The Greylands House Campaign - Session 1

 

Summary 

I am starting a house campaign for my partners, playing in my OSE Greylands campaign. In this first session the party members mostly met each other and found some more about the current state of the land.  

Party Members

• Verasha - Level 2 Druid 
• Pipam - Level 2 Illusionist
• von Plarf - Level 1 Elf
• Zoltan - Level 2 Dwarf

Followers

Jaro (Verasha's war boar); Jan "the Hard Up" (Torchbearer); Ludwig (Porter); Adam (Man-at-Arms); Walter of Potsdam (Man-at-Arms) and 3 War Hounds 

Session Recap

After a strange dream/side-adventure/mental breakdown in the Slumbering Ursine Dunes, Verasha returned home to the Greylands. She had apparently been away for close to a year and a half, as it was now autumn and also a year later. 

The druid, immediately upon reaching Greytown, went to the town kennels and bought a trio of trained war hounds. She then met up with the rest of the party:

Pipam, a golden child of a lesser aristocratic family who had been coddled and sheltered from the world his entire life and so had now gone out on adventure to experience (and touch) everything that he had missed.

Von Plarf (no first name given), a daughter of a lesser noble family of heretics from the Empire. She is out in the Greylands to seek her fortunes, just like every estranged daughter, 8th son and other people with no prospect of ever inheriting anything of value from their family. 

She is companied by her nanny valet butler servant and bodyguard Zoltan the dwarf. He's here mostly to try and keep miss von Plarf from getting herself killed.

After hiring some help from the Guild of Mercenaries, Hirelings and Porters and inquiring about what's new around the place, the party realized that the forest south of town had now managed to grow almost twice in size, essentially merging with another forest further north. As Verasha was someone born and raised in the forest, she decided to head back home to her village and investigate. 

As the group travelled they stopped at an outpost near the edge of the forest, a tower renovated and manned by soldiers under the service of a woman named Frina. They then went into the forest proper, stopping by to pay respects to the wooden idol of Medved. The camping site in the forest clearing appeared strangely empty, and they had learned that the Lord of the Bears had not been seen around recently. 

This, except without the honor guard and pile of treasure.

From there as they were heading towards the lake the group had several encounters, one with a pack of talking wolves who were weirdly cordial and polite and the two groups crossed paths without any incident, the other encounter was with a troll who was approaching the group, but hadn't seen them yet. They blinded it using a Light spell and then ran off, leaving the troll sitting on the ground and shouting profanities at whoever had done this to him. 

With those incidents out of the way the party made it to the hidden pagan village on the shore of the lake, Verasha's home. The village was, luckily, still there and everyone seemed happy to see Verasha again. 

Between asking in town and speaking go the hippies in the hidden village the party learned that the strange space elves seen previously in the area had built several pylons and, once those were activated, a chunk of the forest as well as a strange and ominous tower that had appeared a while back simply...vanished with a pop. Then in the span of less than a month out of the area that the strange elves had rapidly started to grow a new forest in there, sprawling out into the surrounding area, covering a huge amount of territory before finally stopping. Leshy, the guardian spirit of the forest had also been crankier and weirder than his usual self. 

GM Observations

So, this was not much of a session, but it was important to help the players get situated and acquainted with the setting and the adventure locations. Both encounters in the forest ended up with really high reaction rolls, plus the quick thinking on the part of the players also meant that any potential fight with the Troll was immediately avoided too. 

Beyond that - I decided to run a house game for my family and since I am planning on exploring more of the Greylands and what that setting can be, beyond a rip-off of the (much better) Hill Cantons, I figured this would be a good thing to run while I prepare for my next open table campaign. 

While most of the events of the previous campaign are still canon in what happened in the area, I do plan on simply reusing or resetting if you will the dungeons, so I can run them fresh for the new players. 

I also plan on using this campaign to test out various house rule changes and tweaks I have been wanting to make now that I also have another campaign under my belt. 

Slumbering Ursine Dunes - A Play Report, part 3

  

Summary 

I decided to run the excellent Slumbering Ursine Dunes by Chris Kutalik as a casual pick up game while I am busy with family stuff. This was the third and final session of the game.

Party Members

• Landalf the Fragile - Level 4 Elf (Previously part of my Greylands campaign) 
• Verasha - Level 2 Druid (Also previously part of my Greylands campaign)
• "Crunchy" - Level 3 Thief

Followers

Spyro (Landalf's longstanding porter and valet); Brown Thomas (Man-at-Arms); Hedviga the Harridan (Woman-at-Arms); Tishomir (A level 1 War Bear), Marko (A magically charmed pirate), Jaro (A war-boar) and Milkshake (A giant lizard)

Session Recap

After 2 weeks of downtime the party decided it was finally time to try and have a go at killing Ondrej the Wereshark. They headed back into the Dunes, down the familiar path to the Glittering Tower, and after arriving there they had realized they weren't actually sure how to get to the dungeons underneath the tower so they decided to take the radical approach of....asking someone. 

