DCC Return to the Starless Sea - Review

Return to the Starless Sea is an interesting deep cut for DCC fans. It’s both a call back to the often recommended Sailors on the Starless Sea, which comes with much nostalgia for this 12-year-old dungeon crawling community, and a print publication of a tournament module from GenCon 2023. Reading this was a blast, as the text contains sidebars about wacky things that different tables experienced. However, running outside of a tournament format will be a different and challenging DCC experience.

Site: Goodman Games
Purchase: $12 PDF, $18 print
Pages: 75
Release: GenCon 2023, Print 2024
My Familiarity: Played at a convention, Ran at open table (writeup)

What this game is ‘about’

Reviewer’s note: Games need to know what they are about. The market is crowded, and few games have the luxury of being middle-of-the-road. What is the appeal of a game to the players, including the game master?

Dungeon Crawl Classics (DCC) is a gonzo, old-school D&D-inspired game that cranks the craziness up to 11. This module is a tournament-style adventure that doubles down on lethality in exchange for an utterly wild experience.

The first half serves as a classic meat grinder, encouraging creative play. The second half tests the players’ survival and dungeoneering skills, as first-level characters certainly lack the resources to confront all the presented challenges head-on. Part two of this adventure adapts less elegantly to normal play as it is meant to weed out and differentiate tables of players.

The leviathan strikes

Changing My Mind on DCC

I love the DCC modules, but the rules system can become cumbersome during play. The luck system being inverted from d20 is a throwback to first and second editions, but explaining it to tables of new players has worn on me. Equally, the burn mechanics of spell burn and burning luck points, stacked with heroic deeds and mercurial magic, stacked with the dice chain add a lot of flavor to the game. Still, that flavor adds some mechanical heft to the flow of play that I’m not liking … especially in an open table format where I always have new players.

Lately, I find myself gravitating toward the streamlined nature of Shadowdark. I’m tempted to adapt Shadowdark in a way that allows me to run DCC modules using that system. The writing in these modules really is that good.

Encountering this Adventure at a Con

I played part 1, the funnel portion of this module, at ScrumCon ‘24. By that time, I had already run the original “Sailors on the Starless Sea” several times, so the nostalgic nods, like pitchfork-wielding peasants, worked well for me. The theater-of-the-mind approach of my tournament GM at first felt dry .. but after a few combats turned into a fun procedure where I as the player placed my peasants in a front rank of characters to be attacked while a mob behind them pushed the adventurers forward into danger.

Funnels are an amazing experience all D&D players should do at least once. However, it’s a box I’ve checked, and I don’t feel the need to do it too much more.

Kicking down the door DCC style

My Experience Running Part 1

The adventure starts media-res as a peasant mob tries to save their town from an unchecked chaos incursion. A stroke of bad luck quickly led to disaster; one player lost all their peasants in the very first encounter. I tried to run the interior as theater of the mind, and I liked it. A ‘chaos chicken’ encounter was a highlight, creating a memorable moment for everyone involved.

The TPK in Part 2

The adventure’s second half begins in a flying 1970s wizard van. The anachronistic van scene was a blast to run despite the broad age range at my table. The players even pulled out their phones to play music from the 8-track tapes, adding to the fun atmosphere. Once inside the keep though it became clear that while I could scale down the monsters of the adventure to the number of players I had, without making a plan to avoid the many can-kill-you-with-one-shot dangers of the last battle, we quickly went from zany adventure to TPK.

I’m thankful for my group of open-table meetup attendees and I think they had fun, but part 2 isn’t for everyone. Run as is, it will murder players and I think I should have telegraphed those dangers more before one-shot killing my the adventurers.

Read, Play, or Skip?

This is a definite “read.” The first half is an excellent starting funnel, setting the tone for a gonzo world where chaos must be defeated. The sidebars describing highlights of what happened at GenCon, complete with artists’ depictions of players’ creative solutions to scenarios help reinforce the culture of DCC. Unfortunately, I think this might also have been the adventure that made me want to put the DCC rule book on the shelf for a while. It may be some of the clunkiness, it may be the lack of a real digital tool to help people level up, but I’m likely to go back to Mutant Crawl Classics or adapting DCC content to other rules-light dungeon crawling games,