Is there a "GDQ" equivalent for DCC?

[Starbeard]

So my halfhearted search didn't turn up anything; sorry if there's a thread buried somewhere on the topic.

I noticed that the first 6 modules are arranged sequentially by level range, from 0 to 5. Was there an implicit intent to pitch these sort of as candidates for the T/A/GDQ equivalent of DCC? Do they fit well moving on from one to the next like that (I've only got the first)? Are there any other good lineups that you've tried or would recommend as a tour de force of everything DCC has to offer throughout its average level range?

Edit: and to be clear, I'm not talking about similarities in content or even adventuring themes, just a series of quasi-tournament style classics that more or less flow easily from one to the next, 0 to 6ish, with a general sense that the scope and stakes are supposed to bump up a bit at each step.

[GnomeBoy]

The main thrust of the intent is that the adventures are all stand-alone and mix-and-match. There are subtle links between some of them, for those that find them, but there's nothing on the scale of GDQ.

As for "flow" recommendations, I've barely been able to run more than one complete adventure in a row as it is, though this summer I'm hoping the campaign won't collapse under scheduling snafus.

But Sailors into Doom is a common "link", though one iota of the beauty of Sailors is that it can lead to ANY other adventure...

[Starbeard]

Thanks for the input. I do like that everything is designed to be standalone, it's helped me drop stuff into my own campaign pretty easily. It probably means that you can mix and match just about any of the modules and turn them into your own supermodule, too.

I'm just starting to play in a 5th edition Against the Giants game, and that's got me thinking about maybe running DCC in between those sessions, since we'll be rotating DMs to avoid burnout and there's room for one more DM slot. None of these guys really know anything about DCC, so the idea of presenting it as a Grand Tour of the game seems pretty appealing. Start with the Starless Sea funnel, then bump survivors up a level and run a 1st level module, then bump survivors up another level and run a 2nd level module, and so on.

Ideally I'd like each module to last no more than 1 or 2 long Saturday sessions. I think they'd respond better to the one-shot tournament format, since Against the Giants will be the "main" campaign. Still, I'd want to have enough plausible connections between modules that it wouldn't be hard to narrate the flow from one to the next, and maybe even rewrite some early ideas and NPCs encountered into later modules; like how L. Sprague de Camp turned Thoth-Amon into Conan's archnemesis in his edits.

Food for thought.

[Raven_Crowking]

You might want to take a look at AL 1-5 The Stars are Falling. https://www.rpgnow.com/product/123608/A ... alling-DCC

Alternatively, Cut to the Chase Games has a number of sequential adventures, intended to form full story arcs: https://www.rpgnow.com/browse.php?keywo ... from=&pto=

[GnomeBoy]

Ideally I'd like each module to last no more than 1 or 2 long Saturday sessions. I think they'd respond better to the one-shot tournament format...

Should be very do-able. Sailors can certainly fit a 6-hour slot and I've done it in shorter slots, too. I'd say many of them can fit that sort of time frame. You might even want some extra stuff ready to hand, depending on how long a "long Saturday session" is... Maybe dealing with events between the adventures? Like, how they spend their gold and all that... what sort of trouble they get in locally, etc....

[ThickSkullAdv]

I wrote The Corpse That Love Built as a spiritual sequel to They Served Brandolyn Red.

Attack of the Frawgs is a bit of a prequel to The Haunting of Larvik Island. For the upcoming 3rd printing of Larvik, I'm working with an author to include a new tie-in adventure between those two. And, I've got the ultimate sequel (which I lovingly refer to as Frawgs 2/Larvik 2) which one day I will release, but I'm super behind on that. So the path for those would be Frawgs -> Upcoming Tie-in -> Larvik -> Larvik 2 (if I ever finish it...)

[Starbeard]

Thanks for these suggestions, I'll definitely look into them.

We haven't started yet, but I did round up a couple of friends from another group for an impromptu session of Sailors on the Starless Sea. No frills or fluff, very little improvisation, basically a playtest so that I could take notes on which aspects of running DCC I'll most need to get used to.

At first I gave them 4 PCs each (8 total), thinking that they could supplement their numbers as they rescued prisoners, but two were killed in the first encounter and the rest went down in the first big fight against the beastmen. Lesson learned. We threw in more PCs to finish the fight as stragglers just catching up, and eventually at the end of a 7 hour session they completed the scenario with 5 survivors, though only because I went really, really easy on them in the last area. They had unwittingly passed by, overlooked or destroyed everything that might have helped them there.

