This post has taken way longer than I intended. A combination of a busy schedule and having too many disparate thoughts has resulted in it being dragged through most of the month. This post will also be kind of a long one, as I go through my scatted thoughts and observations on running my OD&D campaign.
Setting
I generally have (or had) a fascination with ancient history and fantasy inspired by it. I have been a fan of Glorantha for years and worked on the setting for quite a few years as well. When I decided to use Ancient Messopotamia for broad inspiration for my OD&D campaign it seemed like a bit of a no-brainer to me. It's stuff I like, it's stuff I am broadly familiar with, and as I made a point to say in the setting primer, it is conversely not something I plan on being too strict about. Perhaps I should have been though.
While I am hardly unhappy with the setting, and I think it definitely had its own distinct feeling when compared to the Greylands, I do feel like a lot of the broader "vibe" of it being set in an ancient world didn't quite come through as strongly as I was expecting.
The realization as to why that is came only after the fact and with the campaign over. Part of it is that for me the big draw to the ancient world is aesthetic, and specifically - visual aesthetics. I like the look of the buildings, the outfits, the material elements. And those are very hard to get across in an oral medium like RPGs unless I spend way way too much time describing how random things look, or just carrying way too many visual aids. The other part of it has to do with what I said above - I did not push the setting deep enough into being an actual ancient feeling world. While there was some of it - no anachronistic backpacks, no crates and barrels, etc, I am unsure of how well the feeling came through.
Something I did quite enjoy in the setting was putting Law and Chaos in more a prominent and central role. Drawing from the pulp inspirations that lead to their inclusion in OD&D in the first place I made both of them be quite tangible and relevant forces in the lives of the PCs - after all the game kind of peaked at a battle of Law vs Chaos in the players' homebase city! That said, I also think I got this out of my system and I am quite alright with not bothering with alignment for the foreseeable future. Or maybe just not in such a direct way if I do.
For example I quite enjoyed how Chaos was presented in the Greylands A mix of its writeup in Jason Sholtis's Operation Unfathomable and the Weird from the Hill Cantons (which makes sense, as the Greylands are very much my own riff on the Hill Cantons). A sort of primal force of existence which is not really evil or even always dangerous, but definitely tends to make things worse for most normal living things. This also tracks with the conception of Chaos in, say, Ancient Greece which I am familiar with as well.
System and Referee Stuff
The whole point of the BSSS campaign (and not just going back to running the Greylands once I came back home from the US) was for me to play around with OD&D as a system and explore what that offers when compared to B/X. As such, I would argue that this experiment in system exploration was thoroughly successful!
There were two main things I wanted to test out, system-wise in OD&D, in the campaign. First was having a very very limited choice of classes. While the Greylands has a lot of class options and even more are unlocked through play, BSSS only had two - Fighters and Sorcerers. The second thing was having all HD and damage dice be just d6.
Limited Class Choice
In order to emphasize the Sword and Sorcery vibe (the success of which was I think mixed at best) I decided to simply have just two classes - Fighters and Sorcerers! Explicitly Sorcerers too, not Magic-Users, as I decided to use the brilliant Wonder & Wickedness for the magic system in my game, rather than the usual spell list found in OD&D. You can find the details on what each of the classes can do in my Player's Document, but the short and long of it is that there was broadly an even split between Fighters and Sorcerers, with Fighter being slightly more overrepresented among the PCs. (Although the regular group mostly consisted of Sorcerers despite this)
The super limited choice did make character generation much easier, but honestly I don't know if I really prefer it over the "just have tons of classes, who cares?" approach of the Greylands. As such I think I probably will go back to having a bunch of classes, rather than just two like I did here.
D6 All the Way Down
This was the bigger thing I wanted to try out, and I'd say I was very satisfied with the results. In OD&D hit dice and damage dice are all the same - d6. Some classes have a bonus to their HD, some don't, but it doesn't matter. There is just something nice about the symmetry in having both dice be just d6 by default. It makes weapons choice a lot less of a "just pick the thing which has the highest dice number on it", it also makes running larger combat much simpler as I can simply roll a number of d6s equal to the enemies and simply use those to track their HP, rarely if ever having to record anything.
Additionally, a sort of unintended (or maybe it is intended? I don't know) consequence of all of this was the fact that I can also run much, much larger scale fights in OD&D with relative ease and speed when compared even to B/X. Skirmish rules, either ones I came up with myself or better ones that Marcia B came up with allow you to seamlessly shift between handling entire gangs of 5 or 10 NPCs or Mercenaries to one-on-one combat without having to change any system or even roll differently than you would do in either case.
Plus, there is just that appeal there to the wargamer in me of just needing a handful of d6s and some d20s to run the game. It took some time for players to really adjust to it and there were some unsure and questioning glances at me as I was explaining it at the beginning of the campaign, but i think by the end people were just used to it and it worked quite smoothly.
