Interview: Dungeon Dwelling Creatures with John Watson
It's a monster mash
Dungeon Dwelling Creatures is live on Backerkit and it’s got stretch goals to hit! To me, it feels perfect for striking that balance of playing as monsters without being edgelordy, nor just being super heroes with fangs. There are just so many monster archtypes that it becomes easy to imagine so many weird classes to create and fun ways to roleplay them. Plus, you get to imagine completely different adventures since you aren’t trying to stop the cultists. You’re trying to empower the cultists! Anyway, go back it now, but also keep reading because John shared some really cool insights into how the game developed over time.
Tell us a little about the first spark for this idea and what that first version of the game was like.
I first had the idea for Dungeon Dwelling Creatures in November of 2021. I was driving back from the LongCon and thinking to myself about the variety of different genres you could play in DCC-compatible games. I was curious if anything was missing and then it hit me that no one had done anything quite like the Humanoids Handbook from 2nd ed. AD&D when I was a teenager. During the two-hour drive, I mentally went down a rabbit hole of ideas. As soon as I got home, I rushed to get to my notebook to start jotting down my thoughts. I knew I was onto something.
I first reached out to David Baity to run it by him. He thought it was a good idea and something that no one had done before in the DCC community. Originally, I wanted one of the monsters (I decided on Goblins) to be able to take classes. New classes, but still classes. Baity once again shared his thoughts and said he felt that it should be exclusively race classes. He was right! Eddie Bartlett was one of the next people I reached out to, and he was as excited (if not more so) as I was. I sent him some fully detailed and partially detailed race classes. He responded with the partial ones fully fleshed out! After that, we decided to work on it together. We started off by calling it Horde Crawl Classic, but the Dark Master was worried it might get confused with some future projects that Goodman Games was working on, so we agreed on the idea of Dungeon Dwelling Creatures.
How did the game change over time?
Over time, many of the monsters went through changes. Goblins had a scaling action die (based on the number of goblins), but it's now always a d20. The Dybbuk could cast spells at first, but during the first playtest, the player was having so much fun corpse-hopping that we decided to double down on their ability to possess corpses. Since we needed a new arcane caster, the Hag was what we decided to develop. Originally, we had monsters using luck, too, but I felt that monsters should have a different stat. A guy you may have heard of, Stefan Surratt, helped come up with the name "vile" for the monster's anti-luck stat and develop it further. The last big change was that Eddie and I had originally discussed making this a zine, but so many authors were excited about this that the project kept growing and growing!
What is your favorite moment from playtests?
That's a tough question to answer. The first one that jumps to my head is actually when I was playing in your playtest of The Conquest of Chaos as a Hag. On my first roll to cast a spell, I rolled a natural 1 on my action die, so I got to test the Hag corruption mechanic quickly. We had just written the official Hag corruption charts (which are harsher than a Wizard's corruption since Hags thrive on corruption), and this was the first official roll on one of them. I had forgotten about this moment until I stumbled across a video of one of your playtests and laughed all over again while watching it. Eventually, my Hag could only speak in rhymes, too. While this did not hurt her mechanically, it did make roleplaying very interesting and fun!
Thanks for sharing. Anything else you'd like folks to know?
I'd like folks to know that this is a big passion product for Eddie and me both. Also, for the other authors, too. I have been taken aback by how passionate people have been about it and the creative things they have done or helped me come up with. While this game does go into some more mature concepts (you are playing monsters after all), it is still DCC and a blast! I have had so many playtesters under the age of 18 who have enjoyed playing monsters.
Last, I'd like to say that we did get consultations regarding a couple of the classes (Dybbuk and Wendigo) since they are a part of real world cultural beliefs. We wanted to ensure that we were offering the right amount of cultural sensitivity to both. Ken and Ixchal both gave us great feedback helping to grow both race classes into what they are today.
What kind of monster-class would you love to see in Dungeon Dwelling Creatures?
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Dungeon magazine #10 had an adventure named Monster Quest. Y’all should check it out.