Dungeon Crawl Classics #67 - Sailors on the Starless Sea - Session Recap

Return to the New

Starting a campaign in a new game system can be a turbulent affair, and it doesn't always play with your audience. Stepping outside one's comfort area and into an unknown realm can be novel, but it's also a large and risky commitment, especially if you like the systems you are already familiar with. But for Dungeon Crawl Classics (DCC), I'm thankful our group took the plunge!

As a huge fan of old school D&D (and similar Old School Revivial game systems) DCC tickled my fancy. Although extremely novel in its construction, it emulates the novelty of experiencing D&D as it was presented to the prospective player back in the ancient halcyon days of the Red Box B/X set (I'm quite partial to Moldvay myself). Deadly combat. Rulings before rules. Greedy adventurers.

DCC may not play especially similar to B/X or other OSR game systems, but it does an exceptional job of evoking a similar experience while taking advantage of the best elements of contemporary game design. It runs on a beautifully lean version of the d20 OGL and after you get used to the multitude of quirky tables and funky dice, the bones are recognizable to anyone who played RPGs in the 3.5 era. Did I mention it uses Zocchi dice? While not a necessary accessory it does help to emphasize the sensation of strangeness that permeated D&D in the old days with its then-remarkable set of polygonal dice. It also allows the utilization of the 'dice chain', one of DCC's interesting mechanics that allow scaling to be less straight-line. Fascinating stuff, but I think I'll hold off on gushing more about DCC until our group has played a little more and I am ready to do a full review.

Enriching Heroism

We started out, as the game system suggests, with a 0-level funnel - specifically an official funnel module called "Sailors on the Starless Sea". Funnels are another DCC concept, basically a riff on the idea that people used to roll up several sets of attributes and then pick their favourite when creating a new character, due to how unforgiving '3d6 down the line' is. The funnel is a meta representation of that abstraction, and has each player take several 0-level peasants into a dungeon (the "funnel") armed only with the tools of their trade (pitchforks, rolling pins, filleting knives, etc). Traps and monsters promptly thin the mob down to just a handful of (hopefully desirable) survivors, assisted by their pathetic armaments, negligible hitpoints, and inadvisable lust for treasure. Each player grabs their favourite survivor, assigns them a class, bumps them up to level 1, and you have yourself a party of adventurers.

There are a lot of ways to do funnels but to avoid bogging things down mid-adventure I decided it would be best to assign XP and level up at the conclusion of the first adventure, and to only allow PCs to retain one character each. Henchmen & hirelings are great but in classic D&D style, they must be lesser than the heroes they follow and must never be contemporaries!

Starting Out

The module suggests 15 characters should be sufficient to complete it with about 50% casualties, but after reading it, I was confident this would be insufficient to give adequate odds of success. As a first adventure I would not have been satisfied with a TPK outcome, so I bumped up the starting pool to 24, four for each of my six players, and decided if the group played sufficiently well that they were still numerous by the end I could just heap on some additional enemies for the finale. 

I also allowed players to roll up their characters individually prior to the game, but I am not sure this is how I would handle it going forward. I think doing this creates a risk that players will become too invested in their favourites, only for them to die suddenly. With everything prepared, it was time to slaughter some beastly servants of chaos in an avalanche of suicidal peasant-flesh.

Ingress

From hereon I will be referring directly to elements that appear in the module. If your DM is planning to run this for you, you have been warned.

The hook is that the players are a mob of villagers from a town that is beset by kidnappings. The culprits are holed up in an old castle ruin that was once the fortress of an ancient chaos lord. The band of peasants descended upon the crumbling keep in high spirits, eager to avenge their fellow townspeople and of course to plunder the ruins of whatever valuables they could find. Approaching the causeway they paused at the sight of the blacksmith's sons roped to poles with vines (one PC decided that these were his brothers). A brave soul moved close enough to inspect them via a stiff jab with his staff, which revealed that these were, in fact, vine horrors.

The vine horrors aren't particularly tough but 0-level characters are fragile and they each have two attacks with their long lashing vines. A pair of hits were landed, one harming a tough halfling dyer and another ripping the throat out of a dwarven lorekeeper - first blood!

The other peasants overcame their terror long enough to advance up and bash the vine horrors to pieces, denying them a second round of attacks. 

