The 2021 Free RPG Day adventure for Dungeon Crawl Classics was Tomb of the Savage Kings, and it seems like a good deal of fun.  This is an homage to some classic Mummy movies, specifically The Mummy (1933), The Mummy’s Hand (1940), and The Mummy (1959).  As the 1933 film is a favorite of mine (second among Universal Horror only to Creature from the Black Lagoon), I was pretty jazzed to check this out.

What you’ve got here is an interesting dungeon crawl with a few very cool twists.  I think if you can pull it off, there will be some real shocked expressions on your players faces.  Having not run it, I can’t say this for sure, but it does feel a bit less deadly than some other DCC adventures I’ve read.  Though having run several, I can say things can turn very deadly, very unexpectedly…and the opposite is just as true.  That said, there is potential, depending on how things end, that this scenario could push your game onto unexpected tracks, for a while at least.  So, you’ll want to prepare for the different ways it might turn out.

As I was reading it, I kept thinking that you could do a few modifications and drop this into a Lankhmar-based campaign fairly easily.  Certainly the El Gato stuff would fit with Lankhmar’s thieves’ guilds.  As the scenario takes the PCs out of the city, it could be nice as a change of pace if they’ve been doing a lot of urban action.

One thing I wasn’t sold on was the connections to Doom of the Savage Kings.  As the title implies, this is linked, but that link is extremely thin and I’d argue doesn’t work.  This has such a strong Egyptian vibe and Doom of the Savage Kings has such a Scandinavian vibe, the idea that the two titular kings were brothers is just…well, it just doesn’t work for me at all. There’s also a potential link to The Tower out of Time, which I haven’t read, so I can’t speak to that.

Overall, this one looks like fun, and I think if the twists work right, it could be very memorable.  I think I may hold off on trying to work it into my game at this point, and look at using it if I ever do get a Lankhmar-set game going.

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