Interview: Trevor Stamper's Tales from the Smoking Wyrm #10

Tales from the Smoking Wyrm is one of the few DCC zine publications to reach ten issues. In addition, Blind Visionary Publications has published multiple side issues (their Monograph series) and STL files. BVP is lead by Trevor Stamper, who folks may know as one of the hosts from The Scrivenery, which is a valuable resource for game designers and publishers. Trevor took some time to answer some questions about Tales from the Smoking Wyrm #10, which is on Kickstarter right now, as well as other projects that he’s working on.

You seem to have a great fondness for trolls, giants, and Norse/Scandinavian mythology. What draws you to that area of myth and folklore? Any guidance for writers struggling to know when to stay close to their inspirational roots and when to break away?

I like Norse mythology, but then again I am captivated by all mythology, and maintain an ever-growing library of mythology, religion, and occult reference volumes to fuel my passion. How we developed the troll article, and subsequent articles I think might provide some insight into my process, interests in Scandinavian myths, and advice:

We began after we finished Tales from the Smoking Wyrm issue 1, and Dave Boruch, John Olzsewski, and I were sitting around brainstorming things we might do after our unique take on the Paladin in the first issue. Mutant Crawl Classics had just released, and I was keen to pull it into The Smoking Wyrm writing. The mutations are a wonderful trove of standardized special abilities that can be used to create a bevy of different characters.

We eventually turned to the topic of trolls, as I had just spent several trips to Europe visiting Norway, Scotland, and England. I grew-up in England, so there is a kinship there to these stories. We agreed we wanted to present a more nuanced troll class after discussing some Pohl Anderson novels. We wanted to explore and encompass the majority of what Scandinavian and related mythologies revealed about trolls, while pulling in some aspects of Appendix N literature as well.

We moved in to the active research phase, and I consider that to be the most important part of adapting mythological concepts to roleplaying games. You need to read broad and deep. You need to look at what contradicts itself, and why. Trolls are especially important—they sort of merge with dwarves and giants in different legends. There is often this ambiguity of time that makes it hard to see sharp distinctions in the literature. I read several different Scandinavian mythology volumes, and we did a deep dive into the Folklore journal literature to look at the significance of trolls in myth and legend. This all took about 4-5 months of effort.

We also wanted to have our trolls morph into the trolls you see in DCC and D&D proper—nasty, brutish, and not too bright. How to do that? We gave them the ability to burn their Intelligence, and as they get lower, they become more bestial, more modern troll-like. This creates a motivational system in trolls—they are constantly seeking knowledge, lore, and other things to work to increase their Intelligence, and they burn it back down as they invoke their powers and roll poorly.

John hammered out the first few drafts, then Brian Gilkison and I did some heavy developmental editing passes. Things changed a LOT during those passes. Discussions were had, and decisions made. Which leads me to a few guidelines:

1. You must be open to killing your darlings and thinking of things in very different mindsets to get to a good product.

2. Do your research. Don’t just watch a few movies and call it good. Look for experts. Look for experts who are native to those traditions. I had purchased a few Norse mythology books while in Norway that we used extensively, and we found more to read as well. Read what you find—all of it. Reread it and mark it up with notes. If you can get them to help, have your friends read it and talk to them about it. Playtest some ideas. Figure out what doesn’t work. Don’t half-ass research and development time. Ever.

3. Mythology is heavily informative, but at some point, you also must nail things down in concrete mechanical terms that make sense for your project. That is always painful, but necessary. This is not justification for ignoring the myths and legends and going with something you watched on television—that is just bad design when it comes to creating a good representation of something.

4. You have to ask yourself: is this is close enough that it is respectful, but also interesting, dynamic, and elegant in terms of mechanics? All those things matter a huge amount. In a way, DCC is very useful for this. It has a “no class is balanced” approach. There are numerous mechanics to explore and tinker with to get the approach you are looking for. Spell, mutations, mighty deeds, defects, corruption, the list goes on and on. I find a lot of inspiration in the turning tables, for example.

Adjacent to the troll article, we wanted to do a small adventure to highlight them, and so we teamed up with José Luiz F. Cardoso and produced the first Smoking Wyrm Monograph: For Whom the Bell Trolls and an article on troll luck. Our new articles on Mimir move further into this Norse landscape. We have about 4-5 troll adjacent patrons planned, to finish out the series. It will likely take a few years, which is also good, because I find time helps improve these projects as well. New possibilities open we had not thought of before.

Can you tell us a bit more about your alternative skill system or about the article on piety?

Sure. The alternate class system pulls the dice chain fully into the skill rules for DCC. We embrace several narrative tools in this system, empowering the player to control their narrative and define their character through the naming and categorizing of skills, which then builds to improve broad-based proficiency checks using the dice chain. I find it engages players fully, allowing them to really embellish their characters by naming what they know, and why they know what they know.

