Earlier this year, our group successfully concluded our campaign The Tales of the Green Dragon Brotherhood, and now that I’ve had some time to think about it, I wanted to write up a quick retrospective, capturing what went well, what didn’t, and what this campaign meant for me personally going forward in the hobby.

If you’d like to read about the campaign in gory detail, it lives on LegendKeeper here.

Honestly, the primary thing I wanted to accomplish with this campaign was, well, actually running a campaign. As I’ve written before, I have played a lot of games in a lot of systems, but had never been able to run or play in a campaign all the way from beginning to end. So the fact that the same group (mostly) started and ended together after several years and dozens of sessions in the same game world felt like a massive success. The fact that it ended with the exact die roll a specific character needed at exactly the right time was just icing on the cake.

Another sort of meta-level success is that by starting the campaign, I also started our game group (affectionately known as The Sunday Night Dirtbags, and there will be more to come on that). I initially sent out an email to a few guys I’d played with over the years, then we pulled in a couple of work friends, then a couple internet friends, and lo and behold, we now have a regular crew that vibes pretty well. We like the same kind of games, we take the same approach, and we’re all moderately able to keep to a schedule while still giving each other the grace that being adults with jobs and lives requires.

The system I chose – Low Fantasy Gaming – worked perfectly for the kind of campaign this ended up being: very sandboxy, very emergent. The mechanics really clicked for us – martial exploits, luck and rerolls came in clutch over and over, but so did the looming specter of PC death. We lost two PCs in the first two sessions, which set just the right tone. We used the Midlands campaign map right out of the box, and I only added a couple of towns out of necessity. I started the whole thing off with one of the written adventures (Tomb of Graxus), and the set pieces from that ended up influencing the entire campaign- I couldn’t have written a better, more narratively satisfying conclusion.

And I mean that – I couldn’t have written it. Every preconceived thing I did in advance for this campaign ended up being pretty useless. I started out very nervous about wanting to do this thing “right,” so I read a bunch of books and blog posts about how to GM properly, going so far as to write up the stuff recommended by Sly Flourish’s Lazy DM system – which I then promptly ignored and/or couldn’t shoehorn into the actual game at the actual table at all. Almost everything of note happened due to a random roll on an encounter table, an unexpected player choice , or me taking something they did and running with it.

There was an entire little mini-arc on a strange, alien planet complete with ray guns, bandersnatch, tribes of frog men in a hollowed out asteroid, and psychedelic mushrooms – none of which was remotely contemplated when I decided to run this game. Which is to say, this campaign really helped me learn how I actually GM. Turns out, I’m not a “write a 5 act story” kind of guy. Which is good, because I gravitate pretty heavily to the OSR so emergent play is the order of the day. All that to say – I now have some confidence as a GM I didn’t have when the campaign started. I now know what “my way” is, and I feel good about it.

One thing I’d like to improve on with the next campaign (and “improve” is not really the right word) is to really enforce things like resource management, wandering monsters, morale, henchmen/retainers, encumbrance – those old school techniques that I believe can really serve to force meaningful player choices. I tried to introduce a couple into this campaign, but it was too little, too late. We were already having very loosey goosey fun so it didn’t feel totally correct to suddenly start enforcing stuff like encumbrance rules at the end.

Of course, doing that will require some solid campaign management tools, and that’s another area I feel like there’s room to explore. I ran the campaign mostly in Foundry, using LegendKeeper for campaign notes and the occasional homebrewed monster or weapon. More and more I find myself resisting the urge to use most VTT tools. I don’t want automated everything. I don’t want animated maps. I don’t want my tabletop game to become a slow, crummy video game. Earlier this year, we spent a few sessions playing Keep on the Borderlands using the original Basic D&D rules, and everyone just used fillable PDFs and a shared dice roller on Quest Portal, and I think that’s the direction I’m going. Although that site has a ton of functionality – mostly I just want a nice splash screen, some ambient music, and dice, with the ability to pull up a grid if we need it. But I’m going hard towards theatre of the mind for the next campaign, make no mistake.

All in all, I could not be happier with how things turned out. A great group helped make a great game. Onward!

#sessionreport #osr #dnd #ttrpg #lowfantasygaming

Note: this is a repost from an older blogging platform. Links may be hinky.

