Portal Under the Stars report

[Zenitii]

Today I played my first DCC RPG session, ran Portal Under the Stars. I decided to write session report, because before playing DCC I enjoyed reading them, so maybe someone will have fun reading this one.

There were 12 adventurers total, 4 controlled by me (pretty passive) as a GM, and 8 by my two players, 4 per each. First player - halfling trader, gong farmer, and 2 other farmers, second - squire, con artist, dwarven miner and miller.
They entered the portal and began their adventure. Squire decided to hit the closed doors to chip off some crystals, and well... he died in the blast of light and arcane energy. From this moment players were much more careful. Con artist decided to examine the door and learned about the star pattern, so they waited two hours. In the next chamber one of the farmers controlled by me entered the room and barely avoided flying spear. Miller decided to step in, thinking the trap is disarmed, but avoided another spear. Halfling noticed, that the spears fly at a given height, so he crawled and activated the rest, which flew above his head. Then he opened the door and entered another room with a big statue. Since it was only turning, all decided to enter. Miller, after examining the room moved to open another door and died in the stream of fire. Halfling, seeing this, decided to spike a spike into the base of the statue by using hammer, to prevent it from moving. I wanted to promote creative thinking, so I allowed him to disarm the trap this way by using two spikes. Next they entered the burial chamber. There, dwarf and con artist began crushing all skulls and looting everything. Then the party decided to enter the pool room. They saw the crystal statues through the door, went back and sent halfling without torch to examine. Statues ignored him, so the dwarf entered with his lantern. Noticing the attention of statues he ran away and closed the door. Con artist entered the room and began tp pry out all gems, despite floor slowly collapsing. After 100 everything went down, but one of the farmers threw him a rope, which he caught, burning 10 points of luck, thus surviving. Next they entered the scrying chamber and killed Sisurag, loosing one farmer in the process. Last was clay army chamber, where only clay general survived and posed no problems at all. After discovering secret passage and putting the crystal ball into the depression we ended the adventure.

At the end, 8 of 12 peasants survived. I think players played quite clever, one lost only 1 character, and second 2 of them (almost 3, but burned luck). I've been playing as a Game Master for 15 years, but during last 5 years I had only 2 or 3 sessions total. I had many players who really enjoyed my sessions, but I felt tired and bored, always struggling with my creativity. DCC renewed my love for the roleplaying games since I read the Corebook, presenting this fantastic and mysterious world which awoke my imagination again. I'm looking forward to creating adventures in this world and am full of brilliant ideas. I would like to give my words of appreciation to Joseph Goodman, for obvious reasons, and who also creates really clever dungeons with awesome and unique encounters, which demand creative and lateral thinking to beat. Another person is Harley Stroh, I absolutelly love his adventures and I think he is the best adventures writer I have ever read. His scenarios invoke this mysterious, fantastic, unique and consistent atmosphere, for which I play RPG's. They really let me, and I think my future players too, to immerse in the fantastic world of Aereth. I'm seriously going to buy all Your adventures Harley, even though I live thousands of kilometres away and noone is selling DCC RPG here. And lastly, thanks to all draftsmen (especially Doug) who awoke my sleeping imagination with their brilliant drawings. I started reading DCC Corebook mostly because of You, hypnotized by these old school graphics.

Lastly, I believe I got one more person to our awesome hobby. One of the players was completely new and never played such games, but today he asked full of excitement when we can play next time. The other player was more experienced one and I culd see she really enjoyed the game as well and is waiting for the next session. I think next time I'll bring more players to create bigger team and introduce all of them to this gem, which is DCC RPG.

[DM Cojo]

Great report. Very similar to my first experience with DCC RPG. I can't help but feel the same as I did when I was ten and played basic D&D for the first time. I love DCC's balance between lethality and creative ways to avoid character death. Glad to hear it went well!

[Doug Kovacs]

Just because I happen to be reading things today I'll say "your welcome"

and remind you, if you are not already aware, that in addition to these forums there is always a constant flow of ideas about DCC going on in the Google plus group : https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities ... 2243499289


You also mentioned being on the other side of the world…. there are people from outside the U.S. over there as well


If you mentioned Harley over there I bet he would pop up and call you "awesome" or something like that.

[Zenitii]

Thanks for this Google group! I'll post it there as well, I even see session reports section, so it will be proper.

The balance between lethality and ways to avoid death is indeed great. I also like the high randomness during character creation. I believe both these factors can give you a feeling, that your high level character (who, unlike many of your other ones, survived so many adventures due to luck and player's wise decisions) is indeed someone special and favored by the whimsical, mysterious and undpredictable gods, or even the fate himself.

[Brock Samson]

Thanks for the summary - these are useful to folks who are planning to run this in the future, in addition to being highly entertaining!

I ran a particularly lethal game of Portal Under the Stars a few weeks ago... Four players with four characters each. Only four survived, including one character who fled. One player lost all four of his characters. Ouch!

They skipped the burial chamber and stopped plucking crystals out of the pool when it became evident that water was escaping through the empty spaces. Why so cautious? Because traps had polished off 4 or 5 of them already. The flames especially messed with their heads - they wanted out as fast as possible at that point. So, facing the full force of clay warriors, it came down to a desperation arrow that scored a solid hit on the leader (lightly damaged already), rendering the other statues lifeless once again.

I had basically declared it a TPK at that point, so it was pretty crazy. One character, realizing that collapsing the pool was actually a good thing, spent the majority of that encounter desperately prying out crystals, but at 10 seconds per combat round, it was (unbeknownst to him) not going to happen. He did have the clever idea of pushing a couple of crystal statues into the pool to load the floor, which I allowed with a strength check, but it was still too late with several warriors having already climbed up to the middle tier and only a couple of characters left.

I can't remember such a wild ending to an adventure!