In the best of all possible worlds, we’d have done the entire funnel — the level 0 adventure Dungeon Crawl Classics uses in their brutal method of character creation — the same night. In the second best of all possible worlds, we’d have finished it the very next week. In the world in which we actually live, sickness and real life got in the way. But the stars finally aligned, as they often don’t do, here on the Starless Sea.
When we left off last time, the villagers had, at great expense, dealt with the minotaur beastman leader and six of his closest beastman friends, none of whom rolled low on their morale check.
Errata: The written adventure was clear that the beastman friends would scatter once their boss was killed; I didn’t see that part. And so there was a lot more death than necessary. I’d also neglected to remind the players that their characters could spend luck to improve their roll modifiers. In the second half, I reminded them of this a lot. As long as I’m doing a mea culpa, their longshot to grapple up to the battlements should have succeeded. I dunno why I judged it too high. There was a beastman patrol they could have encountered. And, to come completely clean, the beastman encounter left behind a lot of hides that could have been used as rough armor or disguises.
The lesson of the DCC funnel is that non-combat solutions are preferred to combat solutions, and when the players come up with something clever, they should be rewarded. I don’t think I fully understood that, going in. D&D trains you to want to just kill everything. You get the loot, the xp, and it’s simple. You have a sword and a spell and a target, they fit well together.
Try that in DCC, and your character just… dies, usually. It was my job to get the players thinking about other things they could try, and then if they were decent ideas, reward them for that by not having their characters die.
With the beastman leader dead, the players found themselves at the top of dark stairway leading into the depths. Six of the villagers just freed from the beastmen by the players (and immediately joining the players as replacements for characters lost in the battle) said that they’d been being carried below by the beastmen, who seemed to have little desire to harm them. But no villager ever returned.
So, I don’t want to spoil the entire adventure, but I do want to celebrate some really good scenes:
Faced with a rune-covered portal, a halfling used his expanded luck to pass a DC 20 strength check without even rolling. The little bugger hulked out, tossed that thing aside, and was immediately blasted to death by the explosion of the guard runes. Other characters explored and got the treasures on the other side.
A little set back by the death, the players elected not to take the secret path deeper into the dungeon, even though they’d found it.
This is the dichotomy of DCC; the game wants to reward daring and innovative play, but seems to want to kill those that do it. This came up a lot in the adventure.
The players found spare Chaos priest cloaks hidden in nooks and correctly deduced, given all the Chaos symbols they had seen thus far, that probably having these cloaks with them would be a Good Idea.
The players managed to board the magic ship in the intended way without futzing around with the symbols on the magic rock on the beach — they remembered the portal. They didn’t have the cheat methods for the leviathan encounter on the Starless Sea, but one of the players decided to try and use one of the hate skulls they found and put it on a torch. The skull started screaming. The leviathan was all “Wtf?” and thought it was just another chaos thing and let them proceed. The players did the “Chewbacca in the prison cells” thing and the four robed characters led the other “prisoner” characters up the ziggurat. Some of the beastmen were a little suspicious, but the frenzy of the ritual consumed them and they made it to the top without battling.
They weren’t able to stop the chaos shaman at the top from completing the ritual, but they did have a round to prepare for the rising of the avatar of the Chaos Lord, a massive cyclops wielding a deadly black metal flail. The players flung the skulls as expected, and moved in to finish the job, spending luck and wooden weapons against the flaming monster as if there were no tomorrow; and they broke the summoning, leaving the Chaos Lord’s weapon and armor to fall, empty, to the ground while the beastmen below scattered (most becoming leviathan food).
When a character went to grab the flail, the Chaos Lord returned as a fountain of lava, instantly killing three of them. When it subsided again, one of the players had no characters left.
I let her choose one to miraculously survive. All the survivors became level 1, and headed off to the follow-up adventure, Return to the Starless Sea, which we will not play because DriveThruRPG won’t accept my payment. So, if we play DCC again, it will be some different adventure.
But next time — Captain Sonar.