Now wary, the group advanced up the causeway to the ruined castle's gatehouse. Reluctant to cross the wooden timbers serving as a bridge, they instead opted to circle the keep in search of alternative entrances. On one side they, somewhat surprisingly, elected not to climb over the rubble of the north-west wall, thereby avoiding one of the deadliest 'traps' in the module in the form of a tumbling avalanche of loose stones. I had previously decided that this trap needed to be reduced in potency as it could easily wipe out more than half the group before they have even gotten into the keep, but it ended up not mattering. In the written module the avalanche also revealed a fun secret room, which I had moved into the underground segment instead since the group had so many dwarves there was a good chance they would bypass it entirely if they were to notice and avoid the avalanche (old-style dwarves have a stonesense-y type ability that made it easy for them to spot the danger).

The mist-shrouded sinkhole on the Eastern face proved similarly unsuitable to their tastes, although the ghostly forms within didn't stop them from tossing in a couple of test rocks.

Upon returning to the gatehouse the group decided to cross over carefully one at a time. Upon the last group crossing the threshold into the courtyard, the two beastman guards hiding in the gatehouse released the portcullis, which struck and killed a cowardly town watchman who was taking up the rear. This actually proved beneficial as he was an inept fighter, but unlike most of the others was carrying a proper shield & spear which other, braver souls would go on to put to good use.

The Courtyard

The beastmen sounded the alarm by ringing a bell before retreating back to their mates in the castle's sole remaining tower, and knowing that any element of surprise had been lost, the group decided it would be wiser to continue to proceed cautiously rather than trundle head-first into an ambush.

Almost immediately the group decided to try and gain entry to the tower where the beastmen lay in ambush, as one of the peasants had heard a rumour that there was treasure hidden beneath it. With a few characters working together and a bit of burned luck, the group managed to force the old door, revealing the charnelhouse within. Not particularly clever, the waiting beastmen revealed themselves almost immediately - but the trap was sprung regardless when a dwarven blacksmith heedlessly charged past his fellows and into the unlit tower! Their minotaur champion descended from the stairs above, easily separating the foolish dwarf's head from his body.

The beastmen charged forward into the bottleneck of the door, preventing the peasants from using their weight of numbers to their advantage while the spear-equipped beastmen could fight comfortably in two ranks. The group suffered several more casualties including a wainwright, a smith and a charcoal burner, all human. The group managed to inflict some damage in return by utilizing a wheelbarrow full of rocks the wainwright had to provide them with throwing missiles, but ultimately decided to retreat rather than grind it out in the narrow space. I decided it would be thematic for the beastmen to be light-sensitive given their ability to function in darkness, so they did not pursue into the courtyard.

The band, now down to 18, began exploring the courtyard's other features to see if they could find something that would be useful in overcoming the beastmen in the tower. They started by investigating the old well near the western wall. The well is, while interesting, totally useless to adventurers and potentially very dangerous. Looking into it causes adventurers to have their perceptions warped and if they fail a will save, they might tumble into the depths. The well is a gate into the underworld and the beastmen have been using it to transform villagers into more of their kind. I will note that this feature is one of several examples of excellent and imaginative writing in Sailors - though unlikely the book accounts for the remote possibility that the gang is able to scrape together the gratuitous amount of rope it would take to descend all the way to the bottom (although any party to attempt this earns the certain doom it invites, as it would require ignoring the multitude of signals suggesting they turn back).

Only one character was brave enough to take a peek inside, and they also happened to be the one with the best will save and managed to avoid taking a tumble. The party wisely moved on after only a cursory inspection of the strange well.

At this point the group decided to begin searching through the debris and overgrowth around the courtyard, just in case there might be something useful hidden from the naked eye. As it turns out, there was! They discovered a marked capstone that concealed a secret stash of useful loot, and by working together (and burning a substantial amount of luck) they were able to displace the capstone and get the treasure.

A squabble erupted over the distribution of said loot, as prior to this point a particularly chaotic dwarven goatherd had been greedily looting the dead of their coppers and equipment to keep for himself. The dwarven party-members began screaming at each other in dwarven, and the argument culminated with one of the blacksmiths sucker punching the goatherd and knocking him out cold. The quarrel escalated when the now-unconscious goatherd's simpleton chestmaker nephew stabbed the blacksmith through the chest with a spear, knocking the band down to 17 living members, of whom only 16 were conscious. The group decided that the issue of the murder would be settled by trial after they returned to the village.

