| Down the nerd rabbit hole with Dungeon Crawl Classics and the Mythic GM Emulator

Bleryk and Blenr0n came by last Friday for a little drinkin' and gamin'. We're old: we didn't even make it to midnight, BUT we got in a game of Sentinels (fun!) and played Love Letter a few times (fun! bought it the next morning and we played it again! again fun!). But the big event was that I wanted an excuse to play DCC and use my fancy new Dwarven Forge tiles, but fucked if I was going to stay sober enough to GM. So we tried adding this weird indie product called the Mythic GM Emulator to the mix and I think it worked pretty well!

In a nutshell, the GME is like a magic 8-ball that you ask questions of then roll some dice to generate a response. (It's a set of charts, not literally an 8-ball, that is a metaphor.) The players come up with a yes/no question and the likelihood that the answer would be "yes" (50/50, unlikely, almost guaranteed, etc.) then roll dice. Based on the "chaos rank" which is a measure of how out of control things are at the time, the dice return a Yes, No, Exceptional Yes, or Exceptional No result, and sometimes throw a curveball into the proceedings by indicating that a random event has occurred.

To start with I built an empty dungeon. I didn't think of any context or stock any monsters because we would do that collectively while playing. Then, we started drinking beers.

A beer

Next we rolled up three 0-level characters each, named them, and generated their starting equipment. Then we killed one at random, picked one to promote to first level, and kept the last as a 0-level henchman. This was the hardest part of the evening because I absolutely could not convince my printer to print the 1st-level character sheets. Finally, we needed to make up an important NPC and a plot thread for each 1st-level character to use with the GME.

We ended up with:

- Mort of Ort: This gravedigger-turned-fighter had an unrequited love for beautiful Queen Milfia, and an equally burning desire to find the legendary Axe of Azgør.
- Dire Badger McPherson: Once a humble dyer, this 2-4' foot tall (we're not sure), 70-pound halfling was now a dual-stave wielding punishment machine. His NPC relationship was with "Mira Threshbottom" (a target for his dual-stave approach? perhaps an opposing halfling practicing the same technique? BOTH!?) and had it in his mind to acquire the golden fleece of cloaking.
- I either lost Bleryk's character sheet or he has it, but his character was a priest of Justicia who wanted to find Mordecai the Black.

That done, we started to actually play. To start with, we needed an adventure hook! To do that we generated our first scene. This is where the NPC and plot hooks we created for our characters came into play. First we rolled...

TO BE CONTINUED!