The piety article broadens faith in DCC, also utilizing the dice chain to allow lay practitioners to roleplay their worship, acts of piety, and call upon their (possibly) indifferent gods to help them in times of need. I invented the system back about 1987, when playing AD&D 2^nd edition in high school. I have used it for decades. I have since adapted it to DCC. This is another narrative tool with huge potential impact in the game. It means that players who play devout individuals who are not clerics can also gain power through their gods—but it takes roleplaying work to get the pay off.

Both articles are sub-systems that you can just bolt on to the main DCC game easily and empower players. Both will change the tenor of your game quite a bit. Piety probably more than Skills.

Issue #10 feels like a big milestone! Does the future of Tales from the Smoking Wyrm look much the same, or does the future look a little different?

I think issue 10 is a milestone. We now have about 600 pages of Tales from the Smoking Wyrm written! That is pretty cool. I have explored a lot of space narratively, and in terms of producing elegant books. I believe the whole package is important—every aspect of a publication deserves great attention to detail to produce the best experience possible.

We think of The Smoking Wyrm as the “Dragon magazine” of Dungeon Crawl Classics. There is a lot in every issue—I don’t know of another zine at all that is consistently 60 pages long. We try to balance things so both judges and players are engaged. We focus on top notch, inspirational art. We cover a variety of topics. I don’t see that changing as we go forward.

We do get feedback that tells us that folks like what they read but want even more info on how to engage with that material. The Patron Missions article series is a response to this type of feedback. I have about five more different types of short articles that further highlight ways to integrate the patrons we produce. Each brings different ways to use a patron in a game. In campaign play, patrons take up a lot of narrative space—they are important and offer their services quid-pro-quo: I give you some power, you do some things for me. You need to roleplay that out. We are developing those now. We don’t want to be just a patron magazine though—so we do try to balance things.

I would like to see more organizations explored, based on the rules we provided in Smoking Wyrm issue 5. I think those have great campaign potential. More ways to integrate MCC and DCC. More new character classes—possibly with Norse flair to them. I think exploring goblins and goblin myths might be very fruitful—sort of a follow-up to the trolls. Jinn patrons would be cool, as would a generative system to develop crazy Jinn palaces and such, like we did with tentacular nests in issue 6. Exploring the Elemental Planes and Phlogiston might be something worth doing. I think a few alternate versions of MCC classes might be beneficial. More Cullpepper’s Herbal would be great—I think we are moving towards something neat with that article series. I get a lot of great comments about it.

I have been thinking about XCrawl a lot lately as well—I could see a DCC gladiatorial combat system using XCrawl characters. I have about 40 articles with various stages of notes on them—all stuff I need to get back to. Issue 11 is fully written, and issues 12-14 are partially written already as well.

My goal is to do about 2-3 issue of the Smoking Wyrm annually, 4 if we could really push things. Figuring out how to balance this work with other projects is a real effort though. I am working through it, trying to find the time to do it all and balance things.

Most Kickstarters base their stretch goals on dollar amounts, but you seem to have moved to goals based on the number of backers. What's the reasoning behind that and what's been your experience since making that adjustment?

I focus on backer numbers and try to provide a variety of price points and options to let folks comfortably find a way to support my work. I find focusing on people is more inclusive and aspirational. I also try to put my stretch goals at the outside range of where I think a project will head—it is meant to inspire people to talk to their friends and chat up the campaign and stretch the funding levels to reach these cool goals. It is so much more positive to say: can we find two folks to help us hit this goal, than: can we find another $2000 to hit this goal? I want to engage people.

I long ago pulled the “punch-up the product” type goals into the main project from the get-go. I present a singular vision and hope folks are interested. I never make stretch goals that open something “for purchase” either. That has bitten me in the foot before! There is nothing worse than a “for purchase” stretch goal breaking at the very end of a campaign—almost no one even has time to register it exists, and VERY few folks go back and increase their support for such things, in my experience.

Anyway, my stretch goals are meant to be aspirational. I focus on people, not money. My goal is to connect with people.

My curiosity won't let me not ask about Earth Crawl and your Patreon. I know it's been in the works for a long time. What can you share about Earth Crawl and its eventual full release?

Yes, I have a Patreon devoted to a new setting: Earth Crawl. You can get a free or paid membership and see the setting as I develop it here.

