Bathtub Review: Sailors on the Starless Sea

Bathtub Reviews are an excuse for me to read modules a little more closely. I’m doing them to critique a wide range of modules from the perspective of my own table and to learn for my own module design. They’re stream of consciousness and unedited critiques. I’m writing them on my phone in the bath. Sailors on the Starless Sea is a 15 page module for Dungeon Crawl Classics by Harley Stroh. It’s a funnel, designed to cull a score of level-zero characters to a party of level-1 ones. I’ve run a few funnels before, and a few in the rules-adjacent Mutant Crawl Classic, a game I should probably review by itself. I haven’t delved into the deep archives that are the DCC line of modules, but I find this being recommended repeatedly. A chaos god is returning to life, and the characters must prevent them and brace an underground sea to save the people of their village. The backstory is wordy and flavour fully pulpy, but is really an excuse to flavour the adventure with chaos, and from then it…