Four Days of Undying: DAY ONE -- WHAT IS THE AGE OF UNDYING?

The February Mythoard -- if you don't know about Mythoard, make sure you check it out HERE -- is devoted to The Age of Undying, an exclusive print release for Dungeon Crawl Classics available only to Mythoard subscribers.

Since subscriptions for February close in just a few days (on February 10th), and I want folks to know about The Age of Undying and what it's all about, I have decided to do FOUR DAYS OF UNDYING here on the blog.

No, The Age of Undying is not strictly a Crawljammer product, but as a DCC supplement it is fully compatible AND it features additional rules and information for using Crawljammer classes (in addition to the standard DCC classes) in the Undying world.

But what IS The Age of Undying? Where did it come from?

Basically, The Age of Undying spawned organically out of my home Crawljammer game last year. One of the PCs -- a cleric of Cthulhu -- sacrificed one of the giant greenstones on the Purple Planet in a climactic moment (one that shocked every other player at the table, since that was NOT the party's plan) and since his deity had visited him in a dream in an earlier session and told him to find a way to "remove the veil between the living and the dead," well...he was just doing what he thought was right. And how could he deny Cthulhu any request?

So...that session ended with the crazy sacrifice and the desires of the cleric amplified by the tremendous power of the greenstone. And I had a week to come up with what it meant to "remove the veil between the living and the dead" before our next session.

At first, I thought that it would be enough to have some un-dead rise from the Purple Planet and maybe an aspect of Cthulhu himself climb up from the great dead lake. But then I sat down to put some "ground rules" in writing. I thought I'd write a page or so that we could reference at the table. And over that week I continued to write. And write. And think about the craziness of the "ghosts" from the Gen Con Catastrophe Island games run by Doug Kovacs, Adam Muszkiewicz, and Wayne Snyder. And think about the novel I was then reading, by Gabriel Squailia (Dead Boys, a good one, like a Henry Selick nightmare of an underworld movie by way of The Odyssey). And the unforgettable colossus of corpses from the mind of Clark Ashton Smith. And all of that inspired the world that had come to be. And before the next session, I had 10,000 words of rules about what it meant to live (or try to live -- if you dare) in "The Age of Undying." It was the first draft of what would be revised and playtested for the remaining four or five sessions of the campaign before the school year ended.

After the revision, I sent it off to Joseph Goodman for approval as an official 3rd party supplement for DCC, and he approved. And then I asked the Mythoard folks if they'd want to include it in a box as an exclusive, and not only did they want to do that, but they wanted to name the whole box after it! So here we are. Four days until orders close.

And there's a 25% discount for new subscribers: AGEOFUNDYING. It's good until February 10th! Use it HERE when you place your order.

I'll be back tomorrow with Day Two of FOUR DAYS OF UNDYING with another little behind-the-scenes glimpse of The Age of Undying.