After distributing the rest of the loot the group moved to inspect the sinkhole again from the other side, and despite noting the instability of the surface, a minstrel crept up alone all the way to the lip with the intent of looking inside. The hollow earth gave away, nearly dragging her in, but she manged to grab the crumbling ledge and hang on. Foolishly, two other villagers (the simpleton dwarf and a wizard's apprentice who really ought to have known better) ran to help, adding their weight to the loose earth and causing another shelf to fall away into the sinkhole, pitching the wizard's apprentice and minstrel to their dooms. Remarkably, the dwarf survived and clambered back to safety without further assistance.

Next they moved on to the chapel. This is a very thematic and interesting space, with its ancient blackened bones and forever-burning embers, but it ends up being mostly dominated by a tar-ooze that attacks when anyone approaches a jewel-studded fountain on the far end. Most oozes are resistant to slashing and piercing damage, and this one was no exception - but the party initially mistook their difficulty harming it with blades and spears for total invulnerability and attempted, unsuccessfully, to disable it by interacting with different elements in the room. This proved especially unfortunate when one villager destroyed the unholy censer, which is actually the solution to a much nastier encounter later on. Whoops.

They eventually destroyed the ooze and miraculously only lost one villager, one of the group's two chimney sweeps (a father and son pair).

At this point they began strategizing for how to overcome the beastmen in the tower. Their first idea was to cook the unconscious goatherd's goat in order to lure them into the open with the smell of meat. Not a bad idea, but the presence of the minotaur champion meant that these beastmen would not be so easily manipulated. They ate the goat and then decided they would go collect the wainwright's wheelbarrow (now abandoned before the broken tower door) so as to remove the bowl segment and use it as some kind of siege-shield to protect their shooters so they could chip away at the beastmen from safety. The two villagers sent to collect it flubbed their stealth checks, and another dwarf bought it when a couple of beastmen threw their spears from the entrance.

They ended up abandoning the wheelbarrow plan and instead put the unconscious goatherd in it, where he would remain for most of the adventure. They eventually settled on stacking up outside the door and then having the simpleton dwarf piss on a stone idol of a chaos god they found, hoping it would enrage the creatures. They managed to lure the minotaur champion out and promptly hacked him down, which caused the remaining beastmen to break and attempt to flee into he courtyard. The group easily ran them down and hacked them to pieces.

Exploring the tower they discovered a group of six surviving villagers in chains, and decided to add them to their number, bringing their character count back up to 21 villagers. In hindsight, it probably wasn't necessary to give them the full six that the module allows for, but one player had already been reduced to a single injured character so I took pity on them.

They managed to avoid a flesh-burrowing grub by using the chimney sweep's brooms to sweep up the lice and flea infested carnage covering the tower floor (how polite!).  They also found some additional treasure, and the group's only elf laid claim to a mithril elven sword.

Exhausting all other avenues, the group descended down beneath the ruins via a staircase next to the tower. Amusingly, they almost decided to call it quits before they found the stairs.

The Descent

The dungeon component of the adventure is significantly more linear than the above-ground element, and so things picked up quickly from here.

The group discovered the secret treasure room thanks to the simpleton dwarf being in the lead and his natural stonesense. They collected the loose change missed by the beastmen, but failed to discover the secret compartment in the overturned chests.

I attached the previously noted secret room (a crypt for an ancient chaos lord) to this one, which is protected by a series of interesting magical traps. The group had their elven astronomer translate the runes (their previous rune-reader disappeared into the sinkhole) but he flubbed about as badly as he could have. With only a lot of mistranslated gibberish to go on, they ended up just forcing the door and triggering a fire trap that roasted their herbalist. The simpleton dwarf, on fire but alive, hurled himself into the crypt and managed to extinguish himself via its magical aura of cold. The space requires regular fortitude checks to avoid slowing down and freezing, and the surfaces are all covered in slippery ice. After the dwarf skidded out the group decided to move on, as their only 'clue' had proven utterly worthless and they thought there might be a trick to it that would be revealed later (there isn't, the 'solution' is to brute force the problem by smashing the ice containing the chaos lord to get at his loot - although they did avoid the final trap, a nasty curse that follows the character around and is likely to go off at an inopportune moment on some other subsequent adventure).

