Playing Sleeping Place of the Feathered Swine

In a few weeks I will be running "The Sleeping Place of the Feathered Swine" in Dungeon Crawl Classics at Game Con South Bend, so I thought it would be a good idea to run the adventure a few times so that I am intimately familiar with this terrible cave. The first of two play-throughs happened last Saturday with three players.

Here are the highlights and observations. Spoilers, obviously.

• The players selected the randomly generated Warrior, Dwarf and Thief characters. This may have increased their odds of survival since the Warrior and Dwarfs came out as killing machines, even though they were completely random. 
• I think I will skip the encounter with Felix Longworm as he doesn't provide much incentive to go into the cave unless the PCs are really hard up for cash. In a one-shot context, the promise of gold that can't be used isn't very motivating. I will attempt an info dump for my next play-though and see if that works better.
• The players immediately picked up the resemblance of one cave feature to a part of the female anatomy. This landmark became known as "the vagina pit." I might note that this was my first time DMing a game for an exclusively male group.
• The players found the mushrooms and armor before getting a good look at the feathered swine. They spent an awful long time looking at the armor, thinking it had to be booby trapped. It was not until one of them ate the bio-luminescent mushrooms and gained perfect darkvision that they were convinced it was safe to put on.
• The Warrior did not seem too pleased when the armor attached itself to his body. The Dwarf immediately asked "How will he poop?" which I actually had an answer for.
• The players essentially ran the adventure backwards and made short work of the Worm Tumors, luckily avoiding any infection. However, they were terrified of the things and would not go near the group of four of them.
• Aspeth gave them her quest item and then hobbled off to become a suicide bomber. The players assumed that she killed all of the remaining Worm Tumors this way. They were wrong.
• The Thief performed the surgery on the feathered swine as he was the smartest character in the group. He did manage to get infected and had his left arm cut off at the elbow and cauterized immediately. He then removed one more cyst before calling it a day.
• The players decided that going up the vagina pit would be the best way out of the cave. The Dwarf and Thief have no problem scaling the walls. The Warrior was not so lucky and repeatedly fell onto the cave floor. Although his new evil armor absorbed most of the damage from the fall, he made enough noise to attract the three remaining Worm Tumors, charred and angry from their encounter with Aspeth. Although the monsters were quickly killed by the three PCs, the Warrior was still infected as the worms crawled through the plates of his sabatons. 
• Tired of failing to climb the cave wall, the Warrior decided to walk the long way through the cave. By the time he got back to the rest of the party, the infection had taken hold and he was now a super-powered Worm Tumor in evil armor. Luckily for everyone, he could not pass the pit and remained in the cave.
• The Thief and Dwarf left him to die and got paid. The Dwarf had an awkward sexual encounter with Felix, who he had developed a crush on.

Playing Sailors on the Starless Sea

After a month-long break between sessions, we were finally able to finish up playing through Harley Stroh's Sailors on the Starless Sea. It was my first character funnel and was much more fun and easier to run than I expected. I had nine players for my final session of the adventure with a total of 36 PCs at once. Not nearly as daunting as it sounds when you approach each group of PCs as a chunk of characters and let the player decide what happens to each character.

Here are some of the highlights:

• First PC death occurred within minutes of the adventure starting as the immediate reaction to bodies covered in thorned vines is to poke them with a stick.
• Players were obsessed with getting as many things out of the freezing tomb as possible. Apparently once of them tore the skull off the corpse while five other PCs died around them in one round.
• There was an awful lot of planning on how to light a candle and then get it to touch the beastman that had been soaked in oil. The occurred in a room with three loose torches on the wall.
• Several PCs were added when they were freed from the beastmen's clutches. They apparently had two dogs, a goose, a duck and a cow with them.
• The goose found the band of fire. He immediately became the strongest creature in the game and his owner faded into the background.
• The chaos leviathan attacked, pulling a handful of PCs over the side before someone tossed in the skull they stole from the dead Chaos Lord's tomb. I suppose that would be a pretty good sacrifice and immediately calmed the leviathan.  
• The players left just under half of their characters on the shore of the starless sea, which is probably the dumbest thing they did the entire time. Nearly every player had one character wearing a cloak or furs and all but one left those characters on the shore.
• As a result, only one character was able to move undetected among the two dozen beastmen at the temple. The others didn't understand why one was being ignored and just sauntered up to the temple. This began a slaughter that will not be soon forgotten.
• The one disguised PC calmly walked up the ziggurat and immediately pushed the shaman into the pit. He then tossed skulls at whatever it was coming out of the pit. The resurrected Chaos Lord went down like a bitch.
• The strongest fighter in the beastman melee was a cow with a pitchfork tied to it. Pitchforks are where it's at.
• That cow will be the my wife's dwarf character's mount in the upcoming 5e campaign. Betsy the War Cow.