Sailors on the Starless Sea is without doubt one of the most popular DCC RPG adventure modules, probably the most popular one. It's the classic place to start a Dungeon Crawl Classics campaign.

It's also a funnel, that 0-level concoction that has since become an industry standard. But where did the funnel come from? And why is Sailors so popular?

The Origin of The Funnel

An important conversation involved the low power level and scant resources in the no-edition D&D games that Doug ran. “The funnest games that I play or run are ones where the players have real low resources,” says Doug. “They almost have nothing, and they're just scrounging to get whatever. I ran a game circa 1999, in which the characters had literally nothing. Somebody got half a pair of scissors and was elated that that they had a weapon.”

While the initial wave of products stands as an impressive and unified whole now, that obscures the uncertainty of the moment. Most of these adventures were written and playtested in 2011 and the fate of the DCC RPG was anything but assured. Third-party products for Fourth Edition D&D were a dead end and Pathfinder had been successfully assimilating former Third Edition players since 2009. The atmosphere of pessimism informed Harley’s thinking when he was writing DCC #67: Sailors on the Starless Sea.

“I wanted to put everything I loved about D&D adventures into this one, because who knows if there's gonna be another? I hadn't had any work for two years,” recalls Harley. “So, I put all my love, my passion and all the cool stuff in one adventure. It could have easily been written by any of a dozen other writers who are better technical designers than I am.”

But Starless Sea wasn’t written by those other folks, it was written by Harley Stroh, and it’s totally out of control. If you’re looking for the Platonic ideal of a funnel, you probably already have it in the core rulebook in Joe’s “The Portal Under the Stars.” “Portal” is brief—only eight encounter areas, most of which are traps or puzzles—there’s only a little bit of magic and it has a tidy ending. In comparison, Starless Sea pushes every envelope available. It has nearly 20 encounter areas and almost half involve combat. “There's no limit on the special effects budget,” says Harley, “so you have a ziggurat going up in flames and undead chaos lords arising from inside the molten stone and the ceiling collapsing, and there's a leviathan. Let's crank this up!” He’s skipped over the beast men and the well that drops directly into the howling abyss of Chaos. Like DCC RPG, the stakes of Starless Sea are constantly escalating. In trying to leave nothing on the table—because the table might not have been there in the morning—Harley wound up writing the perfect distillation of DCC RPG in action.

That Starless Sea is the best-selling adventure in the whole DCC line—the equivalent of D&D’s B2: The Keep on the Borderlands—is utterly unsurprising, at least to everyone not named Harley Stroh. “I'm happy to lay any success at the feet of ‘Harley just loves gaming,’” he says. “I'm not a thoughtful designer. I love these stories, and I love providing these opportunities for my players. That's the most fun.”

Starless Sea Variant Covers

The adventure is now on its 10th or 11th printing, something like that. Long ago in 2015 when it hit its 4th printing - which seemed miraculous at the time - we decided to celebrate by publishing variant covers. Each variant is an homage to Doug's original cover, as executed by a different artist. These are long out of print, so we present them here for the enjoyment of those who haven't previously seen them.

Tell us in the comments...what are your favorite memories of Sailors? And which variant cover is your favorite?