Dungeon Crawl Classics — Session 2

Wherein the Party (Mostly) Survives by Kevin Whitaker

Welcome back, adventurers. Last week my gaming group began their first foray into Dungeon Crawl Classics, an old-school-style fantasy RPG, designed with modern sensibilities. Our group of would-be heroes assaulted a cursed mountain fortress, only to be routed by the demonic inhabitants within. Of the initial sixteen characters, only four made it out alive. But, now reinforced with more “volunteers” from town, they were once again on the road to the ruin, ready to rescue their fellows and exact bloody vengeance on their foes.

Or at least die trying.

Rolling Down the Mountain

Our party started pretty large last session; I was expecting a group of four players, but ended up with six. The first four players had three characters each, and the last two had four characters between them. This week, we were down to a group of four, and I decided to limit them to two characters a piece. I did this largely to combat an issue I ran into in the last session; players splitting their PCs into sub-groups, and then having to manage all of the action as it happened in multiple places. By limiting the number of characters each player had, I hoped they would be encouraged to at least keep their own characters together, if not the entire party. I also knew the group would be more cautious, as the near-total-party-kill they had experienced had calibrated expectations concerning how deadly DCC is.

Recalling how poorly a frontal assault had gone, the group decided to go in the back way; up a rockslide which had collapsed down a cliff edge, which would lead them them right into the courtyard of the fortress. Like most things in DCC, the tumbled stones were far more deadly than they appeared. Characters not explicitly looking for good footholds were made to pass an Agility check, failure resulting in an avalanche as the loose stones and boulders careened down the mountain. All but one of the groups succeeded in their check, and I was forced to make a decision.

You see, the rockslide is a trap, but it behaves more like a monster. Rather than the PCS succeeding in a Reflex save to avoid damage, the avalanche “attacks” the characters with a +5 to the roll. When most of the characters have a defense of 10, this kind of bonus almost ensures the entire party will be hit. On top of that, the avalanche does 1d10 damage, against characters who have, on average, two hit points. The net result was a total party kill, not two minutes into the session.

Now, DCC is a deadly system — it says so repeatedly in the rules, and my players knew what they were getting into — and I had been advised by someone else to play the game honestly; that is to not hold back. But in this case, I decided to soften the outcome. As I’ve written about repeatedly, my play sessions are two hours long or so. Spending twenty minutes to transfer new characters from the list of replacements onto characters sheets isn’t fun. Having your party annihilated in the first few minutes of the game isn’t fun. Not to mention that the mechanics are a little off; since the avalanche attacks as a monster, the character’s aren’t responsible for their own fate. Sure, they touched off the rockslide, but they were then at its mercy. Other traps in the game rely on the characters rolling a save to avoid damage, thus giving them some limited agency. It’s an odd turn of the rules, and I’m not sure why the authors chose to do it.

In the end, I decided that some of the characters had made it sufficiently far enough up the slope to avoid the slide, and some, including the one who had failed the roll, were caught in it, but only took half their HP in damage. Perhaps too beneficent of an outcome on my part, but it kept the game moving, while at the same time providing some kind of consequence for the failed roll.

Strength in Numbers

Once the dust settled and the party had regrouped, they discovered the avalanche had revealed a previously hidden underground passage. Devoid of rope (thank you, random item tables), two of the characters came up with a workable solution involving a length of chain and a torn up sack. Once at the bottom of the passage, the characters were then confronted with an intimidating door, warded with arcane runes.

The alchemist among them rolled well to decipher the writing, and I read off the perfectly old-school (and equally ridiculous) warning to the group. Undeterred, the party set about opening the door; carefully, at first, but then resorting to brute force when the door wouldn’t budge.

This is something of a pattern I’m noticing in Sailors on the Starless Sea — doors and other openings are blocked by high-difficulty Strength challenges. On the one hand, I understand the desire to keep the adventure challenging; level-0 characters have low modifiers, on average, and putting an extremely difficult challenge in their path encourages them to a) work together, b) find a clever solution, or c) find another way through. On the other hand, it’s been my experience that a party will throw themselves against such an obstacle until the GM clearly tells them that they can’t make it through. So, in the case of roadblocks like these, I’ve opted to equate a failing roll not to a failure to move past the test, but instead to how much time it takes to do so. In the case of this door, it took them nearly an hour to open it, all the while unseen things might be happening outside the cave. I find this works as a good compromise; poor rolls carry some weight, but don’t completely block the flow of play.

Once the door had been opened, the party had to contend with another trap; this time a blast of magical fire engulfed the party, and many of them suffered horribly. There were two deaths in the party, but both characters made their Luck checks to recover. I mentioned last week that I had misread the consequences of this particular action, so they got by with less of a consequence than was appropriate, but I’ll be sure to rectify that in our next session.

With the trap sprung, the next challenge lay before our adventurers; a tomb, locked in magical ice, with a very tempting (and potentially dangerous) treasure at its heart — a dead warrior, dressed in well-made armor, clutching a massive (and obviously magical) axe. At the far end of the tomb was a door, which the party hoped would give them a secret way into the fortress.

