empire of the east

A POST-APOCALYPTIC SCIENCE FANTASY SETTING FOR DCC RPG

Based on the EMPIRE OF THE EAST book series by Fred Saberhagen

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 empire of the east
A POST-APOCALYPTIC SCIENCE FANTASY SETTING FOR DCC RPG

Based on the EMPIRE OF THE EAST book series by Fred Saberhagen

Empire of the East book series created and written by Fred Saberhagen • Adapted and written by Jason
Vey • Additional writing: Jim Wampler and Harley Stroh • Editor: Rev. Dak J. Ultimak • Additional editing
and proofreading: Jen Brinkman • Cover art: Ian Miller • Cartography: William McAusland and Stefan

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Poag • Interior art: Chris Arneson, Fred Dailey, Cliff Kurowski, Doug Kovacs, William McAusland, Bradley
McDevitt, Ian Miller, Jesse Mohn, Peter Mullen, Russ Nicholson and Stefan Poag • Art direction: Joseph
Goodman & Harley Stroh • Art direction & layout: Matt Hildebrand

DCC Empire of the East is copyright © 2020 Goodman Games LLC. Empire of the East book series is copyright JSS Literary Productions LLC. Dungeon Crawl Classics is a trademark

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of Goodman Games LLC. DCC RPG is published under the Open Game License. Refer to the OGL in this work for additional information.

www.goodman-games.com

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 Characters
chapter one page 8

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Magic
chapter two page 14

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Monsters
chapter three page 42

Personalities of the
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Changeling Earth
chapter four page 50
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Science, Technology
and Magic
chapter five page 66
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Adventures
chapter six page 72
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Character Sheets
page 85
 Chapter One

CHARACTERS

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Mewick was there, thrusting with a long dagger,

swinging a war-hatchet that looked like some
peasants’ tool save for its swordlike basket
hilt. Even with one of the barracks cleaned
out, the Free Folk inside the stockade were
still outnumbered. Yelling, Thomas led his own
squad charging to Mewick’s aid.
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 INTRODUCTION
F ar out in the reaches of the wastelands and glow
deserts is an unmapped territory known only as
the “soft lands.” Stumble into it, and you’ll soon
lose all sight of familiar landmarks, as well as your sense
of direction. Without warning, a dust storm will blow up
out of nowhere, the gusting sand-winds will change direc-
tion by greater than 90 degrees, and if you stare at your
barely visible feet you will see that you are now stand-
ing on sands of a slightly different color. That’s when you
know. You have been displaced in space, and perhaps
even time, to a parallel world similar to your own, but
with bizarre differences and strange physical laws with
which you are unfamiliar.
Thus it is that you and your traveling companions might
find yourselves journeying from one post-apocalyptic
world to another —to a new kind of broken land.
Welcome to the Empire of the East.
EMPIRE OF THE EAST
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mpire of the East is the collective name for a tetral-
ogy of books written by Fred Saberhagen. Some-
times referred to as The Ardneh Sequence, these
books include The Broken Lands (1968), The Black Moun-
tains (1971), Changeling Earth (1973; later re-titled Ardneh’s
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World), and Ardneh’s Sword (2006). This sourcebook covers
the first three of these books, the original Empire of the East
trilogy. The fourth book, which takes place centuries later,
does not figure into the setting of the Changeling Earth, as
it takes place following the Second Change at the end of
Changeling Earth/Ardneh’s World.
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Well-read gamers will recognize Saberhagen’s Changeling
Earth for its prominent place in Gary Gygax’s famed Ap-
pendix N list of works in the original Dungeon Masters
Guide. Diehard fans of Fred Saberhagen’s works will also
know that the post-apocalyptic Empire of the East series
also serves as a prequel to his later Swords Trilogy and
subsequent works set in that milieu.
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Furthermore, Saberhagen’s eclectic and heady mixture
of post-apocalyptic setting, science fiction precepts, and
swords and sorcery in many ways anticipated the Ralph
Bakshi movie Wizards (1977). This movie is itself a cited in-
fluence upon the first post-apocalyptic role-playing game
by James M. Ward and Gary Jaquet, Gamma World. And
so the strange loop of influences and confluences tightens.
In Dungeon Crawl Classics: Empire of the East you will find
a post-apocalyptic setting in which magic and technol-
ogy lay in uneasy opposition to each other, and rarer still,
sometimes existing in an occasional alliance. Wizards and
warriors struggle against both demons and super-intel-
ligent AIs. It is a world inhabited by both mutated and
Page 6
magical creatures. Swords and spells may win the day,
but possession of an atomic tank or the backing of a shag-
gy demi-god born of the past holocaust can sometimes
trump both.
RUNNING DCC: EMPIRE OF
THE EAST
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s is true of nearly all setting books, running suc-
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cessful role playing sessions of DCC: Empire of
the East will require the prepared judge to also
have access to the DCC RPG rulebook. Rule and setting
variations presented here are, by their very nature, de-
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pendent upon the rules and settings from which they
vary.
That said, as a judge and players, there are no hard and
fast guidelines on how much or how little of the infor-
mation presented in this book you should use. You can,
of course, use the entirety of what is contained herein
to run a full-fledged Empire of the East campaign set in
the fabulous world of the Changeling Earth depicted by
Fred Saberhagen. Alternatively, player characters may
stumble into this world by virtue of planar travel, a mis-
step in the soft lands, or other extraordinary means. Or
you may simply wish to take portions of the men, mon-
sters, magic, and machinery in DCC: Empire of the East
and import them into your existing DCC campaigns to
spice things up.
A gentle word of caution: though mixing and matching
game mechanics in role playing games is a do-it-yourself
tradition as old as the hobby itself, careful consideration
should always be given to doing so. The variances of set-
ting and game rules presented in this tome have been
thoughtfully engineered both to create verisimilitude
with the works of Fred Saberhagen and to facilitate bal-
anced and fun game play therein. One could, for exam-
ple, use the spell enervation rules in DCC: Empire of the
East to replace the spell corruption rules in DCC RPG
with only a small impact to expected gameplay. On the
other hand, importing the entirety of wizard, elf, and
cleric spells into DCC: Empire of the East could quite eas-
ily break the setting, and thereby result in diminished
play value for you and your players.
Likewise, many of the spells herein may not precisely
balance with similar spells found in the DCC RPG rules.
If you are running standard DCC RPG, you may need to
make certain adjustments to the mechanics and specific
effects in order to maintain play balance. This is largely
because the roles of demons, elementals and djinn are
far more prominent and quite different in the Change-
ling Earth than they are in your typical DCC game, so
those wishing to use these versions of creatures should
think carefully about the effects they might have upon
the game.