Pan Orso, the majordomo of Medved's portion of the tower showed them how to get to the dungeon and wished them luck. Along the way they also went through the Kitchen and ran into the Cave Dwarf cooks, offering them some of the magical rye from the field to add to the stew they were working on.

Heading down the stairs to the dungeon the party encountered the Eld "sigil" that was blocking Medved from accessing the lower levels. After fucking around with it for a bit, getting zapped for their troubles, they decided to just move on. Once in the dungeon proper the party started exploring all the doors in order. 

First door they ran into a chest guarded by a not-too-subtle mimic pretending to be a mosaic on the wall. It flopped on top of Landalf, but managed to be quickly ripped apart by the elf, along with some help from Verasha's animals. In the next room they found some deeply ancient and crumbly scrolls, one of which, much to the dismay of Landalf, had a spell encoded in it, but was too fragile to realistically take back in one piece. 

In another room they discovered a pile of molding rags with rat skeletons hidden among the detritus, and connected to it - a series of urns containing soul juice. After experimenting with the urns and their contents and finding them mostly harmless, the party discovered a curious contraption. A reed boat facing a black wall of seemingly empty nothingness, save for the glimmer of stars in the distant Void. A way to traverse the universe (or universes, perhaps?)! 

Deciding to at least have a go of killing Ondrej, instead of just getting on the boat and going on a different (and hopefully less suicidal) adventure, the party explored some of the other doors and hallways, eventually finding a room full of suspiciously new and well-maintained ship ropes. Digging around they discovered a trap door in the ceiling and a way into the hidden cove where Ondrej and his pirates keep their flagship. 

After some futzing about with trying to get Jaro the pig to actually get up through the trap door (involving much squealing, protests and fighting on the war-boar's part) the party decided to just have a go at it, and went out into the cove. 

Ondrej greeted them as soon as they were out on the platform. He couldn't see them, but they had not been exactly quiet in their entrance. After some chitchat and a very obvious trap of him offering for them to get on the ship so he can talk with them, the party had secretly decided to just try and deal with the problem by having Hedviga and and Brown Thomas try and set fire to the ship itself. While their efforts were slow, they were starting to get some scorching and smoking from the ship's brow, which was all the provocation the psychotic Ondrej needed.

The rest of the session was one rather protracted fight. Ondrei chucked his smoldering samovar, apparently filled with some strange magical materials in it, as it produced a Sleep effect which luckily only managed to get Marko the pirate knocked out. He then transformed into his wereshark form and, along with his creepy pair of halfling "remoras" hanging off his tits, lept off the ship's prow and onto Brown Thomas and Hedviga, ripping them apart with his claws and teeth. 

Verasha slid into the water and around to the ship, using the small brazier of coals used to maintain the samovar's fire to set the pillows and other flammable objects on the deck ablaze, before jumping back into the water in an attempt to flee the entire thing (her attempt thwarted, unfortunately, by the sea's tides.) 

While that was happening Landalf the elf, now levitating safely out of wereshark range, cast another Charm Person spell onto one of the remoras, as Ondrej gleefully ripped apart Marko and Tishomir, and the party taking down the other remora and piling onto Ondrej. 

Realizing just how tough the pirate was, Verasha went back to the docks and with a very lucky roll managed to shove a sack over Ondrej's head, giving the rest of the party a round of easier attacks and making Ondrej flail uselessly in trying to hit them. He eventually fell to the party's attacks, with the charmed remora then being tied and its throat slit. 

Retrieving Odnrej's head the party went back to Medved, received their reward and session came to an end, with Verasha and Landalf heading into the reed boat and hopefully back to their own home dimension. 

Observations

So, for this session I decided to be a bit soft-touched with consequences. By that I mean that this whole foray into the Slumbering Ursine Dunes was mostly just an excuse to play some more games without needing me to do too much prep. As such I allowed some of my players to play characters from another campaign (as you can clearly tell from the character list above). 

However, it also presented me with a question - does this game "count"? Is what is happening here actually a part of the story of these characters, or just them playing those for the sake of convenience and not having to roll new ones? 

Well, for this session I decided that no matter what happens, the events of this session, essentially, don't happen for the sake of my Greylands campaign from which the two characters are from. If they died in this session, well they wouldn't. Conversely - any treasure or experience they would gain? Also doesn't happen. 

It helped endcap the general casual nature of the game that I wanted to have, so I felt okay with it and, of course, presented it as an option for the players and it was ultimately their decision if they wanted it to be this way or not. They did have to debate about it for a bit, but decided that - sure, let's go with that. 

