Adventure Review: Sailors on the Starless Sea

 

Adventure Review: Sailors on the Starless Sea

Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG. Level 0. My experience: Run 2x for public games.

A solid mod that doesn't live up to the hype.

Sailors on the Starless Sea is maybe the most popular mod for Dungeon Crawl Classics. It was released when the game came out as a starter funnel and has such widespread acclaim that it got a hardcover edition. I'm reviewing this because I ran it a few times and it worked only ok for me. 

First, an overview: this is a funnel where the PCs play several level 0s each. I love that format and the way it gets people used to running multiple guys. They're sent off to a ruined keep in the wilderness. Inside are beastmen, and there are also some delightfully creepy vine monsters. The PCs have to fight past the beastmen into the keep, descend into the underworld, cross a great lake, and then disrupt a massive ritual. It's a stellar synopsis, a classic plot that gets the PCs into the world. 

I found the keep location the strongest. The PCs have a few different options to get in, then a chance to explore, learn some lore about the place, fight a few more beastmen. Then they've got one way to go--down. I think that's great in a funnel; keep the PCs moving and on track. 

Below ground things required more work. First, there's this location that expands on the vine creatures called "The Summoning Pits". It's evocative and strange and probably great but it just doesn't fit into a 4 hour session. For a home game you can include it but I wouldn't at a con. 

Then, there is crossing the sea. The PCs get a boat they summon and use to get across, and along the way they are attacked by a Leviathan. The Leviathan is brutally difficult, able to TPK the party if they don't either 1) burn luck on their damage rolls or 2) figure out an alternative. The mod has two; they can use some incense they found in the keep (which repels chaos creatures) or they can offer a deliberate sacrifice. 

In my games, they didn't figure out the incense idea. It's just a lot to put together--they have to take incense from the box, use it on the creature up there, then make the connection that it should also affect the Leviathan, which is both much stronger and in a different area. Clever parties might but mine didn't. They also didn't land on the sacrifice idea--once they saw that the Leviathan started eating people, it didn't occur to them that a deliberate sacrifice would have a different effect. 

 So they ended up burning luck. In one case I had to coach them through it, because the group was new, and that was unsatisfying. "Ask the GM how to proceed." 

 The result of these encounters meant that only a couple of PCs got to the final ritual location, a ziggurat. Here, there are dozens of beastmen being whipped into a frenzy--it's clear at this point that the PCs are not going to be able to accomplish anything, in terms of combat or stealth. 

 My players decided to continue, sneaking up to disrupt the ritual anyway. It felt like they stepped out of the game to do so, knowing the adventure was at its climax.  

 I found this section difficult to run, because there were dozens of beastmen and several layers to the ziggurat. Abstracting worked but a lot of pieces. Through some clever play and suicidal actions, the PCs did disrupt things leading to a nice finish. But by the time it was over only one or two PCs lived.

 Overall I found it too involved and just too difficult to be a good con game. If several players are new, running many level 0s is confusing. And, the module has some nontrivial puzzles which have to be solved for a successful conclusion. It is asking a lot for the players to learn to play, to play 4 characters, and to figure out the puzzles all at once.  The lethality of the mod makes it a poor campaign starter because the players won't have enough left to form a level 1 party. 

 I think an experienced GM and a clever (and experienced) group of players could have a great time. But it isn't a great starter mod. For cons, I recommend Tower of the Black Pearl or Citadel of the Scarlet Minotaur or Frozen in Time. As a funnel, I liked Beneath the Well of Brass better. 

Weather Generation 1: What I Want in a Weather System

At this blog, we are interested in practical simulationism: rules that get us close enough to reality while maintaining usability at the table.

