First, yeah, I changed the theme. The new WordPress update broke the GeneratePress theme I was using somehow, so swapped to this one. I’ll probably switch back once they fix it.
I’ve been wanting to play Dungeon Crawl Classics since I succumbed to the sales pitch to buy the rules book for it in Gencon a couple years ago. The simple, rules-light nature made it perfect for new players. The characters that could be rolled up quickly without worrying about race, class, stats, equipment or anything else, ready in seconds to crawl a dungeon, was exciting. And the best part of all — the level 0 funnel that every new character would experience in some way. They would survive the adventure, or be irretrievably dead beyond recovery. Those that lived would graduate to become adventurers and, for humans, the first initiation to their character class journey. (Demihumans don’t have classes; they gain abilities in different ways).
I finally got my chance to play DCC this past winter in CaptainCon; we played a funnel adventure, with everyone playing four characters at once, called “Sailors on a Starless Sea”. Next game night, I announced plans to DM this for our family group once we’d finished our HeroQuest “First Light” campaign.
So now all I had to do was … over-prepare.
The game I played in February used randomly rolled, 4 characters-per-page character sheets. These are cheap and free and you can generate as many as you’d ever want in seconds. But for my game, I wanted something special. I’d heard about scratch off sheets you could get; the idea was that the characters would be hidden even from the player until they needed to make a Strength roll, or they took damage, and so they would scratch off the Strength modifier, or Hit Points, etc.
I also printed some sheets at the page above for backup, and gave the players the option of the scratch-off or the normal. Most took the scratch-off.
They turned out to be fun, but the printing underneath is so faint that scratching off the gray often scratched off the text below. So, save your money, just use the regular sheets.
I also got myself a DCC DM’s screen, dry erase board and markers, and post-it notes to keep track of monster health, player initiative and so forth. My DM at CaptainCon used clothes pins representing the monsters and players that he would arrange on his DM screen, but I had my post-it notes and they worked fine.
It’s going to be tough writing about the adventure itself; it’s one of the most famous funnels but I don’t really want to spoil anything. Like all DCC modules, though, it starts the party outside the dungeon with a big lit-up sign saying “THIS WAY TO ADVENTURE”. DCC is not a game that troubles itself with politics or roleplaying — no point in roleplaying a character that is most likely going to die. As they survive adventures, the roleplaying will come naturally.
Sailors on a Starless Sea opens in front of giant ruins; the players are villagers hoping to rescue those stolen in the night by a beastman attack. The attack was bloodless; the villagers may still be alive, they must be saved.
There’s surprisingly little combat in SoaSS, which is good, as it’s most often deadly. Before the players had found their first encounter, they had lost several characters through exploring a sinkhole (that at one point involved — I kid you not — a sheep pendulum) and a mysterious well. I knew what the issue was. I couldn’t say it because I was running it, but the issue was that the players expected that every puzzle would have a solution, and they were willing to spend as many lives as necessary to find it.
There were answers, and if they’d approached the keep a different way, they might have encountered creatures that could answer them, but it’s really good to understand when to cut your losses.
The initial deaths had made the players so paranoid that when they came upon a treasure cache, one of the players destroyed it with her hammer, losing them a powerful longsword and bow, and destroying an idol that may have been useful later. At least they weren’t able to destroy the healing items.
I’d told the players up front that they could spend their luck points on a 1-to-1 basis to improve dice rolls, but forgot to keep mentioning it. This would become a real problem on their first real encounter. Also, with so many minis on the table, the players lost track of which were theirs. I printed some colored bases for the next time we play. I wasn’t taking pictures while DMing, so I recreated a pivotal encounter above as it might have looked if I’d thought to print bases ahead of time.
The other thing I probably played incorrectly was morale. Monsters have a chance to flee combat at several points; when the combat starts, when the first ally dies, when they themselves are below half health, and when fewer than half of their allies remain. I rolled for the monsters as a group when each monster died, but each roll easily cleared their Will score. I should have been rolling for each monster individually, giving them more opportunity to stop killing characters.
As it was, the players killed everything, but the battle took a horrible toll on them as well. Luckily, this was one of the points in the funnel where new characters could be recruited from saved villagers, so I was able to get people back into the game. There won’t be any others.
It took the players a couple of hours to get to and through the first encounter of the actual dungeon. When I played it last winter, we were able to question some beastmen that surrendered; no such luck here. I should have allowed knockout blows to give them the chance to learn more lore. Well, there’s plenty of story markers nearby; they missed a few of them for how they came in, but if they look, they’ll get clues on what’s ahead.
They’re going to need all the help they can get. And I’m going to have to remember the ways DCC provides to face impossible odds without total party wipe. Because this fight is nothing next to the final encounter.
