DCC’s The Grinding Keep Review

DCC Day

I kind of knew it was DCC Day on the 19th of July. It had been advertised to me enough times on Instagram after all. But that was not why I had scheduled a DCC one-shot on the 20th of July. That just happened to be the best day for most of my players. As serendipity would have it, the module I planned to run was the Grinding Keep, an adventure designed by Marc Bruner, which appeared in the Adventure Pack for DCC Day 2024 along with the XCC RPG adventure, Tucson Death Storm!

Hook

I had introduced the hook for this adventure in our recent run of Sailors on the Starless Sea. The PCs discovered a map to a keep and a note hidden in the lining of a cloak in amongst the charnel remains of many butchered humanoids in that adventure’s tower. The note was from the patron of the poor unfortunate who lost their cloak and it indicated that their patron would pay 1000 gp for the safe return to them of a magical lantern. As budding adventurers, most of whom barely had two groats to rub together, this seemed to be motivation enough.

Each player had only one surviving character from the 0-level funnel and one of them was not able to make it to this latest game so I supplemented the four characters who advanced from 0-level to level 1 with a couple of pre-gens kindly provided for the Grinding Keep by Goodman Games themselves.

Big Party

So the party was made up of six level 1 PCs, a Warrior, a Wizard, a Cleric, a Dwarf, an Elf and a Halfling. Two of the players played two PCs each and two of them played one PC each. All of their abilities proved useful. I would say a varied party is very beneficial for this module. On the other hand, if I had to do it again, I probably would have left the players with one PC each even though the adventure calls for 4 to 6 level 1 PCs. They all survived easily enough, although there were a couple of close calls.

Starting the Adventure

SPOILERS! – If you are a player who might want to play this module, stop reading now!

To begin, I plonked them right at the door to the keep as the text suggests. The module wants you to do this. It is designed to be a one-shot by the gods, and it will be! No faffing around in town, shopping or gathering rumours. Just get them in there as quick as you can. I did have to utilise the handy, and essentially invulnerable Leaf Elemental that waits on the grounds of the estate for anyone foolish enough to hold up the proceedings of your one-shot by searching for herbs amongst the overgrown gardens which seem to be under the influence of all four seasons at once. The seasons are a recurring theme and I was gratified to note that the players realised this almost immediately.

Anyway, once they had been chased inside the keep, they were confronted by something that could only have been a magical effect that transformed the interior from a ruin to an immaculately decorated and lit hall. They were greeted by the white robed Host and eventually waited on at dinner by his veiled servants. All of this set up was important. It presented clues to the nature of the keep to the PCs and let their imaginations run with them. Enough strangenesses occur during dinner and upon their investigation of the ground floor of the keep that they should be suspicious. Indeed, before they had even left the dining room, one of my players joked, “the house is a mimic!” He didn’t know how spot on he was…

Of course, the keep is, in fact, an other planar entity who comes to the world to feed, in disguise. The PCs had seen windows and chimneys on the outside but could find no sign of them on the inside. The couldn’t get through any doors that the Host didn’t want them to enter, etc, etc. Clearly, there is enough evidence to allow your players to uncover the truth before things ever really get interesting.

One regret I have is how much time I allowed them to devote to this whole section before Event One occurs. They spent a lot of time searching, theorising, investigating, and it ate into the more adventuresome elements in the latter stages of the module. My advice would be to get them into the Guest Quarters and asleep as quickly as possible. The adventure does not provide much in the way of motivation for the characters to do this, however, so be prepared to improvise.

Event One

Event One is triggered when they wake up after a nights’ sleep in the keep. I was lucky enough that the players wanted to rest and one of them was rendered magically asleep, but without that, it would have been a struggle to get them to wait until the next morning. I probably would have triggered Event One early, if that had been a problem.

What “Event One” means is that the keep is waking up. It will soon be ready to consume a fresh meal of adventurers.

Mechanically, what it means is that every time they open a door, they will be confronted with an intersection of corridors that lead to two randomly determined rooms in the keep. These could be rooms they already visited in the first part of the adventure, or ones that would have been otherwise inaccessible up until this point.

The first room my players visited was the dining room again. This was satisfying as it gave them a chance to kill the Host and his servants from earlier (although, technically they just put the Host to sleep and dragged him around with them for the rest of the adventure.) After that, they encountered one of the three rooms that contained the organs of the keep. They had discovered the journal of a former prisoner/meal in their quarters that gave them hints as to how to deal with each of the organs; eyes, heart and lungs, and that proved useful in the encounter they had with the heart. It is significant that they identified several magic items that act as keys for the doors to these special rooms. But their first instinct was to destroy them if they could. Luckily they forgot about that plan and just kept ‘splorin’ instead. Eventually they managed to overcome the challenge in the heart room and at that point of our session, I realised I was running out of time to get my one-shot done in one shot so I focused things up a bit.

Event Two

The way it was supposed to work was this: every time they left a room, I would start marking that room off as no longer accessible on the random room table, until there was only one possible room left; the one that contained the Alien Intelligence itself. I didn’t have the time for all that. We were approaching the four hour mark at that point and people had work in the morning. So I just told them that, after they destroyed the fiery orb that acted as the keep’s heart, the entire place shook and when they re-opened the door to leave that place, the corridor beyond led to the last room. The players, unknowing, proceeded to their fate. Their fate, as it happened, was to murder the Alien Intelligence of the Grinding Keep, all its Animated Corpses and the Giant Animalcule Swarm that accompanied them. Destroying the heart had pretty much halved the creature’s HP so it wasn’t too difficult. In the end, they fled through the windows in the back of the room, utilising the Feather Fall spell (which two characters had, by coincidence) to safely land in the river at the bottom of the canyon beyond.

Conclusions

Perhaps you can see now why I think I should have made things a little harder for them by reducing their numbers. On the other hand, I am glad they all survived. They had all created and played such interesting and fun characters, even in the context of a game that is not RP-heavy, to say the least.

I was a little disappointed to reach the end of the adventure with so much cool content unexplored. They didn’t find the trap/treasure room where the magic lantern was stored, they didn’t find any of the other organ rooms, which all had really fun mechanics. On the other hand, I felt the adventure was designed to be flexible enough for a Judge to shortcut it exactly the way I did to get them to the end a little quicker, which seemed like good design to me.

This was only the second time any of us had played DCC and the first time with characters of anything other than 0-level. This was a different game to that first experience. PCs used magic and Mighty Deeds at every available opportunity and they got to roll on the crazy magic random tables a lot. At one stage, the Elf cast a Magic Missile and it caused a rain of frogs on the entire party and all their enemies, almost killing several on both sides! This is why we loved DCC. It’s the wonderful and potentially lethal randomness of it and the endless inventiveness of the adventures.

I would recommend the Grinding Keep as a one-shot DCC adventure, as long as you are willing to either cut out bits or extend it to two sessions.