The second softcover collecting the latter half of 2019’s volumes of The Gongfarmer’s Almanac, this features more strange, inspiring, and useful material created by fans for the Dungeon Crawl Classics tabletop RPG.

Volume 8 contains several patrons and deities.  To be honest, this is probably the thing in DCC I’m the weakest on.  Other than some fun pyrotechnics brought on by a cleric’s god arriving near the final battle, my players haven’t had a ton of interaction with patrons or gods.  That may have to change.  I feel like it’s something with a lot of potential.  A couple of those presented here have potential, for sure.

Volume 9 is taken up by a sprawling series of random tables to use in generating strange and unique monsters.  So far, I’ve mostly been running DCC out of modules, so I haven’t needed to create my own monsters (though I’ve modified the ones presented).

Volume 10 features a bunch of monsters and artifacts.  I especially like the Skin Thieves, which I think could make for a very disturbing encounter.  And the Head of Aharise could make a great object for the PCs to come across.  I’m giving thought to modifying it and throwing it at my group.

In volume 11 there are some new classes, a couple of which I liked and would definitely allow in my game.  It also has a section on hirelings which could be handy for groups that start climbing in levels and need a larger entourage for their adventures.

Volumes 12 and 13 are filled with a bunch of optional and alternate rules and general Judge toolkit stuff.  There are definitely some bits in here that I’ll be using.  There’s a large section on making a hexcrawl that features a bunch of the published modules.  I think it could be handy, though a few of the adventures are harder to get a hold of now.  However, some of the charts for random encounters and such would be pretty darned easy to pull out and use in your own game, whatever its relation to the modules.

The final volume is the usual Master ‘Zine Guide they publish every year.

The Gongfarmer’s Almanac series continues to be a highly valuable and inspirational tool for players and especially for Judges of Dungeon Crawl Classics, Mutant Crawl Classics, and their variations.  For Judges, these are really a must have.  And you can’t beat the price.  Get them on Lulu for the cost of printing & shipping, or get them as free PDFs on DriveThru.  

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