More with less - The Dungeon Crawl Classics Druid

“More with less” is what I’ve been calling my latest attempt to process all the amazing table-top role-playing game stuff I’ve bought over the years. We exist in an amazing time for our hobby with so many creative people cranking out content and the internet broadening both access and audience. As a consumer of so many “oooo shiny” new books that come out I feel a bit overwhelmed sometimes, so instead of always looking for the next book to solving a problem I’m trying to make a conscious effort to look at what can I do with what I have. I think it would be naive to say that most of us have read all of our gaming books front to back. I know I haven’t… so what I have I missed? What have you missed? That’s what I’m going to try to illustrate with “More with less” using books many of us have sitting on the shelf.

Up first how to play a druid in Dungeon Crawl Classics (DCC). Tell me if this has happened at your table. Someone plays a wizard and gets the spell “Charm Person”, they read the spell and get to the point where it says, “Druids can also use this spell on animals.”, and everyone does a double take. Druids? How can I play a druid? That’s not one of the classes. Insert confused looks and futile page flipping.

As it turns out druids are in the main DCC rulebook, see also Clerics. In the section for clerics druids are listed as an example of a neutral cleric but we don’t get much else. There are only a handful of references to them in the book, but what is there is enough fundamentally to get us where we want to go. We don’t need to write a new class from scratch. We just need to mentally reframe what we have in the cleric. So, let’s walk through the class bit by bit.

First, we need to define what is a druid. For this we’ll say, “a priest dedicated to nature”.

Hit Points: No change.

Choosing a God: This is where the book mentions druids as neutral, but I think what would be fairer of a criterion to selecting a god is which regardless of alignment would have druids. In the patron description for Yddgrrl The World Root druids are listed as one of his worshippers, but what about Bobugbubilz? Wouldn’t he have “druids” of the swamp?

Weapon Training: No changes as it refers to the god for basis, but I would encourage players/Judges to think about what a druid would carry and how those items would work. Does it make sense for a druid to wear metal armor or rather bones and hides that function as armor? Swing a sword or a sharpened tooth that does the same damage?

Alignment: While the book lists neutral, I would refer back to the choice of god/patron as a basis.

Caster Level: No change.

Magic: “A cleric has access to the spells of his god...” What this tells me is table 5-9 in the magic chapter is an example of a generic list of spells for clerics, so we just need to create a custom list tailored to a druid. So, I submit table 5-9.1 below as a possible example. 

Instead of writing all new spells the existing spells could just have minor tweaks. Ropework might be described as vines instead as an example.

Sacrifices: No change as they “vary according to the nature of the deity”.

Turn unholy: On the surface this might not seem to fit a druid. Many of us have an image etched in our minds of a cleric with an outstretched holy symbol holding skeletons at bay. If we think about the mechanics and at its core what this ability is doing it can make sense. For example, every party camps in the middle of a forest and everyone takes a shift overnight watching for danger. The druid on their shift spots a giant bear sniffing its way to a tasty looking sleeping warrior. Our druid intercepts, empowered with nature magic, wags a finger of “No no Mr. Bear this is not your dinner. Go about your way.”, and the bear leaves. Another example, your party has to cross a river filled with piranha, but you have no boat. Where you might be able to use knowledge or a charm spell on a bear, the piranha know only hunger. Enter the druid who can “turn” them.

Lay on hands: No change.

Divine Aid: No change.

Luck: No change.

Action Dice: No change.

Table 1.5: No change.

Languages: Same as wizard. This allows druids to learn animal “languages” as per Appendix L.

We don’t need to write mechanics from scratch and worry about balance issues. In this case all it takes is for us to think about what we have from a slightly different perspective or context.

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