Lessons learned from Sailors on the Starless Sea

I'm running an open-table, open-world campaign of Dungeon Crawl Classics at Hexagon Cafe here in Calgary, and this is the start of my attempt to document some of what I've learned from the experience.

This game series is an intentional break from my usual play style. For the last several years I've been deep in the world of no- or lo-prep indie games like Magpie's Masks: A New Generation, Jay Dragon's Sleepaway, Avery Alder's Monsterhearts, Bully Pulpit's Fiasco and Epidiah Ravachol's Dread. We typically do character creation together, build out a roster of connected secondary characters together, and do world building together. Everything is from scratch and built up from and around the main characters through collaboration, conversation and play.

For Dungeon Crawl Classics, I wanted the game to feel more old school. I started by smashing together the implied (and in some cases mapped) settings from the modules I wanted to run. That left me with a world map for the adventuring region at 12-mile hex scale. Then I wrote up a 6-page world primer for the geography and cultures of the adventuring region, as well as a rough scan of the broader area around it. In most cases I drew from what was established by the modules, in other cases I was spinning the world out of thin air and historical analogs. Lastly, I built a persistent campaign-rumour table with entries related to all the modules, broken out by class and tied to the dice chain to make it feel very DCC.

All that was an immense amount of prep for me to do before I even had players, and the exact opposite of the collaborative way I had been running games for the last five years. But it had the feeling of the high-prep, DM-driven AD&D games I'd run in the 90s, when I had seemingly endless time on my hands. That's what I wanted here, and when the players showed up to our first session I dropped the world primer on them, handed out a set of three 0-level pregens each, and we kicked off the classic DCC funnel Sailors on the Starless Sea.

Here's what happened next

On game day I found I had a table of six players plus me. I've seen people finish Sailors in a fast four hours, but it took us two sessions of about 3.5 hours to finish the module. Some of this was because we had to learn the rules as we go. Four of us had played DCC before, one person had played original TSR systems back in the 80s, and two were new to roleplaying games.

But some of this was also personal style. I have a soft preference for letting each scene breathe, for prompting my players (especially new players) with actions they could take, for chewing on lavish depictions of scene and character. This is fun for me, and I think it's also fun for my players, but it eats up time. If this was a one-shot or convention game we'd have a problem, but for an ongoing campaign it was fun to lean into.

Spoilers for Sailors on the Starless Sea start here

In the first session the party of ragtag peasants started out by confronting the vine horrors. They made a quick--and smart--decision to set the tree on fire and then, when the vine horrors made to escape the tree, the adventurers closed to melee to pin the monsters in the fire. Many brave adventurers fought, and some were slain or burned in the growing conflagration. One member of the party saved a few vine horror seeds for future study and/or use, and the rest burned.

Instead of passing through the obvious trap at the gatehouse, the party looped around to the east and threw a grappling hook over the castle wall. They clambered up, though several slipped and tumbled to their doom.

From the top of the eastern wall, they could peer down directly into the burned out chapel. The party split up to explore the courtyard or the chapel, and being greedy they approached the chapel's toad statue and triggered the black slime trap. One party member died and the others escaped into the courtyard, resealing the chapel's double doors.

At this point I had the beast folk in the tower, sensing weakness in the invading party, charge out of the tower and engage in melee. The beastfolk were cut down by the enraged peasants, but not before several more of the party were felled. We ended the first session there.

At the start of the second session, I allowed all the players to restock up to three (total) level zeros from prisoners held in the tower. This was as per the module, but also was badly needed as one of the players had lost all her characters in the previous session. Having disposed of the black slime and the beast folk, the party proceeded to investigate the empty chapel, where they acquired one suit of armour, the brass censer and a packet of unholy incense. They briefly surveyed the mystical well in the courtyard, before sealing it with heavy stones and proceeding down into the sublevels of the dungeon.

Descending the stairs, they discovered the emptied treasure room. One halfling character shimmied partway down the fissure that leads to the back entrance of the Tomb of the Fallen, but he turned back before getting too separated from the party. Continuing onto the next room, they grabbed the cultist robes and one character pocketed a glowing skull from the murky pool. Then they descended as a group to the beach at the edge of the Starless Sea.

Two adventurers climbed the menhir and lit the candle that summons the dragon boat to the shore so all could board. Since they had acquired the unholy censer and incense, they were able to appease the leviathan, and proceeded to dock at the base of the ziggurat.

Donning the cloaks of the the Chaos cult, the party snuck up the ziggurat to the sacrificial platform, where they confronted the beastfolk shaman, their lackeys and the summoned aspect of Molan, the champion of chaos. As the final blow was struck, a column of lava shot into the air from the top of the ziggurat and the cavern around them began to collapse. As the last of the slobbering beastfolk descended upon them, the remaining party fled to their waiting ship and were carried off into the black of the underground sea.

That's where we ended the second session.

