The Return to the Return of the Starless Sea by Terry Olson Hail, Reavers! The author of the article and tournament judge, Terry Olson This year was Goodman Games’ official return to Gen Con, and with that, the return of the Gen Con DCC RPG tournament! Speaking of “returns,” this year’s tournament, which was the largest in Goodman Games’ history (198 players!), was Return to the Starless Sea. Those of you with good memories will recall that two years ago in the year that shall not be named, we ran an online version of this tournament for Bride of Cyclops Con. But this year we ran it at a real table, with real players and real dice… and even a real wizard van! And we gamed on the floor of Lucas Oil Stadium! Return to the Starless Sea differentiates itself from previous tournaments by having a zero-level funnel in round 1 and a first-level adventure in round 2. There were five separate flights of the round 1 funnel, each slightly different from the other. The top team from each of these five flights advanced to the final round, round 2. The funnel was designed especially for new players, giving them similar chances of advancement as experienced reavers. And we had a lot of new players. In fact, our final round’s second place team, “The Live Stock,” had players new to DCC. Awesome! The first round begins long after the adventure Sailors on the Starless Sea. The keep has rebuilt itself and is repopulated with even deadlier adversaries. Now, a peasant army surrounds it, ready to end the threat once again. The players begin with 20 PCs but they can draw from a deck of an additional 30, which represents the gongfarmer horde surging behind them. This helps ensure that everyone can play round one for the full duration; indeed, only one team managed a “true” TPK, where each player ran out of PCs with no more replacements in the deck. Even though the funnel format places a PC’s odds of survival mostly in rolls of the dice, those players who could tap into “gongfarmer ingenuity” managed to thrive where others faltered. Where some PCs trusted an unmodified Luck roll to get them through an animated wall’s chomping maw, others improved their chances by propping that maw open with miscellaneous...