Upon entering the tomb, however, the characters discovered the dangers; the floor was so slick that they couldn’t find purchase on it, and the cold was so bone-chilling that every round they remained inside would slow them down, and eventually kill them. At this point, so on edge from all of the dangers which had come before, the party decided to ignore the dead man and his axe altogether, and set about finding a way across the tomb and to the door at the other end.

I must say, I love how the DCC rules, or lack thereof, spark ingenuity. In the absence of any kind of skill mechanics, the group had to come up with a fairly slapstick plan; tying something to each other, and then getting a running start to slide across the floor. In other systems, with more codified rules for things like acrobatics or athletics, the group might have been unconsciously driven to a certain plan of action. Without those rules they were more free to come up with something vague, and then just make a roll. I think DCC actually does this better than something like Dungeon World, where even though the rules are vague around outcomes, a player can declare they have a particular tool and utilize it. Here, the group had to make due with what they had, and come up with some kind of solution.

Again, rather than block play with a failing roll, I made the consequence of failure time — characters who failed a roll had to spend more time getting across the tomb, which meant they would potentially take damage, and keep their fellows in the tomb longer.

Missing that Left Turn at Albuquerque

After making it through the tomb, the party was confronted with their next challenge — me misreading the map. You see, the map shows a passage connecting the tomb to the lower levels underneath the fortress, but it is difficult to decipher (I won’t post the map here, for fear of copyright violations). To make matters worse, the module itself never describes the existence of this passage. When looking at the map of the tomb, it just shows a hallway leading away in the opposite direction of the rockslide. With no immediate exit apparent, I made one up; deciding the passage led to a stair, which ascended up the courtyard of the fortress. This highlights what I think might be my biggest gripe with Sailors, and some of the other modules I’ve seen: the maps.

As a whole, the art Goodman Games publishes with their rules and adventures is excellent, evoking the illustrations in old-school modules like Keep on the Borderlands, while keeping the themes of comedy and weirdness present. The maps are really fantastic, in an artistic sense, but they can be very frustrating as play-aids. Since DCC isn’t as concerned with tactical combat as something like D&D, the maps are more abstract. This is fine, but it means that issues such as the unremarked hidden passage are bound to come up.

In the end, it wasn’t hard for me to roll with the punches. The party exited the hidden passage via a rusted great in the center of the courtyard, and then made excellent rolls to sneak towards the tower where they had previously encountered the demons of the fortress.

Into the Depths

Once at the tower, the party fared much better than they had in their previous attempt. Only a few demons remained above ground, including the injured, elephant-headed champion. Even still, the monsters represented a decent challenge to the adventurers, so I was surprised when they went down in just one round. The characters rolled very well, including the first critical strike of the night. This bolstered the party’s spirits, and with the demons dead, the group started down the stairs and into the dark.

As the party descended into the tunnels beneath the fortress, the first thing they encountered were a few small coins on the stair, glittering in the torchlight. The group was understandably cautious, having fallen prey to countless traps and ambushes already. The coins turned out to be just what they appeared — a few single gold pieces, left on the floor when the demons had raided a hidden vault. The vault itself was easily located by the group (there was an elf or two in the party), and soon the party was substantially wealthier, even though the vault had been mostly looted. That being said, they missed the chance to be even more treasure-laden; one of the emptied chests held a secrete compartment, filled with more goods (and a trap).

This little reprieve demonstrates some exceptional pacing and dungeon design. The group had been hammered mercilessly all throughout the adventure; whether by blood-thirsty demons, insidious traps, or dangerous terrain. The sight of something as seemingly benign as a few loose coins immediately put them on edge, and they spent some time making sure both the stairs and the secret vault were safe.

Once they had collected the immediate treasure, they pressed on, again missing the extra loot and danger of the hidden compartment. This was somewhat of a pattern for my group; missing potential treasure and skipping seemingly optional areas. Part of this, I think, is because our sessions are so short. The other part might have to do with expectations. Since my group tends to run more narrative games, the “old school” mantra of “search everything” isn’t the way we tend to play. I might need explicitly remind them at the end of this adventure to expect things in unexpected places.

Leaving behind the stairwell and treasure vault, the party made their way into one of the more interesting set pieces of the dungeon; a long room, with alcoves and murals on the sides, and a pool of dark water in the center. The alcoves contained some moth-eaten robes, and the murals depicted various evil beings doing evil things. The adventure actually provides handouts for these, and my players were happy to inspect them for clues. I as a little skeptical of the handouts’ worth; what they depict isn’t immediately apparent; but I was proven wrong later.

The most interesting feature in the room was the pool. When a character stared into it, a human skull would float to the top, and attempt to get a character to pick it up. These skulls had belonged to the enemies of the fortress’s ruler, and were a potential aid in the final battle. I was interested to see whether the group would be willing to take such obviously evil (and potentially dangerous) artifacts with them, and somewhat to my surprise, they did. Several party members ended up taking one of the macabre totems.