The Owlbear Boys Ride Again!

This was one hell of a night of fantasy adventure gaming: amazing feats were performed, characters died for reasons poetic, combat was cleverly avoided (until it wasn’t), and the tech stack stayed the hell out of my way.

We started the session back at the Keep, of course. A week has passed so the PCs had to do some financials for room and board, which left them pretty cash strapped and also really clarified the old school play loop: of course they’re going back to the Caves of Chaos – they’re fuckin’ broke. They chose to not hire any help but two players did run two characters each, including a new Fighter. Great news, right? Another sword never hurt!

They hoofed it back to the Caves under a grey cloudy sky and while deciding whether or not to re-engage with the Kobolds, Earl the Thief caught a glimpse of a Goblin lookout taking notice of them, which the party interpreted as evidence of an impending attack1. Rather than leap from the frying pan into the fire, they went with Door Number Three and fled towards an as-yet unexplored cave (the surely-not-that-bad Shunned Cavern).

Staying true to the “as written” nature of this…I guess it’s a campaign now?…as the players searched the bones and gristle at the cave entrance, I rolled for wandering monsters and wouldn’t you know it? A grey ooze falls from the ceiling. Now, these players have had some bad experiences with grey oozes, though obviously, the PCs have not. They role-played the situation beautifully, though, with the dewey-eyed Cleric urging peaceful co-existence and the Dwarfs just wailing on the thing. Alas, one of the Dwarfs got hit by a gooey blow, which dissolved her armor and revealed the fact that she goes commando, which condition persisted the remainder of the night. The new Fighter turned tail and ran out of the cave, claiming to be looking for “rocks to throw or something.”

Eventually, the ooze was dispatched and the party moved quite cautiously deeper into the caverns. They’ve adapted to old school play, so it was slow going and ten-foot-pole prodding. They came upon a nest of giant rats, though I finally remembered to perform a reaction roll and the rats weren’t too fussed. They moved quietly enough to begin to hear the sounds of something big snoring in the distance. Rizz McSwag, the other thief, decided to investigate, and dear reader, hand to God, this motherfucker had the hottest dice you’ve ever seen.

First level thief needs to move silently? Dude rolled a 9 on d100. Check. He comes upon a slumbering fuckin’ owlbear and decides to backstab it. Double damage die nearly maxes out, taking 2/3 of the thing’s HP. Rizz wins initiative, hits again, and another near max damage roll and just like that, he’s killed an owlbear by himself and trust me, that didn’t do anything for his humility.

The party resumed their exploration (after dubbing themselves The Owlbear Boys), and upon discovering the shallow pool and yet more oozes, they quite cleverly attempted to lure an ooze away with a trail of “owlbear chunks,” because boy did they want the bejeweled chalice at the bottom of the pond. While the lure was successful, they didn’t count on yet a third ooze, and rather than risk a fate worse than a topless Dwarf, they decided to ditch this cave and try another.

Climbing up the hill a bit, they discover a cave entrance festooned with signs promising “Safety, security and repose for all humanoids who enter – WELCOME! (Come in and report to the first guard on the left for a hot meal and bed assignment.)”

Again, props to the player whose Cleric bought it hook, line and sinker3. They went in, found the guards, who offered the good Reverend Cherrycoke a skewer of meat and then ran him through with the same. The battle was joined and well, the party’s luck ran out. When the dust settled, the Cleric, the new Fighter (who didn’t fight shit), and the gruff-but-sweet married Dwarf/Elf couple lay dead and the two ranged-weapon-preferring thieves and the free-swinging Dwarf were hightailing it back to the Keep.

Looks like The Owlbear Boys are hiring…

Miscellaneous Notes

• A combination of Quest Portal as VTT and LegendKeeper as map/manager worked perfectly.

• Really enjoying this foray into B/X and the roots of the hobby. This group has three other campaigns going, including my own Low Fantasy Gaming campaign which is about six sessions away from completion, so we’re moving on in the rotation. I am very strongly thinking about shifting this game to another night and running it as an open table for now.

• Descending AC really isn’t that hard to work with, you cowards.

#dnd #osr #ttrpg #sessionreport