Lessons learned from Intrigue at the Court of Chaos (part 1)

Last session we concluded Sailors on the Starless Sea, and this is the story of what came next for my open-table, open-world Dungeon Crawl Classics game here in Calgary. See my notes on running Sailors at this link.

Because the table is relatively new, I wanted to shunt them directly into a first level adventure that would set the tone for the rest of the campaign. One of the things that attracted me to DCC modules is the way the game encourages low-level play that dives right into cosmic plane-hopping. There's no killing rats in the tavern basement, you just launch your characters into the eternal conflict between Law and Chaos.

I picked Michael Curtis' DCC #80: Intrigue at the Court of Chaos because it does exactly this--plucking the adventurers from their mundane lives, bringing them face-to-face with the Lords of Chaos themselves, and sending them galavanting into the Plane of Law on a magic, mystery heist. It's great!

So my plan was to move the party from Starless Sea directly into Court of Chaos, before releasing them back into the mundane world for some open-world, player-driven adventure. My theory was that these two adventures back-to-back would give the players an opportunity to  develop their characters' personalities, goals and conflicts, and provide some lore and worldbuilding info, so that they would have a basis to engage in the player-driven play I want for this campaign.

Here's what happened next (spoilers ahead!)

At the conclusion of Sailors, our ragtag band of adventurers defeated the beastfolk atop the underground ziggurat, and fled the collapsing cavern on their magic ship, sailing off into the inky black of the Starless Sea. The party at this point consisted of Keira the Fighter, Seocan the Elf (no Patron yet), Fiona the Cleric of Ahriman, Alva the Thief, Malachai the Halfling, and two level zeros for the player who had lost all their characters in the funnel (twice!). We also had a number of zero-level retainers who had survived the ziggurat.

Instead of running the adventure intro from the module, I started the session by having the party awake one-by-one on their ship, beneath a putrid sky on a blood-red ocean of screaming faces. After giving them a minute to ponder their circumstances, a smiling, tow-headed lad appeared to greet them from atop the mast. And as he spoke, welcoming them to the Court of Chaos, the sea churned about them and a series of monoliths broke the screaming surface from below and rose round about them, until they could see that they were on a six-pointed platform encircled by the five titanic beings of the Court and their strange menagerie of demons, courtiers, servants and slaves.

The party treated with the Lords of Chaos and asked a few questions, but understanding quickly that the penalty for refusal was death they accepted the quest and were ushered to their lavish sleeping quarters. They ate and drank their fill, before retreating to their individual rooms--the first time most of the impoverished adventurers had slept in a bed to themselves.

As they slept, each party member was visited by a member of the Court through their dreams: Kiera the Fighter treated with Noohl in a ravaged battlefield, Fiona the Cleric received a vision of unholy reward from Klavgarok, Seocan the Elf and Alva the Thief met with the Chiaroscuro Envoy in a wondrous workshop, and Malachai the Halfling and one of the level zeros were offered gifts by Dzzhali. I ran these scenes as solo or duet dream sequences, and gave the players lots of space to add descriptive details for their character's dreams.

At breakfast the next morning Lexaliah entreated the party as a whole to give the Yokeless Egg to her and the forces of Law for safekeeping. They agreed to consider her offer and keep her secret, before meeting with the Court to accept the quest. The Court opened a portal of swirling purple smoke and they stepped through.

On the Plane of Law, they confronted Taurziel the guardian bull. This reads like a difficult fight, but Alva the Thief managed to nail her Read Languages check and so successfuly intoned the inscription that frees the bull from his service.

Next they ascended into the Cataphract and Alva again rolled her Read Languages check to try and identify the script above each of the five doors. She successfully read "Construction" and "Judgment," and the others the party was left to guess as to the puzzle's theme.

Fiona the Cleric opened one of the unknown doors first, and they found themselves in the Creation puzzle. I followed the module's suggestion and used PlayDoh for the Creation puzzle, which let the players get their hands dirty. I had also ordered a set of three sand timers off Amazon, and used the 5-minute timer to add some urgency for the sculptor. Seocan the Elf, an artisan by occupation, fashioned an egg and so passed the first test. We ended the session there.

The second session started with another leap into the unknown, this time Perfection. I pulled out the 3-minute sand timer and had the dancing spectres escalate their attacks each time it ran out. This is a tough puzzle that I don't think supports player agency well (more on that below), but Seocan was able to guess that something was up with the shadows. Once they had the solution they were able to extinguish the torches and relight them without too much trouble.

Next they stepped into the Sacrifice room, which played out in a fairly straightforward fashion though they didn't know the theme. They tried a handful of things to distract or defeat the monstrous blob, and then when those were ineffective started sacrificing equipment. At last Malachai the Halfling, a glovemaker by trade, had the idea to sacrifice his glovemaking skill, and that unlocked the rest of the solution. Seocan the Elf bravely sacrificed his life, and the puzzle was solved.