This is one that I probably will not implement back into my B/X games (unless I do. Who the fuck knows?) but if I am running anything OD&D adjacent, then I am sticking to d6s for all the things, thank you.
Experience Points
Well...that's all well and good, except I was running an open sandbox game with loads of different dungeons and locations, and most of the fights actually happened in the overland travel portions. I don't have a dungeon level to modify this by. So I decided, as I was writing my player rules, to just simplify it. 1 GP = 1 XP and 1 HD = 100 XP. There. Simple and clean. The result of this, combined with relatively easy access to mercenaries and running into large groups of enemies very early on in the campaign meant that the experience gained during the sessions was actually very high.
In multiple sessions the party gained 6k to 7k of experience, almost all of it from fighting enemies. Turns out, when you have a decent sized warband and also Sorcerers that can use Maleficence to wipe out large groups of enemies with ease, it's actually very very easy to defeat much larger groups of opponents. The party had run into 60+ enemies on regular occasions and managed to come out victorious (though usually through very good luck).
This is not, inherently, a problem. But it is definitely a factor I had to keep in mind. The game, after 14 sessions (13 + a wargame) had, by it's end, multiple level 4 PCs. This rate of leveling actually almost outpaced the one in my Greylands game, and in that one character started with 2500 exp upon creation and gained xp from treasure at a x10 rate!
The main factor in this I think comes not actually from the high exp per individual HD (though that doesn't help) but rather the actual circumstances within the fiction. The party were never really rich, but had enough cash on hand to hire more or less as many mercenaries as they needed. Combined with Sorcerers being able to deal massive damage, as I said above, and the lack of enemy spellcasters in those encounters very much lead to strangely one-sided fights.
I think in any future OD&D game I would slash the XP from enemies, making it so that the party gains only 10 XP per HD. I have enjoyed having a slightly accelerated rate of leveling in my two campaigns, as they both have had natural end points for their existence, and thus I wanted players to get at least some idea on what progression is (or often, isn't) in these games. However I have a growing desire to run a much longer and therefore slower campaign, and so experience gain will have to be addressed for that to happen.
Again, this is not really a problem. Having high level PCs doesn't make the game any less tense or interesting! But it does mean that stuff like dungeons and other locations now no longer present a meaningful challenge once most of the party is level 3 and up. That itself is also related to me extensively using other people's modules and dungeons, rather than designing ones myself. It's telling that the one dungeon that the party lost a high level character were the sunken ruins...which is also the one that I have designed myself. Speaking of losing characters...
Lethality
With the game using OD&D as an engine, starting at level 1 and all that, I expected the game to be rather lethal, especially combat. I did give a small concession to the players in letting all newly made PCs to start at Max HP, but that only matters for one session, as after that everyone simply rerolls all their Hit Dice at the beginning of the next session anyway.
Turns out - I was way off! While the first session did have 3 characters die, it was due to a combination of a trap and poor handling of said trap by the players, not combat. In fact from the 7 dead characters (out of 18 total) only 3 actually died in combat. While almost 50% lethality is hardly safe, especially compared to my Greylands campaign which used a Death & Dismemberment table, I actually expected it to be way way higher than this still.
The reason for it is, I think, quite simple - it's a numbers game. The PCs usually had a good amount of mercenaries on hand, and so they would be able to overwhelm a lot of enemies. In all 3 cases of a character being killed in combat, it happened in tight, enclosed spaces where the PCs did not have the ability to outnumber the enemy.
Similarly to the fast experience again above, this is not really a problem, more just an observation. I don't particularly care about a game where PCs keep dying every session, since that just sounds like it will get kind of repetitive and dull a bit too quick.
Phased Combat and Miniatures
For this campaign I wanted to lean into the more wargaming feel that I think OD&D is quite suited for. As such I used miniatures to help visualize more complex fights, marching orders and such. I didn't use a grid or tiles or any of that - just miniatures and a tape measure.
I also used a miniatures wargaming-style phased combat for my fights, which you can find in the player's document. (Note: The document had some revisions as play went on, but I haven't edited them in. The relevant here is that movement and the first missile combat phases were swapped and it worked much better this way.)
Phased combat, I think, worked quite well. It stops all this "action economy" nonsense that everyone goes nuts about in games like 5E, Pathfinder and what have you, and simply lets you just...act depending on when and what you want to do. I plan on using some form of wargaming-styled phased combat rounds in my next campaign too, though whether it'll be the same or different, I don't yet know!
Personal Highlights
I feel it's important to also talk about things I really personally enjoyed as a referee of the game. There were loads of fun moment, interesting twists and such - all hallmarks of a good campaign. However, I want to highlight 3 specific things.Thing 1 - Session 11 and the party trying to take down the garrison in one of the Undying City's gatehouses. This was a very single-focused session. There was no dungeon to explore, no overland travel to plan for and deal with. Just a singular mission with a clear goal - incapacitate the garrison and open the doors to the gatehouse.
