The Greylands Campaign - Part 1

 This year I ran my first OSR campaign, which also has the (dubious) honor of being the longest campaign I've ran, as well as the one with the most sessions in it. As I will not be able to run the game for several months, it is currently on a (hopefully non-permanent) pause. 

I thought this would be a good opportunity to write down some thoughts, observations and stats for this campaign, for the benefit of mostly myself. 

This is going to be a series of posts, and in this first one I would like to present a general overview of campaign, my goals with it and some details on how it actually was organized and run. 

System

The game was ran using Old School Essentials with a bunch of house rules and on the fly decisions, as one would expect in any real tabletop experience. The majority of those house rules were collected in a Google Docs document, but for the sake of both presentation and ease of use at the table, I also made them into printed booklets which the players could reference during gameplay:

Player booklets for the campaign.

I made 6 of those in total and they are one of my favorite things about the campaign, providing a wonderful physical artifact for the game and also serving to impress people at the table.

Campaign Structure and Format

This entire campaign was started because I wanted to have a weekly, in-person, OSR game to play in. As none of those were available, I had to make it happen myself. The game was ran as an open table, with no single player ever being required for the game to commence. 

The campaign was ran in person at my LGS, with sessions usually averaging around 4 hours, though we've had some short ones and some that go for 6+ hours too (with breaks included of course).

The initial recruitment for the game was done through either just telling people I knew would be interested, as well as making a recruitment post on said LGS's Facebook page. I had also spent a good few weeks telling people I was going to launch the campaign, drumming up interest, which I think helped in the long run.

The image accompanying the first player recruitment post.

From there on most week to week games were organized through a discord server I set up for the campaign, and I'd say it worked quite well overall. The game would consistently have 5-6 players, with only a few occasions where there were not enough people available to actually get a game to fire.

The actual sessions themselves followed a pretty standard pattern. Wait for everyone to show up, tell them any rumors or news that their characters have heard over the previous week of downtime in town, finish up any last-minute gear purchases (for characters who chose to spend their downtime buying and selling stuff), retainers hiring and so on. Then, ask them what their plan was for this expedition, usually them following up on events from the previous week's session, or exploring places on their map they've not run into yet. Then the bulk of the game happens, and once we reach a natural stopping point, or it gets too late, the party goes back to town and we do downtime activities for the next in-game week.

Setting

The setting for the campaign was quite sparse, serving more as matte painting in front of which the action takes place, rather than having exploration of the setting and its themes, characters and so on being a primary aspect of gameplay. As such I decided to just make the campaign's setting be a very broad strokes rip-off of the excellent Hill Cantons by Chris Kutalik with the serial numbers filed off. The entire setting bible is this very sparse Google Docs file that I sent to the players after they asked me for some setting clarifications.

The tl;dr version of it is this - In one of the border territories of a NOT!16th Century NOT!Holy Roman Empire a cataclysms of some magical origin causes the entire region to lose some of it's vitality and color (hence the Greylands) and makes dungeons and treasures and weirdness start popping out of nowhere. The place turns into a frontier for adventurers, outlaws, heretics and other such assorted Player Character types. There's only one major settlement, a town whose inhabitants and the rest of the empire have even forgotten the name of. The adventurers who hang out there call it Greytown, in a stunning display of creativity. And...that's it.

Goals

The main goals I had for this campaign were to have a weekly game happening, to get over my problems and anxieties associated with GMing, to introduce people into the OSR style of play (whatever the hell that even is or looks like these days), to have an actual campaign that runs for longer than 3 sessions and to just have some fun.

How well that that work out? Well, pretty good I think! This was one of the more enjoyable GMing experiences that I've had, and despite an initial hump of prep work most week to week game prep was quite minimal and tended to follow just obvious progression from what happened in the previous session.

I also think I did an okay job in showcasing and introducing the OSR play culture to people of varying familiarity with it, plus helping me get some more experience under my belt. 

The game also was quite consistent, only missing a few weeks usually due to me being unavailable, which resulted in a total of 11 sessions over the span of roughly 3 months. Compared to some other games I've run over the years, this has been outright unprecedented! 


I think this is enough for now. In the next post I think I'll write up some interesting stats that I've tracked for the campaign.