The next area was a training room for acolytes, not particularly hazardous but with several clues and tools for overcoming some of the final challenges. A character who threw well on their luck test peered into the pool of water in the center of the room and felt compelled to retrieve a strange glowing skull from its depths. The skulls in the pool are, in fact, harmless (and can even help you destroy the chaos lord at the climax) but the encounter made everyone else too worried to get near it. For particularly reckless adventurers, the pool contained a draining mechanism that would permit access to another secret chamber, but this remained undiscovered. They also grabbed the old acolyte robes to use as disguises.

The group made their way down to the beach of the starless sea, and after noting the spooky unmanned dragonship and the distant shrieks of tormented souls, nearly decided to turn back. A halfling farmer tested the safety of the dark waters by releasing her duck into it and it was snatched up by one of the leviathan's tentacles. Ultimately they found their courage, and one of them climbed to the top of the standing stone (as was seen in a mosaic in the previous room) and lit the candle to call the magical longship to shore. Luckily, none of them attempted to decipher the symbols, which have the power to drive readers to violent madness. The group scrambled aboard the longship, and it drifted into the gloom.

The leviathan proved the group's next great challenge - having destroyed the censer in the chapel previously, they did not have the correct solution to the puzzle, and as such I was expecting things to devolve into a high-casualty bloodbath. The dragonship was seized by the leviathan half-way down and, as the dwarf simpleton had burned nearly all his luck up to this point, he was selected for punishment first. After several failed attempts to appease the leviathan by dribbling pricks of their blood into the water, a lawful forester took the rash action of slitting the unconscious goatherd's throat and cast him into the waves, surely condemning her soul to the ruinous powers and successfully appeasing the leviathan. The dwarf was dropped and managed to land on the deck, yet another close encounter!

The group arrived at the ziggurat where the ritual to rebirth the chaos lord was taking place, and using the acolyte robes, successfully navigated past the horde of chanting beastmen to the top. Seeing their fellow villagers being cast into the burning pit at its center they charged with abandon while some of their number blocked the steps to the platform to keep the horde of beastmen from getting to the summit and overwhelming them. A fierce battle ensued - one of the replacement characters, a shaman, was skewered defending the ramp, while the simpleton dwarf died heroically facing down the reborn chaos lord, his skull mashed by its great burning flail. The madame of a local brothel struck a crippling blow against the lord, burning nearly all her luck to pump up her damage roll, and instantly rendering her unsuitable as an adventuring character. The chaos lord was ultimately destroyed by a luck-enhanced bowshot from a mudlark who had borrowed the forester's bow. 

With the chaos lord dead his surviving beastman followers dispersed in panic and the cavern began to collapse. The group decided to ignore all the treasure save the chaos lord's weapon and armour, and it was the unfortunate bawd who seized it first, causing the departing spirit of the chaos lord to lash out from the pit with a great pillar of magma, hauling her burning carcass back to the underworld with him.

Quite exhausted from their ordeal and eager to escape, the survivors gathered up the remaining kidnapped villagers and seized the chaos lord's wargear (confident by the dimming light of the pit that his spirit had finally departed) and fled, not bothering to scrounge for coins with the ceiling falling in. They returned to the dragonship and were propelled to freedom by a great wave in a somewhat railroady final scene, and I allowed them the opportunity to watch from safety as the castle and its hill caved inward leaving a great unholy rent in the earth.

Victory, but at what cost?

Over the course of the adventure I provided the party with a whopping 30 peasants and I managed to fairly kill more than half of them. I could have, and probably should have, gotten away with a start of perhaps 18 (three per player), but many of the encounters were balanced on a knife's edge and the band made numerous difficult saving throws which mitigated their worst losses. Three times characters survived blows that left them with a single hit point. The leviathan encounter especially could have easily slaughtered most of the remaining party if not for the quick thinking of the forester. Overall, despite my generous provisioning of peasant-fodder, I was very happy with the outcome and I think everyone enjoyed their first DCC experience.

