The Jeweler That Dealt in Stardust

On Monday night of this week I ran a Dungeon Crawl Classics one-shot via Google Hangouts and Tabletop Forge. I ran The Jeweler That Dealt in Stardust written by Harley Stroh from the Free RPG module this year. The adventure is a city based adventure and is for third level characters. I had the players pick from the six pregens posted on the Goodman Games forums.

Note: There might be slight spoilers below.

The adventure takes place in the city of Punjar, but could easily be dropped into any major city in your campaign setting of choice. The adventure centers around breaking into a house in the city of a known fence that worked out of a jeweler’s shop. He has not been seen for the past month and the underlife of the city are starting to think there might be untold riches within – should the fence not still be within.

Of the pregens, we ended up with a cutpurse wizard, scribe cleric, mercenary warrior, outlaw warrior, and the slave thief. There was no love for the Halfling vagrant. The group decided on their character names and quickly assumed the identities of their chosen characters.

Since this was a one-shot we cut right to the chase with the party assembling outside the jeweler’s shop in question. The night was dark and the rain was pouring down. With a brief look from outside the shop (a handout is included in the mod which helped in planning), the group decided to send their thief over the garden wall. He did not get far, the rain soaked wall proving to be quite the obstacle as he failed a check to get over the wall. With a little more planning and some rope and grappling hook the party was able to clamber over the wall into the garden beyond.

The group was forced to deal with a threat in the garden, which felt to me just the right level of threat to the five party group. A somewhat tough, but not over the top encounter. Once the party found a way into the jeweler’s shop a screaming trap that went undetected surely alerted any that were within the shop of their presence.

The group explored the first floor before working their way up. The thief proved his worth, though I won’t spoil too much of the module here. Let us just say if you happen to be playing this it is good to have a thief along!

The group continued their exploration of the house which went fairly smoothly. The module had just enough details and description to make it easy on the judge without overwhelming the judge with superfluous information.

The group reached what was the pinnacle encounter for the module and again, the encounter felt like it hit just the right spot. Players were able to play with their might deeds to try to accomplish their goal. It played out pretty well, though the group lost Randolpho, the mighty cutpurse wizard to this encounter.

It took about three hours to run this module over Google+ Hangouts. I rushed it along a bit towards the very end after the pinnacle encounter, but that was simply because it was getting late and folks had to work the next day.

This was a great adventure to run as a one-shot or drop into a longer running campaign. I had a lot of fun running it and I had positive feedback from all of the players.

Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG is really hitting a sweet spot with me right now. The old-school feel with what feels like new and fresh rules has been great. The adventures I have read so far have been easier to pickup and run than a lot of the Pathfinder modules or PFS scenarios I have run in the past. With The Jeweler That Dealt in Stardust I was able to spend a fairly short amount of time reading it over, getting a feel for it and running it successfully for a group.

I am looking forward to running and playing some more Dungeon Crawl Classics!