Weather generation is great for this because:
        -We have tons of weather data for many locations in the world
        -It’s a background system that any RPG could care about
         -It feels solvable—there is a best way to do it

The goal of this series is to see if we can come up with a general purpose rule to go from real-world weather data to a working weather table. My criteria are:

        -It has to be simulationist. That means it has to ‘match’ real world weather data from a particular place. How close does the match have to be? We’ll learn more about that as we go through this series.
         -It has to be algorithmic. There are tons of cool ideas at there for generating weather in this or that environment. But they can be hard to use because the descriptions are generic. E.g., “Fall weather”, or “Tundra weather table”. It’s much easier as the GM to say: “this environment is like Egypt. Let me use an Egyptian weather table”.
        -It has to be practical. There is a level of taste here. You can create detailed, and probably more accurate, weather if you’ve got a dozen tables and after four rolls you learn that you roll 2d6+2 on subtable C. But this is not useable at the table. I prefer a strict boundary: no more than two rolls, and no more than two tables. A d100 table is two rolls (2d10) and one table—we aren’t going to go much beyond that.

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So what options are out there for us? First, there are tons of variations on table-based methods. Here is a selection:

(1) Roll on a single table. This is the most popular. I like this version for 5e; here is their table for spring:  

 

(2) Movement along a table. This is how the Wilderness Survival Guide does it: it sets a range of reasonable temperatures based on environment, then rolls a 2d6 each day to change. If there is a chance of precipitation, you roll on a separate precipitation table (again based on environment).

 

(3) Multiple tables with jumps. Here for example, you have two tables (basically ‘nice weather’ and ‘bad weather’). Each day you have a 75% to stay on the same table and a 25% chance to jump tables. This adds a bit of constancy.

(4) Independent tables for temperature, precipitation, etc. There is an in-depth version in Dragon #137, by Lisa Cabala, that perhaps gives the apotheosis of this approach. Here is Table 14, for Polar Temperatures. 

 

        (5) There are also souped-up versions of these which I’d call ‘computer-assisted’ tables. Here is a post corresponding to this spreadsheet. I’ll be honest, I don’t really follow it, but I see they have little dials like a “rain multiplier of 0.8” in early summer. 

Beyond tables, there are there two other systems I’ve seen that are worth mentioning.

(6)  Take a real place, pick a year/time that corresponds to your campaign, then pull weather from a database. I see some people recommend the wundergound database. The idea is, you pick a location corresponding to your desired weather, you pick a year, and then use the day-by-day weather. So maybe my campaign starts on September 7 of DR 1000 (or whatever fantasy system I want). I decide the weather is like Chicago. I pick 1955, arbitrarily. Then the weather on day 1 of my campaign is like September 7, 1955 in Chicago. And I progress day-by-day.

       (7)  Use a hexflower, a hextable with structure to it, where you will move from cell to cell based on a roll. Here is an example. If you go off grid then you loop around, unless you hit an X. These are aesthetically pleasing and have some memory effects to them. 

 

      So much for the survey. Where do these techniques land from the standpoint of practical simulation?

      First, computer-aided methods are a no go. If you use a computer already maybe it is not that big an ask. But if you don’t, having to start bringing your computer to games, and possibly configuring internet access, just to get weather is not going to happen.

      Second, we should be wary of tables that get too complicated. The Wilderness Survival Guide and Dragon #137 were both comprehensive because they considered a wide variety of possibilities (like ‘Arctic’ --> ‘Hills’ --> ‘Spring’). This is probably good from a simulationist perspective, but it means flipping pages at the table. (I’ve seen this complaint elsewhere).

      Third, I’d like to quantify how well it matches real weather. This is my biggest source of hesitation with the tables I’ve seen—I can tell the authors have put a lot of thought into their tables, and making them realistic, but I haven’t seen any data in that regard. (Of course doing so would have been way more difficult in the 1980s).

      The third point matters because real locations are how we’re going to orient ourselves with respect to the weather. I want to be able to tell the players “we’re in the Moonsea, so the climate is like Chicago”. That immediately grounds them. Many of the systems seem to use a more vibe based approach—we want there to be more predictability, so we added a mechanic for that.

      It may turn out that simulationism clashes with gamism and using real weather tables means weather that is too constant or too unpredictable or too slow to change or whatever. That’s all well and good—but I’d like to see some proof of that first, which we can only get by comparing to historical data.