A few of them also took along a robe, as one of the murals depicted an individual wearing something similar. One of the characters, upon learning the robes might represent evil, decided to spit on theirs and toss it into the pool. A nice bit of role playing that, in what had so far been a fairly narratively light game.

Once again, the dungeon held a reward for brazen adventurers; at the bottom of this pool was a secret entrance to another room, which held the most powerful treasure in the dungeon. Gaining entrance would mean diving into a pool full of magical skulls, however, and none of the PCs showed any interest in going for a swim. Again, this speaks to expectations — players need to know to look for things in odd, or dangerous, locations.

Killing Friends and Hugging Enemies

A passage from the pool room led the group, at last, to the area which gave the dungeon its name: a wide underground lake of dark water, with a pyramid shining on an island in the distance. As the party stepped onto the beach, a dragon-prowed junk quietly floated towards them from the direction of the pyramid, stopping some fifty feet offshore. The ship seemed to stop facing a tall stone menhir, rising up from the sands near the water’s edge.

At this point, the party fractured slightly. One member recalled the mural in the previous room, which showed a robed individual standing atop a stone tower, with a boat floating amidst some writhing tentacles. Some others wanted to swim for the boat. While the two groups were debating, another character went to inspect some of the carvings on the menhir. She failed her Will save, and immediately stabbed her companion through the heart with a spear, as her mind was corrupted by the arcane magic of the monument.

The sudden violence ended the discussion about what to do next. While one group subdued the insane attacker, another ran headlong into the lake and swam to the boat. Those remaining on the beach quickly stunned their confused companion, and the character who had been stabbed succeeded in her Luck save to survive. Those in the water were not as fortunate.

As the first character clambered onto the boat to survey it, an inky black tentacle slipped around his ankle, and pulled him off the deck of the junk and into the air. Simultaneously, the water around the boat erupted into a mass of writing, snake-like tentacles, which began to harass the other party members who remained in the water.

We were out of time, though, so I decided this would be an excellent place to end on a cliffhanger. The group agreed, though they were all anxious to return to the adventure next week. All-in-all, it was another successful session.

That Map, Though

Things went decidedly smoother for the group this time around. We had all learned a few lessons from our first session; the party had learned to be more cautious, and to act in concert; and I had a better handle on the rules and the lethality of the system. As I’ve written about above, however, there was still room for improvement.

DCC likes to put rewards in bizarre locations — locations which often don’t make any sense. Consider the room with the pool of skulls; in terms of dungeon design, there’s no reason for that area to potentially drain into another, which means there’s no reason for players to suspect anything exists at the bottom. Now, I understand what the author of the adventurer is trying to accomplish — old school adventures rarely made any real sense, and often had loot in frankly inane locations, or hidden behind ludicrous challenges. DCC revels in its throw-back sensibilities, and wants to reward brazen players for launching their characters into dangerous situations.

Again, this is a matter of setting expectations; players need to either know going in that they should look for rewards in unexpected places, or they need an opportunity to be taught to do so. The problem with the former, is that it erodes some of the mystery. The problem with the latter is that if they miss a treasure somewhere, they’re likely never to know they missed it, and thus the lesson is lost.

As bizarre as some of the treasure locations are, I can’t call them unfair. In fact, I wrote last week that I think DCC does a good job of walking the line between deadliness and fairness, most of the time. That caveat came into play at the beginning of this session, when the entire party should have completely destroyed. Again, I understand the intent here, but this kind of gatekeeping is a little absurd to me, and smacks of the same kind of poor dungeon design that plagues the overly revered Tomb of Horrors from D&D. While I don’t think Sailors on the Starless Sea was written with same malice that ToH was, I think the rockslide “trap” misses in a couple of ways. As I said above, it behaves differently than other traps, in that it “attacks” players, rather than having them make saves against it. More-over, it can (and technically did) kill the entire party, even though it could be the very first encounter they have. That’s a weird way of welcoming players to your dungeon. Sure, the monsters encountered at the gate are also capable of wiping out a party, but there the characters have more agency: they can fight back, or choose to flee, or try bypassing the encounter by outrunning their assailants. They aren’t given any such chances with the rock slide. Some players might enjoy this kind of old-school design, but I think it does a disservice to what is otherwise a fantastic adventure.

My last complaint is, of course, the map, which I also touched on above. I love the evocative style in which the map is illustrated, but that secret entrance needs to be more clearly called out, or at least described in the module itself. I know there’s a second edition of Sailors, and I hope they did a better job there. It didn’t end up being too much of a hassle, but it means I’ll have to pay closer attention in the future to any adventures I run.

That’s it for this week! Next week we’ll wrap up our DCC funnel, and after that, well, I’m not sure. I’ve got a busy few months coming up, so I’m more likely to be playing games than I am to be running them. I’ll have some more general content during that time. In the meantime, I’d love to read your thoughts and feedback on this, or any of my other posts. Let me know what you think about DCC, or how I ran it, in the comments below.

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