Finding themselves back in the main chamber of the Cataphract, and Seocan and Malachai restored, they stepped through the penultimate door: Judgment. The puzzle itself was easily solved: Alva the Thief rattled off a list of good deeds, but wasn't quite fast enough (I used the 1-minute sand timer for this). Next Seocan gave it a try, and managed to sneak in just under the wire and retrieve the azure key. While Seocan and Alva solved the puzzle, the other members of the party were locked in a deadly combat with the four Law Lions. Both Fiona the Cleric and Malachai the Halfling were cut down, but they  managed to succeed on their luck check to Roll the Body, and so neither perished. But we ended the session there on a bleak and dramatic note.

Lessons learned from running the module

I think the alternate intro I had worked out was very effective. The Court rising out of the screaming ocean really drove home that this was an alien, powerful place, whose majesty they should take seriously. It took me only a few minutes of prep time to rework the boxed intro text, and this was more about cutting parts I didn't need and working out a new reading order than anything else.

I ignored the module's suggestion to play out all the visitation scenes privately, away from the group. I also combined a couple adventurers into shared dream sequences, mostly for expediency. I know lots of words have been spilled about metagaming, but I've always found that it's fun and narratively fulfilling to exploit the boundary between player knowledge and character knowledge for dramatic irony. I've never had issues with players "cheating," and by getting everyone on the same page about the overall narrative they're able to lean into the drama and create compelling scenes with each other. And lastly, I think that being a good audience is an important part of being a good player, so I want to find ways to nurture that skill by framing solo or duet scenes where the other players get to practice being a fan of the other characters' stories.

As is my preference, I tried to chew the scenery in the dream sequences so as to create character-building opportunities. I did this by asking the players to describe a normal dream for their character, and then subverting that framing by inserting the Lords of Chaos into the scene. This felt unnerving and weird, as intended, but it also helped us learn a bit more about some of the characters by showing us what they dream of. Examples:

• Keira the Fighter dreamed of travelling through a dark forest near her hometown of Burle, and when Noohl appeared the forest began to burn all around them.
• Alva the Thief has a reoccurring dream of a clockwork workshop. The player has telegraphed before that she's interested in contraptions (hence the skill with traps) and clockmaking in particular. Meeting Seocan and the Chiaroscuro Envoy in this place set the tone as magical and strange.

This is a great module to run with props. Using PlayDoh for the Creation puzzle was super fun in play, and the sand timer was really effective at driving home urgency and tension in other puzzles. The handouts for each of the Lords of Chaos are also fantastic.

The Law Lions in the Judgment room were surprisingly deadly adversaries. Because they have a preference for attacking chaotic characters, they essentially focused fire on just two members of the party, both of whom went down about midway through the fight, including the Cleric. This could have ended badly if both characters hadn't succeeded on their Luck Save to Roll the Body, and so were restored to one hit point. From there, the cleric was able to heal the party back to near-full HP.

Lastly, I wish I had used the retainer morale rules to pare down the party a bit after Starless Sea. We had quite a few zero-levels kicking around who had survived Sailors and were sticking close to the 1st-levels as retainers. But I have an impression, perhaps baseless, that Court of Chaos is meant to be run without retainers. The DCC rules say that a retainer makes a morale check at the end of an adventure, but I wasn't thinking of it at the end of Starless Sea and didn't do anything with it. Next time what I'd like to try is rolling those retainer morale checks during the first appearance before the Court, probably at -1d because of the terrible majesty of the Lords of Chaos, and have any failing retainers outright refuse the Court's offer. That would give me a narrative beat to have the Court red-shirt the offending retainers into the screaming sea, driving home for the party that the price of refusal is death.

Questions I have for experienced Judges

Has anyone actually run the puppet theatre intro to the adventure as written? How did it go down at your table? It's not exactly my cup of tea, and the module text acknowledges that it's a bit of a cheap trick. But I'm curious to know if others feel the same way, or if I'm just a weirdo and it works well in play. Are there other alternate intros that Judges used to bring their parties to the Court of Chaos?

What's the fictional justification for a thief's Read Languages check being able to figure out every single word of the incantation to free Taurziel the guardian bull? The module is clear that a successful Read Languages check is enough to interpret the inscription that frees Taurziel, but my impression is that Read Languages allows thieves to get the general gist of a thing, not the precise kind of word-for-word reading required for a spell. I suppose I could have ruled that Alva the Thief could read the symbols enough to make the sounds, but didn't understand them. What would you have done?

How has the Perfection puzzle with the dancers and the shadows played out at your table? I thought this would be difficult in play, since the solution relies on the Judge somehow dolling out the information that there are no shadows. And indeed it felt quite frustrating and artificial at the table. After several hopeless minutes spent looking for meaning in the friezes on the walls, one of my players somehow managed to think to ask specifically about the shadows, which unlocked the solution for the table. But I wasn't happy with the module as written or how I managed it in play. How have you run this puzzle at your table? Are there any home-brew alternatives to this section that hit the same thematic notes with a more player-facing solution?

So that's the story so far. Did you find this helpful? What questions do you have about Court of Chaos? What's your experience with the module? Hit me up on Twitter, I'd love to hear from you.