Earth Crawl is a fusion setting, combining DCC and MCC into one whole. It is near-future, dystopian, post-apocalyptic science fact. That is a mouthful, but basically, the setting takes place about 270 years in our future. It posits that world society collapses after the super-volcanic eruption of the Yellowstone caldera, after which several small nuclear exchanges occur, and about 9 billion people die. There are nasty plagues, and other things going on as well. About 10,000 survivors make it through this cataclysm by being in space at the time, in our emerging space business ecosystem. They watch humanity die and must figure out how to continue. Fast forward 200 years: several million humans are living in orbital colonies, the lunar surface, and some Martian colonies. The earth is a vast resource pull, and so people go to the surface and brave post-apocalyptic horrors to return resources to the colonies. Hence the title: these survivors are crawling all over the earth to find what thy need.

The original concept was Indiana Jones meets Blade Runner meets Twin Peaks. Think Traveller meets DCC in game terms. The Pre-apocalyptic end times were horrible—people were hoarding wealth and food, they were trapping their houses, and hiring assassins to kill neighbors and take their stuff. All of this is now treasure to the survivors. Earth Crawl is an homage to the science fiction I grew up with, along with quite a bit of post-apocalyptic books and other things.

I want the setting to be factually based—all the technology is a logical extension of what we have today. This grounds the setting, like how technology grounded the movie Aliens—you fully believed those were colonial marines. There has not been much technological advancement since 2070. Colonists are too busy scraping out a living to invent lots of new tech. I spend a lot of time researching the realities of space, space exploration, the technologies involved, and the real limits of those things. I even have a NASA consultant who I work with from time to time. Imposing real-world limits creates drama you can’t make up. Everything about space is trying to kill you, all the time.

The setting is dystopian—the corporations and governments control all the resources—including things like radiation shielding and oxygen. Nothing is going well for folks in space. People who go to the surface of the planet are a minority of the orbital colonist population—they are often shunned socially because they might have encountered microbes, harsh chemicals, or radiation. These people are often corpsuckles—people so far in debt they have no choice but to brave the surface and do the corporate bidding. Elves, dwarves, halflings, are all human sub-species and subjected to harsh environments to create lasting physical alterations.

Here is an access link to an early Patreon article that sums some of this up nicely in a game prop I am developing for the first boxed adventure, Scrap Metal.

I expect to release the first public material next year. People can join the Patreon and have a voice as we develop things—and they can get the very low print run exclusive rewards, if they are into those things. I think enough exclusive rewards will be released by January to play Earth Crawl games on your own with that material. I am keeping the background material sparse in the initial release, so folks can make up their own material if they want, then I will continue to fill-in if folks really like the setting and want more. I expect the initial release to be a boxed set with 3 Smoking Wyrm sized books (books 1-3 being a player book, an equipment book, and a judges book) and a short scenario book and cards to support the scenario. Adventures will be boxed sets with cards along the lines of what I have been developing in the Smoking Wyrm Monograph series—things like adversary cards, and sensory cue cards, props, and other cool stuff, all of which seem to really help develop atmosphere for the game and makes most of the art forward facing.

I am hoping to produce 2-3 adventures along with the main game in the initial push, then 3 new adventures a year after that. You will need the DCC and MCC books to play. More advanced “setting” books would come if the demand is there. I have a lot of ideas, but the focus is on the first 3 books right now.

I am running a playtest at Gamehole Con off the books on Wednesday night, and I have a few spots open if folks want to get involved and try Earth Crawl out. You can reach me at Trevor@smokingwyrm.com. I will be submitting events for GaryCon 2025 as well as GenCon 2025 also, so you might grab a spot there, too.

Thank you so much for taking the time to tell us more about TSW#10 and Earthcrawl too! Anything else that you'd like to share with folks?

I want to thank folks for supporting independent game designers, to start with. It might not seem like much at the time, but purchasing an item from an Indie game designer helps keep them designing. It might even be paying their rent or food for that month, so it means a lot.

I also wanted to let folks know that along with TSW10 I am also producing new 0-Level Character sheets, which you can snag in pads of 50 during the kickstarter campaign for only $5 a pad. So far people have snatched up almost 6,000 of these character sheets during the campaign—which is awesome! I will be offering these through distribution but expect the price will be higher than the current campaign.

Thank-you Stefan for inviting me to interview and providing me with such good questions. It has been a pleasure to do.

Tales from the Smoking Wyrm #10 is currently funding on Kickstarter. Click here to back it now.

What issue first pulled you into the Smoking Wyrm and what was it about that issue that brought you there? And what would you like to see out of future issues?

What Else Is Going On?

Overworld Omnibus for 5e and DCC RPG - TTRPG Monster Manual

Inspired by retro video games. Collects Overworld, Nightworld, Pipeworld, Roboworld, and Space Station M into an 8.5"x11" Hardcover

The Dreamgod's Idol - A 1st Level DCC Adventure

Hiwiski the Dream God slumbers still, calling through the dreamland for champions to save her!