Bundle(s) of Holding: DCC Lankhmar

The Lankhmar campaign setting is based on the fictional city of Lankhmar, which was created by the renowned American fantasy authors Fritz Leiber and Harry Otto Fischer. The city of Lankhmar served as the primary setting for a series of sword and sorcery stories featuring the characters Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. These stories were published in various pulp fiction magazines from the 1930s to the 1950s.

The popularity of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories led to the development of a role-playing game (RPG) campaign setting based on Lankhmar. The Lankhmar board game was first published in 1976 by TSR, Inc., a company well-known for its production of role-playing games, including Dungeons & Dragons. They then released the first Lankhmar RPG supplement in 1985, though there had been mentions of it in earlier publications dating back to 1980.

The game allowed players to take on the roles of thieves, rogues, and swordsmen, exploring the streets, alleys, and sewers of the city while engaging in daring adventures and encountering a variety of colorful characters.

The publication of the Lankhmar RPG campaign setting continued through multiple editions and various publishers over the years. TSR released additional supplements and sourcebooks for the game, expanding the lore and providing players with more detailed information about Lankhmar and its inhabitants. Over the years, different companies such as White Wolf Publishing and Mongoose Publishing also acquired the rights to publish Lankhmar RPG material.

In recent years, Lankhmar has undergone a resurgence in popularity, and a new edition of the Lankhmar setting was released by Pinnacle Entertainment Group in 2015 for their game, Savage Worlds. This updated version of the game incorporates new mechanics and features, allowing players to experience the gritty and perilous world of Lankhmar with modern gameplay elements.

Today, Goodman Games is also publishing Lankhmar Material for their Dungeon Crawl Classics line. That’s the particular flavour of Lankhmar that we’re looking at today.

Bundle 1: DCC Lankhmar

This first bundle was originally put out in April of 2021. Now, Bundle of Holding is re-releasing it for anyone who missed it the first time around. As usual for these bundles, the content is split across two tiers with different price thresholds.

The first tier of this bundle costs $14.95 and gets you two items:

• DCC Lankhmar Boxed Set
• Gang Lords of Lankhmar

Although there are only two items in this tier, the first one is a biggie. The Lankhmar boxed set is the toolbox for the setting and contains a lot of stuff:

• The Judge’s Guide to Nehwon (104 pages)
• Compendium of Secret Knowledge (40 pages)
• Lankhmar: City of the Black Toga (44 pages)
• Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar #0: No Small Crimes in Lankhmar (12 pages)
• A gigantic 33” x 17” poster map of the City of Lankhmar
• Another 17” x 22” map of Nehwon
• A 3-panel judges screen with tables specific to the DCC Lankhmar setting
• An exclusive issue of the Goodman Games Gazette

Of course, you’ll also need the core rules to go along with this set. The quickstart rules are included, and the full rulebook can be found on DTRPG.

The second tier is priced on a threshold that, at the time of writing, is sitting at $27.08. This price gets you everything from the previous tier, plus some more items:

• The Land of the Eight Cities
• A Dozen Lankhmar Locations
• 3 2nd-level Lankhmar Adventures
• 3 Higher-level Lankhmar Adventures

This tier is just pure content. The first tier put you into the world and the second sends you off in the right direction. 6 small adventures and 12 locations to pepper into your own adventures should be enough to keep your group going for a while.

The most interesting item here is probably The Land of the Eight Cities. This is an account of the wilderness of the Great Forest. The content is based on unreleased manuscripts by Fritz Leiber. There are also some cool archival photos and info that will be interesting to any fans of Leiber. I like that this acts as both a functional RPG supplement and a tribute to and celebration of Leiber’s work.

In terms of value, this is a good bundle. The first tier is especially solid and worth a look. The boxed set alone is usually $40, so there’s a really significant saving there. The second tier is definitely more for GMs and, with the inclusion of The Land of the Eight Cities, real fans of Leiber.

You can click here to visit the bundle page at Bundle of Holding.

Bundle 2: Lankhmar Thieves

This second bundle is unusual (but not unheard of) for a Bundle of Holding in that it consists of only a single tier. Costing $17.95, the bundle contains 8 items:

• Greatest Thieves in Lankhmar
• 7 Low-level DCC Lankhmar Modules

It’s just a ton of adventures, really. This is very much a bundle of GMs looking for adventures/modules to run with their groups. Having 7 sitting ready to go will keep a group busy for a good while.

The Greatest Thieves in Lankhmar adventure is the meatier item in this bundle, weighing in at 164 pages. It’s intended as a ‘tournament’ adventure, as described by Goodman Games:

“The Greatest Thieves in Lankhmar was first run as a tournament at Gen Con 2019, where 20 nationally competitive teams competed over four days and three hardfought rounds. As their torches burned out, characters died one by one alone, lost beneath Thieves’ House. After 44% of tables experienced TPKs, and nearly 6 in 10 PCs were killed, one team survived to win the tournament. How will your players compare?“

On the one hand, this is not generally how I approach RPGs, and I’m not sure that I’d be a big fan of this mindset. That said, I appreciate that DCC really embraces a fast-paced and deadly style of play. This approach seems tonally appropriate.

There’s a lot less to this bundle in comparison to the first, but the modules are useful and the big tournament adventure is actually really interesting. To me, it’s the latter item that makes this bundle worth the price of admission.

You can click here to visit the bundle page at Bundle of Holding.