Review 10: Creep, Skrag, Creep!
Now it is time to review a DCC funnel adventure! For those who are not aware, these are used as campaign starters where each player controls a group of 4 or so level zero peasants, and whichever PC survives the adventure gets to become a level 1 adventurer. Thus, these adventures are typically designed to be pretty lethal so as to whittle down the character roster. Since level zero characters don't have a bunch of class abilities to wrangle, this is also a great way to introduce new players to the system.
The adventure I'm talking about this week is Creep, Skrag, Creep! It was written by Stephen Newton for the DCC Horror line with cover art and cartography by Stephan Poag. While the DCC Horror series is technically a collection of its own, they are all typically set in a standard fantasy world, so these can be used in a regular DCC campaign without too much trouble. I ran this twice, using standard DCC rules both times.
The basic premise of this adventure is, in essence, an extended reference to the 1979 film Alien. Instead of a deep space ore hauler, the PCs are passengers on a ship (called the Star of Nostro), and there is some sort of creature aboard hunting them. The adventure begins with the PCs waking up in the cargo hold, in the process of being chewed on by some sort of reptilian vermin. The adventure is divided into two parts, with the first proceeding as an investigation of the deserted ship, while the creature makes occasional appearances to pick off victims, growing larger each time. The second part involves the arrival of a pirate ship which coincides with a final confrontation with the creature. Much swashing and buckling to be had by all!
Getting it to the Table
I've done a few reviews of Goodman Games adventures by this point, so I will not repeat myself about the overall wordiness of them; it's their house style, and it works for them, and I'll just have to deal with it. Instead I will focus on the things that made this fun to run for my players and how it helped build the session into a good experience without too much work on my part.
After a brief introduction and adventure background, it moves immediately into some useful advice for running the adventure. The centerpiece of the adventure is the recurring creature attacks, and this is the first bit of advice you get-- how to make the creature behave, and how frequently it should show up. There is even a bit of "survivability tips" for those GMs who are less cruel. The preliminary section concludes with two fantastic tables that can be used to add additional flavor to the PCs in the form of "Rumors & Superstitions" and "Quirky Personality Traits". Most of the superstitions are of a nautical nature and contain clues for the adventure, and the quirks are often synergistic and can create some fun situations, like when someone who is "afraid of the dark" is paired up with the person who has a "fear of fire" and will seek to extinguish light sources at all costs.
Now, the adventure section begins. A minor layout quibble I have is that the map of the ship (another great isometric map from Poag) doesn't appear until partway through the area key. It's an odd choice which makes it a little difficult to reference the map as you're reading the key, and it seems like it could have been put anywhere else in the document without much difference.
One point that this particular adventure has in its favor as opposed to typical Goodman Games fare is that the area keys are not entirely paragraphs of text that you must extract information from. While there is a hefty amount of read-aloud text, the subsequent descriptions are broken up into separate sections about pertinent details in the area. This is a great method for communicating to the GM what the important things are and presenting them in an easy-to-find manner; often when I'm doing game prep, I will re-organize dense text in a layout similar to this. Each area also includes the relevant stat blocks for creatures and effects, which is always a plus. Additionally, each area details any special circumstances in regards to creature attacks, should they occur while the party is in that area.
Another unique feature to this adventure is that there is a relatively large amount of environmental storytelling, and it is presented in a way that is only as involved as the players want to be with it-- there is plenty of detail that can help build a growing sense of dread, but none of the information is critical to the adventure, so you don't have a situation where progress is stopped because the players didn't want to have their PCs take time to study a mural.
Finally, there is a fair amount of thought given by the author to how the adventure might conclude-- either disastrously or really disastrously. One group that I ran it for managed to bust a hole in the bottom of the hull, sinking the boat long before the pirates were able to arrive; there was a suggested procedure for resolving that! The "Concluding the Adventure" section also includes several potential plot hooks to tie this into a longer campaign, which are always appreciated for us module lovers. The remainder of the document consists of appendices providing more detail about running the creature.
What Worked?
- Decently efficient layout-- this adventure clocks in at 16 pages, but it easily contains enough content for a four hour funnel session.
- Contained area-- one problem that I have with some DCC funnels is that there is too much opportunity for wandering around; with all of the action being focused on a ship, you have a lot more control over the events and can adjust the length of the game pretty easily.
- Lots of interactivity! There are so many things to investigate and play with on the ship; combined with the built-in time limit of creature attacks and the pirate's arrival, the game could turn out very differently every time it is run, depending on where the party goes.
- Honorable mention to the Klabautermann, the aquatic kobold of good luck.
What Didn't Work?
- Lots of read-aloud text. I know, it's a convention, but it always sounds so clunky when you read it, because it's not how you speak normally. Just give me some evocative room description bullet points and I'll paraphrase it!
- A fair amount of word count devoted to things that I can't imagine the players ever thinking of doing. There's a full column devoted to the off-chance that a player decides to try using pufferfish venom on a corpse, which will subsequently bring it back to a brief normal life before becoming a larva-infested zombie. Cool, but unlikely to come up!
Final Thoughts
This is perhaps my favorite DCC funnel that I have come across. For one thing, it is the only one that has consistently acted like a funnel is supposed to, and the players are generally just left with a single remaining PC. Part of that is the schedule of creature attacks-- rather than a series of larger fights where the full gaggle of peasants can bring their pitchforks to bear against one or two big foes, these are brief attacks where it grabs a couple of targets and then leaves. It also manages to walk the fine line between freedom to explore and a tightly-focused linear adventure. You will quite often hear people in the OSR-adjacent sphere shriek in fury at the dreaded "railroad" when they are actually talking about a linear adventure-- they are two different things! I am of the opinion that linear adventures are just fine for a funnel; in fact, they are ideal, because the whole point is that your band of peasants is being swept up in events far beyond their understanding, and the end result is that those who survive are spit out the other end into a life of adventuring. That transformative moment in their lives is not the time for a full-on 100% player agency sandbox. For one thing, it'll take forever to get through the adventure. For another, they're not going to feel like the little guy in the movie who suddenly has to pick up his pitchfork and try to save the town while the music swells! This adventure shoots this gap nicely because there is plenty of interactivity (with good and bad results-- look out for the dung eels if you play with the bilge pump for too long), while still keeping the action focused and moving towards the conclusion.
You can get "Creep, Skrag, Creep!" at the Goodman Games web store. Thanks for reading!