The somewhat frantic planning that the party did, their cobbled together plan that actually managed to work and then the fight (which claimed Rajini the Sorceress, one of the few deaths in combat). I personally don't really like long, protracted combat in my RPG sessions, as I might have mentioned.
However, I feel that if everyone involved knows that the focus of the given session is going to be a complex fight with lots of maneuvering then it can, and I think did, produce an enjoyable gameplay session. As I talk about in the Observations section in the session report, it lead to me pondering experience gain and mission or objective based experience gain in the context of an OSR sandbox game, plus it lead to my next favorite thing -
Thing 2 - Battle of the Undying City. This was an almost feverish inspiration, a Dwarf Fortress-like Fey Mood taking me over for a few days. Those are mentally and physically exhausting, but so so rewarding. I love campaigns that tackle different things - wargames, dungeon crawling, exploration of unknown areas, mini-games etc. And I am so so happy with the tabletop wargame I designed, created all the elements for and then also assembled into an actual physical game that I now have and can (and will) play again as a stand-alone wargame.
That is not something I ever thought I'd be doing when I started this campaign, but it it was an absolute pleasure to make, to play with several people before the actual session for which it was intended (and see its potential as a wargame in its own right) and then to also have the "official" game of it as part of the campaign also go quite well, with interesting twists and turns in the tide of battle.
I don't know if I'll be making another tabletop wargame any time soon. But I do hope that whatever game I run next will give me the inspiration to make something like this.
Thing 3 - The last highlight for me is actually a character death. A curious thing to highlight, I know, considering I was the referee and, to some degree, responsible for it happening. Specifically, I am talking about the death of Esho the Necromancer and the emotional impact it had on me, on Esho's player and honestly on the other players in the game.
Esho was kind of a linchpin of the group. He was created in Session 1 and kept going since then, a core member of the adventuring company and a constant presence in whatever the group was doing at the time. His death was also quite sudden, brutal and out of nowhere, even for myself.
A sorceress, a member of a rival adventuring party who's territory the PCs had unknowingly stumbled into, managed to run into Esho as he was distracted, his back turned to her (she was invisible anyway, though his sorcerous sight would have allowed him to see her..if he hadn't failed his roll) and separated from the rest of the party. She backstabbed him with a magical dagger, her goal not really to kill him, as much as just hurt him, mark him with the dagger for tracking later and then run away. Instead though the damage on the attack was...very high. Like absurdly good roll on my part, and so Esho instead was dropped to 0 HP and failed his Death Save (a mechanic that I put in the game and then failed to save basically every person who ever rolled it) and so, just like that, had been killed.
The party's panicked response turned to sadness, as everyone just felt kind of...bummed really that Esho was now gone. As a final act of respect to their friend and companion his body was given to the Daughter of the Sea, which the party had just liberated from her fountain prison a few moments before he was killed, and she carried him away in her tender embrace.
From there, the player played different characters, and did actually say that the death and it's emotional impact were quite exhilarating, but you could actually feel Esho's absence in the campaign. The constant presence that he was now felt like a hole every time the party ran into something undead and there wasn't Esho around to gleefully run towards it in a desire to figure it out and bend it to his will.
Another player mentioned, weeks later, that he almost felt responsible for Esho's death, because he hadn't stayed with him out in the hallway but instead went with the party into a separate room.
This kind of emotional response, for me, is what makes OSR games really stand out. The kind of honest feelings of loss and regret that come from a character you didn't just come up with yesterday, but watched build up slowly over time, of weeks and weeks of play. And as such it is the absolute highlight of the campaign for me, even more than any of the others.
Lastly, STATS!
I know probably nobody but me gives a single fuck about this stuff, but I love keeping track of random stats for my campaigns. Posting the stats for my last campaign is one of the reasons this blog even exists in the first place! So fuck it, we're doing this! Have some stats!Total players in the campaign: 11
Of which played in at least two sessions: 9
Total characters in the campaign: 18
Most players in a single session: 6
Dead characters: 7
Dead retainers: 11
Longest surviving character: Maru the Witch
Highest level reached: Level 4
Class breakdown: 10 Fighters, 8 Sorcerers
Highest amount of experience gained in a single session: 7760
In-game time elapsed: 10 months
Money spent on carousing: 1300 silver
Single most valuable treasure looted: Statue of the Sea Queen, 2000 silver
Single most powerful item found: The Nine of Swords
Magic swords found: 2
Magical corruptions acquired: 5
Toughest enemy defeated (outside the wargame): Conan, a 7th level Fighter.
Dungeons explored: 7
Of which "cleared": 2
Hexes of Interest visited: 7
Total hexes traveled: 24
Number of demi-gods met: 2
Number of portals to other worlds found: 1
Final Thoughts
Oh and if you read all of this blather and/or any of my session reports as the game was ongoing? Thank you!