Anyway, it went well, I'm confident that I can run a mean game for my group when it's my turn to ref, and now this other group of friends are excited to continue on with another module. Which is unusual for us, since we usually homebrew all of our campaigns.

Any suggestions on what to bring in next? It's gotta be a 1st-level module that leads smoothly from Sailors, after riding the dragon longship down into the unknown undersea. One idea I'm tossing around is to have them spat out into space, where they sail through the cosmos as star vikings onto their next adventure, but I'm not sure which modules might go well with that setup. I could give them some 1st-level city adventures in the 998th Conclave of Wizards, but then we're back to open sandboxed campaigning, when we're hoping to keep to the 1-module-per-session tournament theme.

[Mat Mobile]

At first I gave them 4 PCs each (8 total), thinking that they could supplement their numbers as they rescued prisoners, but two were killed in the first encounter and the rest went down in the first big fight against the beastmen. Lesson learned. We threw in more PCs to finish the fight as stragglers just catching up, and eventually at the end of a 7 hour session they completed the scenario with 5 survivors, though only because I went really, really easy on them in the last area. They had unwittingly passed by, overlooked or destroyed everything that might have helped them there.

That's absolutely a normal thing to happen. Those first 2 quick kills make the players understand that this battle won't be won by pure fighting. They need to be creative. And let them be creative. Whatever they want to try, as long as it's not "stupid", let them try it! Then reward their creativity by having good ideas work. It also happens to be super fun!

For your next adventure, I would suggest playing "Doom of the Savage Kings". I just played it and it works perfectly after "Sailors of the Starless Sea". Simply have the boat sail down the river north of Hirot" into the village and start the adventure from there. It's a super fun "micro setting"! (see my review here: link)

[Starbeard]

That's a great review, I think I'll pick up that module too.

Unfortunately we already went through our next session, which ended up being Tower of the Black Pearl because I had it to hand.

The connection from Sailors to the Tower came out really well. In the first session they had bypassed the expanded Slow God section (actually I forgot to add the doorway leading to it), so for this session I had them start mid-action, shooting down a cave tunnel uncontrollably on the dragon-prowed longship: all about is a latticework of vines, with the occasional skeleton tangled in a position that gives the impression of being dragged further down the tunnel. They reach a dead end and are shot through an opening high on the cave wall, the Slow God area, while the water continues on through an underground tunnel.

The area was more or less by the book with only minor changes, the ultimate result being that they woke the Slow God from its slumber, and escaped through another tunnel of rapids as infinite vines threatened to overtake them like Lando escaping the Death Star's core in Return of the Jedi. Shooting out into the night, the full moon hits the ship and unfurls a mystical sail of starlight, causing it to rise up out of the water. The ship sails up into the cosmos, leaving behind their world as it is fully enveloped by the Slow God. Whoops!

They had found both Sezrekan's item and the treasure map, and one of the characters was an astrologer: perfect! He deduced the map to be a starchart leading to the world of Sezrekan's mortal tomb. With nothing else to go on, they follow the charts, surviving on space kelp and the carcass of a starslug, arriving at the Hollow Sun, a black hole sun with three worlds: the Grey Planet, the Flickering Planet, and the Radiant Planet—hone of the Tower.

They land, spend a month leveling up, equipping themselves and hunting rumors until it is time to tackle the Tower. Enjoyment was had by all.

The Hollow Sun is now going to be the immediate setting for the foreseeable future. The Radiant Planet has two broken moons, having collided long ago and littering the sky with a ring of moon metals that reflect a wide variety of colors; its orbit is heavily elliptical, resulting in seasons that last a year. The indigenous races include cyclops people afraid of/weak to the dark, squat purple fishfrog-men who fight to the death, and corpulent transparent people who are the overlords of the local city-state and enslave the other two, mostly for army service and gladiatorial games. The dragon-prowed longship can fly under the light of a full moon (on this world, every two months), or in the cosmos indefinitely.

Now it's time to consider a Level 1-2 module to go on from here, and to decide whether we stick to XP rules or just level up after each adventure.