Goodman Games

Ran DCC RPG for the first time this past Friday using Portal Under the Stars... it was great. The players enjoyed playing multiple characters for a change and didn't seem to mind PCs dying left and right. The most impressive idea they came up with was figuring out that the crystalline statues would only attack in defense and then leading them to the burial chamber where they then threw a torch inside....

Cool use of the crystal statues.

It is really interesting to hear stories of this adventure in play. I have run it many, many times, and players still manage to surprise me with new approaches in every game. It's really kind of cool how you can hand gamers a problem, and a bunch of 0-level peons, and watch them come up with creative solutions every time.

My players did that trick with the statutes, but not until after they whacked a few PCs, and they tried to use them to kill the demon snake. I decided the demon snake was smarter than that, so ... as far as they know, it's still there, with a couple of crystal statutes milling about aimlessly in the dark...

My players ran to the base of the barbarian statute when it started shooting bursts of flame at them, assuming (correctly, I ruled) that the statute's outstretched arm could not shoot flames at its own feet. They then proceeded to loop rope over the statue's arm, send up a more-or-less willing halfling, haul up the corpse of a fallen comrade, and lash it to the tip of the finger to block future flames.

I let it block a couple of bursts before disintegrating in a shower of blood and viscera.

Nice! I have seen PCs run for cover under the statue, and seen them climb the statue...but have never seen them lash a corpse to the finger! That's hilarious.

My group did the "hide under the statue" bit and, after a stretch of trying to figure out how to disable the rotation ability, I let them gum up the works (assuming a hairline fissue between the statue and the floor) by tearing sheets out of the "black grimoire" of a character who rolled Wizard's Apprentice as his occupation and sticking a bunch of those pages into the gap.

This left the statue pointing into a corner that they were then able to avoid. I kept the statue firing indefinitely rather than running out of fuel (I blame the excess whiskey I was drinking) and they ultimately tried to lure the crystal beings into the statue room in the hopes that they'd get blown away by the blasts. They ultimately abandoned that plan, though, once they finally grokked that the crystal creatures weren't a threat as long as they didn't attack them. It was a pretty clever plan, though.

Reading over this adventure to run it at my first (and much-anticipated) DCC session. Have a question about how people are running area 3 with the statue -- the text says the statue "launches flames continuously", for up to 5 rounds before fuel is exhausted. The introduction to the adventures states that this was a particularly dangerous room in playtests. But the text doesn't explicitly state that the statue's flames can hit more than one character per round. So are people taking "continuously" to mean multiple attacks per round? That's the only way I could imagine it being able to be as devastating as the introduction makes it sound to a party that is clustered around a door since the attacks don't mention any area of effect either.

Regardless, I would be hard pressed to decide that it could hit targets that were at 2 different doors in the room in a single round. My inclination is to let attack it all characters within a quarter of the room it faces each round, in a flamethrower-like attack that has a chance to hit all of them. The smell charred level-zero flesh will be thick.

I found that the frightened peasants tended naturally to huddle in groups at various points in the room, so I would just have the flames hit every character in the largest group. I guess if you were using a full battlemat you could just sketch out a cone or line effect for the flames, but we were just describing things with some rough notes on a sketch of the room, so it didn't really pose a problem.

Sounds like a good interpretation. Thanks.