be of much value.

Personally, I do not allow clerics to spellburn under normal circumstances. Although clerics are explicitly allowed to make sacrifices, this is explicitly to reduce disapproval or to regain favour, not to increase their spell check result. That's not something that I would tinker with, because it is part of both the flavour of, and the balance between, classes.

OTOH, Fear No Rule! Let the rules bend to you, not the other way around!