The Misadventures of Hareng Rouge

Three things occurred to me about Mutant Crawl Classics as my current party finished up our first proper adventure. The connection is that Mutant Crawl Classics is a rollercoaster of character abilities. Lean into that if you can.

In most RPGs progression smooths characters out. In MCC progression destabilises them. Characters lurch between competence and catastrophe as the environment mutates around them. Perhaps that is accidental design. Perhaps it is deeply intentional. Either way it produces a style of play where survival depends less on optimisation than on adaptation to sudden change.

Mutations in MCC are not permanent assets in the modern RPG sense. They are unstable adaptations. Useful now, dangerous later, and always subject to environmental disruption. What I haven’t worked out yet is, is MCC intentionally designed around abrupt competency swings, or is this an accidental consequence of exuberant systems piled on top of one another?

Let me unpack that.

Let’s look at how your characters arrive at Level-1, at the end of a funnel.

It appears to me that there is a formula for a Mutant Crawl Classics funnel adventure. We’ve now done two. One as the actual funnel and the second as a level-1 adventure with some homebrewed excitement.  I’ve had a sneaky look at a third. There’s a pattern in the loot you get. Consistent rewards are a device that gives mutants some extra mutations, a medipac and a handful of C-Cells. Mutation devices include the Lil Fun Particle Accelerator in Assault on the Sky-High Tower and the Gene Resequencer in the Museum at the End of Time. The Lil Fun Particle Accelerator is more benign than the Museum Gene Resequencer. More controllable. It makes you make some choices about what other benisons you might like.

What do you walk away with at the end of the funnel? Some healing from the medipac, but not perfect healing and healing that favours Pure Strain Humans. More on that anon. The C-Cells, batteries basically, give you extended usage on any Artifacts you picked up. Not only will they last longer but you don’t have to ration their use quite so strictly. Use them now and use them later. Take two bottles into the shower. The mutation devices give your mutant characters more mutations. I think the power scaling of mutations is non-linear. One is good. Two is more than twice as good. Four is more than twice as good as two. My character now has eight Mutations for shape changing, better vision, healing, telepathy, telekinesis and combat, making things cold and combat, and a double-dose of super-intelligence and interacting with Artifacts. That’s a pretty good spread of combat impact, area control, party face and utility. In any random situation my character probably has a decent tool for the job and if not they can cold-slap someone and hide behind our superfast super agile mutant with three attacks.

Along with the extra potency from the levelling up you gain a broader spectrum of mutations, and some health and some longevity to the new Artifacts. It’s a starter kit to get your characters through the next one or two adventures whilst they establish themselves and you learn the system and how they operate. Part of the starter pack is that some of the party are going to pick up some extra mutations.

During our latest adventure in the Museum at the End of Time we’ve picked up a second medipac. As notescribe I dutifully noted and scribed the functions of the device. I was paying more attention to why it worked the way it worked than what it did because this was the second identical device. It’s a strange one and it leans into a notion I have that Mutant Crawl Classics is some combination of harum-scarum game design or under play tested.

The device pulls in two different directions. Firstly, it heals you for 3d8 HP. Which is pretty solid healing when the like HP of a level one character is 10 HP. Range of 3 – 24 HP, with an average of 13.5, with a better than 50% chance of healing between 11 and 16. The second effect is that there is a 5% chance per hit point over the character’s maximum that the medipac will remove one random mutation or defect. My level-1 Mutant character has 11HP. If reduced to 1HP there is a 75% that they are at risk of losing a mutation. Worse if they are not that badly injured. There is a 25% chance that they will heal enough to face between a 30% and a 55% chance of losing a mutation. Two thoughts occur. This healing device is more useful at higher levels. In two levels time when my character is a Level-3 character with 15 HP those risk bands move sharply in my favour. Secondly the device risks removing the very thing that the game, on the surface, is about and making a character less powerful and less interesting. At least for a bit. Get into a fight and potentially lose additional powers or at worst case, lose all your mutations and change your class entirely, whilst dropping back to Level-1. Have fun kids, but be careful. It is a very Crawl Classics approach – throw some randomness at the characters and we’ll all laugh about it later but it strikes me as a bit counter-intuitive. The medipac increases physical survivability at the risk of losing mutations which might be adaptive traits. Those mutations in turn become a source of power and a vulnerability. The game incentivises preserving advantageous mutations in much the same way organisms preserve advantageous traits under environmental pressure. Something to protect as well as use. Nobody wants their aircraft carrier to be sunk.

The third thing that occurred when things were occurring to me and to my character was that my character picked up nice mutation from the Gene Resequencer. Cryokinenis Which was cool. Partly cool because my character picked up cryobox last adventure and has become obsessed with cooling and heating and finding out how that works. So getting a cooling power fitted the narrative in a satisfactory way. Also cool because Cryokinesis has some decent combat powers. Decent damage output with a persistent burn effect at melee ranges and some viscious ranged damage at higher activation rolls. That works for me. My character is not a great melee fighter but is a good ranged fighter. Having a decent chance of getting good ranged attacks but with a potentially fight ending melee outcome is okay. I keep my character’s AC high and hope that my party kills them before they kill me.

What occurred to me was how swingy this was. I’d spent a bit of time picking over the combat capabilities of my character. Finding them unsatisfactory. Looking for area control options.  This new mutation makes my character a much more assured fighter. All of a sudden if a fight starts I know how to finish it. Fire up the cryokinesis and either dash in cold slap some enemy combatants or stand back and hurl ice daggers at them. Those ice daggers are a spread of 1d6 attacks at 1d8 damage per dagger. 50% chance of at least 10HP damage if everything hits and a nice cluster around 12HP. Suddenly my character is a combat-effective.

Which has two effects. First, they will survive longer and the party will survive better. Secondly, I’m less likely to roll the dice on this character. As they evolve towards an optimum, well, for want of a better word build, I’m not messing with that. If my character gets lightly injured, I’m not hitting the medipac for a top up of HP. I’m retreating and healing up. All other things being equal.

So what’s my take away?

MCC deliberately or accidentally destabilises character competence. The game repeatedly gives and threatens to remove defining abilities. Advancement is not linear optimisation but adaptation to volatility. Funnel and early-level play act like environmental pressure rather than balanced progression. I’m back to the trifecta from my earlier posts. Randomness will happen, learn to love it by leaning into it, improvising around it or planning contingencies, redundancies and concepts of operations.

Perhaps that is the real shape of MCC. Not progression as accumulation, but progression as adaptation under pressure. Characters do not become steadily optimised heroes. They become strange collections of surviving traits, assembled through luck, catastrophe, improvisation and selective preservation. The funnel never really ends. It just becomes more sophisticated.

Expect to be pressed up hard against the evolutionary filter.