On Artifacts and How They Work as Encounters, Treasure, and De facto Character Abilities

Mutant Crawl Classics is the warped, mutant sci-fi twin to DCC. All Plantients, Manimals, Mutants and PSH are welcome here...

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Melfast
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On Artifacts and How They Work as Encounters, Treasure, and De facto Character Abilities

Post by Melfast »

A Happy Radioactive Holiday Season and New Year to All!

Artifacts are a key and important part of MCC. They are the default reason for adventuring at the beginning of campaigns. They are not only fun to find, but it is very important that the Judge makes them available to find.

Artifacts are encounters. They are essentially a combination of creature and trap when they are first found. An average 0-level character only has about a 25% chance to successfully understand an artifact well enough to use it, and 55% chance that that they will actually break the artifact and cause themselves harm or death. It is important to understand the risks and rewards of attempting to use artifacts, and to know when to make an artifact check and when to wait until conditions are more favorable. Characters are expected to have a failure and break rate for artifacts, and the number of artifacts in an adventure needs to reflect this.

Artifacts are treasure. They replace magic items, items made with special materials, coins, gems, jewelry, etc. The Neolithic societies of Terra AD do not have typical fantasy world economies, and do not value wealth the way a DCC-Lankhmar character would for example. Artifacts are the main thing players seek and are the items with the most value to their tribe or for trade. Batteries are especially needed as treasure items to make other artifacts work.

Artifacts are part of character abilities. Particularly for Pure Strain Humans. PSH have many class abilities related to making them better at understanding and using artifacts, and in interacting with AI. If there are not enough artifacts of the right types in the adventure, it makes PSH less capable (and less fun to play), especially when compared to Manimals, Mutants, and Plantients that are less artifact dependent. Sentinels and Healers are particularly dependent on artifacts to make class abilities work. All MCC classes are expected to have and use artifacts; this is what lets them stack up against DCC characters in terms of character capabilities. PSH are generally best at learning and using artifacts, and will be the most effective at using them in a party.

I’ve done a deep dive into artifacts, and the next two posts will discuss them further. I analyzed the artifacts in all the official MCC adventures, and then compared them to one sample DCC adventure from 0-5.

In a typical MCC Adventure, there are roughly three times as many artifacts as there are magic items in a DCC adventure. This is because of their threefold use as encounters, treasure and character abilities. Level-0 characters will break roughly 50% of the artifacts they find when they do artifact checks to understand and use a found artifact. Even at Level-1, characters will still likely break 30% of the artifacts they find. To have a 50% chance to understand a found artifact, you need a total of a +5 to your artifact check, and you would still have a 30% chance to break the artifact. To have a 75% chance to understand an artifact, you need a +10 on your artifact check. This is doable with Intelligence bonuses, class bonuses, and using Luck, but it is important to understand how to give your self and your party the best chance. I think the game anticipate that a third of all artifacts will be broken during artifact checks. If you stay ahead of that number, especially with armor and weapons, you and your party are doing pretty well.

If you want to see all the posts together, along with charts that show the breakout of artifacts by adventure level and in comparison to magic items in DCC adventures, here is a link to a PDF that has everything: https://1drv.ms/b/s!Ak88KIALsgrVioEcRam ... w?e=FA8vQg

Happy gaming…

- Melfast

Edited on 12/31/20 to add a section on expected artifact breakage rates.
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