Sailors on the Starless Sea (Dungeon Crawl Classics)
Yesterday night my group and I finished Sailors on the the Starless Sea by Harley Stroh. This is another module with somewhat of a cult following, I had played a short part of it before using Shadowdark, and had read it before, which left me with the impression that it was a bit all over the place. But now having played it with an actual flock of peasants going through it, it was a fantastically wild ride. All players were new to the system and immediately grasped the "essentially D&D" vibe of it. They particularly gravitated to the luck mechanic and the speed of play for combat. They were particularly thrilled by the sheer epicness of this low level escapade, the stakes, the fatalities as well as the chaotic flavour. From a GM's point of view it was fairly easy to run, but a little hard to first absorb all the information because of the very verbose presentation. This was especially noticeable coming over from Shadowdark and OSE modules that I have run recently. However, the verbose style has its advantages too. The read aloud texts especially just transport SO much flavour, which makes it actually a joy to read. The maps and art are fantastic, especially the drawing of the burning effigy at the end and do just as much work as the text to inspire the GM to convey the feeling of the world. Especially the final encounter at the golden ziggurat was a mystery to me how it would play out just from reading it, but in practice it worked brilliantly even with a split party at the top and at the bottom. And all of this done in theatre of the mind! The experience of running it has really shown me the power of theatre of the mind and going forward I will definitely use this as the default for my other games. The game was run online only using discord with video, so the default was to look at the players and not at a VTT. It was great to see all the non-verbal communication that you usually miss when playing online. Another advantage of theatre of the mind I think. Would definitely run this again as is! It took us two sessions of about 3h each. 10/10