Of the surviving fourteen peasants, the six selected to continue adventuring were:

• Ingrid the Forester: she sacrificed her fellow to appease the leviathan despite her lawful nature, likely damning her mortal soul in the process. I imagine this character has a dark future in store. I actually forgot to prompt Ingrid to use her magic skull against the chaos lord, which belonged to one of his most hated enemies, so she left with it and it will probably serve as a future conduit to ruinous powers intent on exploiting her fall from grace. Ended up taking both the chaos lord's armour and weapon, in exchange for a future treasure share. Elected to become a fighter.
• Walden Jr. the Chimney Sweep: the son of the father-son duo of chimney sweeps, his father was slain by the tar ooze. Dispatched several creatures including beastmen and a vine horror, and came away with a keen sword forged from milky-white steel. Elected to become a fighter.
• Myyrah the Mudlark: borrowed Ingrid's bow for most of the adventure, as despite being a forester Ingrid's agility is truly abysmal. Overcame the call of the well and contributed to several engagements with well-placed arrows, culminating in the slaying of the chaos lord himself with a luck-enhanced shot. Elected to become a cleric.
• Asher the Caravan Guard: a man with truly impressive attributes, he was lucky to survive an attempt to use an ancient bow that snapped when put under tension and left him with a single hit point. Asher was wisely kept out of danger by his player being a prime adventurer candidate, and it makes sense given his limited attachment to the kidnapped villagers and high intelligence. Claimed the skull-decorated torc of the minotaur as part of his share. Elected to become a wizard.
• Arwil the Smuggler: one of the six late-additions to the mob, Arwil arrived late enough to avoid most of the deadlier confrontations, but still pulled his weight in the final melee against the chaos lord, jabbing away with a looted spear. He was quick to don the robes of an acolyte as a disguise. Elected to become a thief.
• Sigismund the Rutabaga Farmer (aka Sigismund the Old): another of the six rescued from the tower, Sigismund is an utterly unlikeable (if good-hearted) old fart who fought tooth-and-nail against the beastman acolytes atop the ziggurat. Alarmingly intelligent for a vegetable farmer. Elected to become a wizard.

Final Thoughts

Sailors on the Starless Sea is a fantastic OSR-style module. Lots of hidden secrets, dangerous and inventive traps and a reasonable number of opportunities for tooth-and-nail combat. Some thoughts: definitely an adventure to tweak before play. 

There are some elements that strike me as unsporting. The clue to how to overcome the leviathan doesn't actually help you figure out to use the censer, which could easily remain forgotten in the chapel above. The avalanche at the start would be an anti-climatic way to slaughter half the party indiscriminately. Also, this is one of two occasions where an inanimate trap uses an attack roll against characters instead of calling for a save. This, to me, is unintuitive and goes against the spirit of the conceptual differentiation between saves and attack rolls. Wearing armour probably shouldn't offer much protection from a rockslide, and making these tests attack rolls very importantly denies players the chance to burn luck to save themselves. Luck is an important resource in DCC and when better to start learning about how to best utilize it then the introductory funnel, where overburning your luck can only kill one of your many disposable level 0s.

My players also made a keen observation that beyond a certain point, the characters have very little motivation to proceed, a minor failing of the setup which seems like it ought not allow for additional kidnapping survivors. There was a frank discussion at the beach about everyone just going home rather than boarding the ghostly dragonship. Given all the foreboding cues up to that point, it would take exceptional bravery to motivate these exhausted peasants to move forward and nothing really stops them from retreating as other funnels do.

The chaos lord's effigy is also a tad weak for such an imposing figure - he is easily overpowered by a few villagers through weight of numbers. You could make the case that he is not yet fully anchored in this universe, but this isn't directly conveyed. Something I would definitely emphasize so that the players are aware that it is possible to overwhelm and destroy him in the moment, something that kinda goes against OSR principle of being quick to run away when obviously outmatched.

With a few tweaks Sailors is definitely a module I would consider running again!

For my own growth as a DM, I need to keep practicing my verbal descriptions. This adventure we also tried out experimenting with OSR-style mapping (maps are drawn by the players based on verbal descriptions, not issued or drawn by the DM). There were a few situations where my descriptions were inadequate to give the players a good picture of the environment, but nothing too devastating. Probably in future I should impose more consequences for too much dawdling, as our session dragged somewhat when the PCs spent a large amount of time faffing about the courtyard quarreling over treasure and then later deciding how to assault the tower. These emergent moments can be fun, but I probably allowed them to drag on beyond that point. 

This document ended up being rather massive and bloated in retrospect, but I enjoyed writing it - I will probably continue to do session recaps if my players enjoy them, but they will probably be more succinct in future and I might separate the 'review' elements from the 'recap' ones to increase readability. 

Soup out.