Losing Spells in DCC
Dungeon Crawl Classics does not track spell slots. You roll a spell check, d20 plus caster level plus your Intelligence or Personality modifier, against the target number printed on the spell. The result column tells you the effect, and it also tells you the important part: whether the spell is lost.
A natural 1 is a misfire or corruption depending on the spell, and it is always lost. Beyond that, most arcane spells are lost on any check that fails or lands in the lower success bands. Clerics are worse off, since their disapproval range grows every time they fail, dragging the odds down further across the day. Roll poorly twice in a row and a wizard who started the crawl with six spells is holding two, with no rest in sight. The dice, not a resource budget, decide when the book goes quiet.
This is the whole tension of DCC casting. Power is uncapped on a hot roll, but so is the risk of going dry at the worst moment.
At the table: Before a fight, ask the wizard which spells they still have available after the morning’s checks, not which spells they know. Those are different lists.
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