Session Report for Sailors on the Starless Sea
My new Dungeon Crawl Classics campaign began as many first-time DCC campaigns do -- with Harley Stroh's much-loved o-level funnel adventure Sailors on the Starless Sea. It took us two sessions rather than one, but that was to be expected since I walked everyone through character creation manually and also because we were roughly constrained by my son's midday nap time. What follows are some assorted notes on my specific experience running the funnel. This isn't a review exactly -- there are enough of those for this adventure especially -- and probably won't be of much interest (or even comprehensible) if you aren't already familiar with the module, as I'll mainly be addressing what I did rather than running through the module as a whole.
I did make a (very, very minor) mistake right from the jump. When originally planning for the session I wasn't exactly sure how many players I'd have, and so I decided that if I had 4 players they'd each have 4 characters and if I had 5 they'd have 3 characters, for 16 or 15 PCs total. This made sense to me at the time -- only a difference of one total PC, what a clever use of math! What I forgot is that Sailors has a recommended PC count of 10-15, so when I ended up with 4 players that put my 1 above the recommended amount of PCs. This is so trivial as to barely be worth mentioning, but I do think being at the max-recommended (or 1 over, in this case) party size did make it a little bit easier than the much hyped funnel experience is supposed to be. The players made it out with 11 PCs still alive in total, losing only 6 including a single reinforcement. Not exactly a meat-grinder. Of course, it could simply be that the players were rolling fairly hot (which they were); I believe I've seen some reports of people running it with as many as 20 PCs and still having a fairly deadly experience.
The other thing that made the adventure less deadly was the fact that I removed the very first encounter with the vine horrors, and my understanding is that can be a fairly brutal first combat with their two actions a turn. Still, I don't think this was a "mistake." As Stroh himself remarks in the bonus content in the current printing of Sailors the horrors feel a bit out of place as-is, and I think it suits the adventure (and simply the style of play) better to start at the wide open gate of the keep rather than with a more-or-less unavoidable as written combat. I considered adding in the bonus area that expands upon the horrors, but decided against it as with our more limited time it would definitely have turned the adventure into three sessions. If I ever ran Sailors as a level 1 adventure rather than a funnel I think I would use the horrors (including the bonus area); otherwise, I think it makes sense to leave them out.
One of the first things I did when prepping the adventure was find any test/check where there was no outcome from a failure and consider ways to make the failure more meaningful. Surprisingly for an early DCC module there weren't too many of these, the most notable being the heavy door leading to Felan's tomb, which requires a DC 20 check to open. My very minor rework to this was to allow one PC to open it on a DC 20, and then if they failed allow 3 PCs to open it without a check -- thus exposing all 3 PCs to the fire trap rather than just 1. However, they didn't bring down the wall concealing this entrance and therefore my very clever solution didn't see any use. So it goes!
Using some form of morale rules for the first time was a fun, different experience, and does a lot to help the DM consider the dungeon as a whole, connected space rather than a strict sequence of isolated encounters. When the PCs bust into the tower with 7 beastmen the players managed to slay their champion before anything else happened. Rather than having all of them flee I did a morale check and exactly half of them failed. The adventure mentions them fleeing into the courtyard, but since the party was right outside I figured it made more sense for them to flee deeper into the dungeon instead and, thinking ahead, realized this was a perfect reason to have the door to the secret room in the passageway slightly ajar. Then, when the players passed it by (I think more due to me being unclear in my description rather than a lack of curiosity on their part), I decided they would leave the secret room and find the 2 beastmen manning the battlements for reinforcements, leaving the door to the secret room wide open. Something minor, but I think it was a good first attempt about thinking how the dungeon can change when the PCs aren't necessarily present.
Since character creation took a bit of time and, again, we were operating on an unknown, baby-determined session length, I skipped an initial "best practices" type spiel in order to get things going. This didn't affect things too much, as the players (one in particular) were generally willing to mess with things and "drink the goo" as it were, but it did lead to them kind of charging through the adventure and ending the first session on the beach of the titular Starless Sea without having explored most of the rest of the dungeon. In order to avoid them missing nearly 50% of the module I employed a bit of artifice by suggesting to my wife between sessions that they may want to explore further before boarding the longship. If any of my players are reading this, Emily and I apologize for this little bit of deception -- it (probably) won't happen again!
All in all, Sailors is as good of a first exposure to DCC as it is reputed to be, and I hope the group enjoyed it as much as I did. I'm generally satisfied with the very minor changes I made and don't think I'd do much of anything differently if I ever had an occasion to run it again other than start with 12 PCs rather than 16 in a group of 4 players. I was initially planning on running the other acclaimed early Stroh adventure Doom of the Savage Kings next (again, Sailors into Doom being a very common DCC campaign opener), but since I believe we'll only have two weeks of sessions before being interrupted and I want to minimize weeks off mid-adventure where possible I think I'll be going with Daniel J. Bishop's Chanters in the Dark instead.