Lessons learned from running the module

One narrative note I was able to hit in the vine horror fight: the module states that the vine horrors are the corrupted corpses of the village blacksmith's sons. So I simply asked the table if anybody had a character with the blacksmith occupation, and when one did I pointed out that these were his sons and asked him how that made him feel. It worked great and added narrative weight to that character, so that when he perished later it felt more tragic because we knew something of the loss he had already borne. This also set up a dramatic payoff much later, when they would return to their hometown and meet the devastated widow.

I had a handy procedure in my back pocket when the players set the vine horror tree alight. I rolled 1d6 at the start of each turn to determine in which direction the fire spread on the hex grid. And I increase the damage die size each turn, i.e. 1 damage on the first turn, 1d2 damage on the second turn, and so on. So the fire was getting both bigger and stronger as the combat progressed, which ups the stakes. And the randomized spread changes the tactical realities of the combat each turn, forcing the players and monsters to react in new and interesting ways. It's something I've used before, and seemed to work well at the table, and the players were engaged, so I'm likely to continue using it.

I think I made a mistake when the adventurers decided to bypass the gatehouse and instead climb the citadel's east wall with the help of a grappling hook and rope. Climbing the walls is a difficult check as per the module (DC 15), and in the moment I ruled that the rope would give them a +1D advantage. I'm a fan of the dice chain in DCC and enjoy the flexibility it gives me to adjust mechanical opportunity based on fictional position. But in this case a large portion of the party perished by failing their check and falling to their doom, which felt fictionally weird and wasn't fun in play. I think in future I'd simply allow them to succeed, or reduce the cost of failure to "you aren't strong enough to climb the rope, but you don't fall either." What would you do? How have experienced judges ruled this one?

The beast folk are surprisingly weak in this module. I think I had an expectation, based on the Vine Horror fight at the very start, that the beastfolk would be quite deadly. But actually it was the adventurers who had the upper hand in every combat with the beastfolk.

At one point the adventurers cleverly trapped a handful of beastfolk in the abandoned temple with the black slime. They waited to see who won and if they would reenter, and on the fly I ended up abstracting the "off-screen" combat between the beastfolk and black slime by rolling the total hit dice for each side against each other, with the higher total surviving. This worked for abstracting this combat, and I wonder if it would work in other cases as well?

At the start of the second session, I allowed all players to restock to three characters. In future, I'd allow them only to restock to two. The reason is that the entire second section is actually quite safe, and is mostly about exploration and discovering clues as to the bigger story behind the beastfolk. When we got to the third and final section, the combat atop the ziggurat, I found that the party was too big, and had to invent procedures to kill them off (see last bullet).

In the interest of creating class-specific opportunity, when the party discovered the fissure that leads to Felan's tomb I stated that a halfling could easily shimmy through, but it would be a tight squeeze for anyone else. This isn't from the module, but I find I often like to play with character size in this way in order to create story beats that are class-locked to halflings. I'm also a big fan of creating opportunities for the party to split up. It worked great in this case to build a sense of tension and wonder, even though ultimately the player decided to turn back before discovering the tomb.

Because I had too many surviving characters at the end, I had to invent a die-drop procedure to kill off characters in the collapsing cavern. The party was fleeing from the top of the ziggurat down to their waiting ship. I grabbed a handful of zocchi dice and dropped them in the centre of the table from about a foot up, to simulate the rocks from the collapsing cavern roof. The dice shot every which way, and every character or beastfolk warrior they hit took damage (I think I allowed a reflex save for half). It was a great little bit of improve table craft to raise tension as they fled, and to help reduce surviving party size down to the 1-2 per player I think is ideal at the end of a funnel. It helped, but probably not enough.

Questions I have for experienced judges

One player lost all their 0-levels between the vine horrors and clambering the castle wall. So I let them play their pet goose for a bit (the goose was later killed by the black slime). What would you have done? Since it was early in the module, I can see allowing a fresh party of peasants to arrive for them, or simply redistributing the remaining 0-levels.

On the shores of the Starless Sea, I ran the menhir of madness encounter as written (any character studying the spirals on the side of the menhir makes a Will Save or attacks their comrades). But next time I'd probably substitute the Glimpsed by Chaos teaser from Court of Chaos, since I was already planning to shunt them directly into Court of Chaos next. Glimpsed by Chaos is a great little bit of worldbuilding (instead of generic spirals, the menhir sports the symbols of each of the five Lords of Chaos) and it has a fun, weird monster. It feels like a good bit of gameplay and an effective teaser that would pay off in the next module. Has anyone done this, and how has it worked?

How do experienced judges run the portion of the ziggurat encounter before the final combat at the top? Because the modules gives us a map of the full ziggurat, I ended up drawing it out at the table, and had the players roll-to-sneak once for each of the eight sections of the looping ramp to the top. But this felt like way too many checks in play, and was a bit tedious. In future I'd likely only draw the top portion of the ziggurat that's needed for the final boss fight, and abstract the sneaking to a three-roll skill challenge. But I'd love to hear how others have run it.

That's it, that's my first post. Is this helpful? What's your experience with Sailors? What would you do differently? What have you done differently? Hit me on Twitter with your thoughts.