With that in mind, the session was quite curious in that it still produced a very very tangible feel of anxiety and stress, especially in Verasha's player. Ondrej ripping hirelings apart in a single round definitely underscored the point of just how creepy, dangerous and kind of off-putting he was and the tension was enough that we had to take a break just so the player could collect their thoughts. 

There's often talk about OSR dungeon crawling being, in essence, a horror game ,but I've not seen too many people discuss how that actually plays out in practice. And how having a player that is especially empathic and sensitive to the tension of a situation and the fictional reality of going into a dark, horrible and extremely dangerous place can actually affect one's mental state. Verasha jumped off that boat and tried to swim away because, at the time, that was the only remotely sensible and self-preservational action her player could make. Because how suicidal does one need to be to decide to go back into the fight with the wereshark that rips people apart with his bare hands? 

I've talked before with my BSSS campaign about authentic emotional responses arising from OSR gameplay due to the real stakes in place during those games. In this case it was curious that even a game with, in practice, no stakes could still produce such a strong emotional response. 

That player is okay, by the way, and if anything right now sees the whole experience as a broadly positive and growing moment, but hopefully nobody thinks Nordic Larps or horror TTRPGs are the only ones that can evoke strong emotions in a player. 

General Thoughts on the Game

So, let's cap this off with my general thoughts on Slumbering Ursine Dunes. tl;dr - it's fucking great, I loved running it and my players had a blast playing in it. It's got charm, quirkiness (without becoming grating, a thin line to walk) and...well it is one of the pieces of writing that inspired me to give this whole OSR thing a try, because hey if it can produce something like this then there must be something to it!

I again highly recommend seeking it out and reading it, along with Chris's other writing both in published form and on his blog. It does not disappoint, and if anything it can be very enlightening to a GM on just how much adventure you can pack in a small and discrete location like the Dunes. 

OD&D Character Sheet (Based in my BSSS one)

 I realized I hadn't actually shared this on here. I made a custom character sheet for my OD&D campaign! It was an interesting design challenge and also this way I knew it had what I needed on it, instead of trying to retrofit an existing one, 

And here it is! 

You can download a full resolution copy >>HERE<<.

 I decided to also make a generic version without my game's logo and border and such in case someone wants to use it for their OD&D game (someone was asking about it to begin with, so here we are.) 

You can download a full resolution copy >>HERE<<.

So hey, if anyone ends up using this for their game, please write to tell me about it! 
 

P.S.: Oh one final note. These are sized for A4 paper, because I live in a sane country. But I've printed it on US Letter sized paper and honestly it fits fine enough! 

Slumbering Ursine Dunes - A Play Report, part 2

 

Summary 

I decided to run the excellent Slumbering Ursine Dunes by Chris Kutalik as a casual pick up game while I am busy with family stuff. We got another session in, with a third and possibly last session happening tomorrow!

Party Members

• Landalf the Fragile - Level 4 Elf (Previously part of my Greylands campaign) 
• Verasha - Level 2 Druid (Also previously part of my Greylands campaign)
• "Crunchy" - Level 3 Thief
• Danica - Level 2 Knight

Followers

Spyro (Landalf's longstanding porter and valet); "Mad" Mox (torchbearer and aspiring Chaos Monk); Gigurg the Man-Beast (Porter); Hedviga the Harridan (Woman-at-Arms); Tishomir (A level 1 War Bear), Jaro (A war-boar) and Milkshake (A giant lizard)

Session Recap

 With 3 weeks of downtime, but also no money or food, the party ended up having to go back to Kugelberg, where they at least had free lodging and food (if you do not count Jaromir's endless stories a price to be paid). However, before they did so Verasha the Druid had gone back out to the magical wheat rye field to look for the giant lizards. 

Luckily she did find them again, and with some food and an Animal Friendship spell one of them was put under her control and became a follower who she dubbed Milkshake. As such she also spent the 3 weeks of her downtime teaching Milkshake some basic commands, and also a "shake it!" command where it would very energetically waggle its long lizard tail everywhere. 

With a not very successful trip looking for info in nearby Marlinko also not going anywhere the party ventured back into the Dunes once more. With a clear mission to find and kill Medved's second cousin Ondrej the party naturally....went in the absolute opposite direction, deciding to instead explore the western part of the Dunes. 

Crunchy the Thief's falsified shell tokens apparently worked well enough as the party were not hassled by the centaur toll-takers, then proceeded to follow a waft of rotting meat smell coming from the south. They soon found a mysterious crack in the sandstone, apparently full of magical darkness and smelling like death. While they were debating going down inside anyway they ran into some beachcombers (not-so-secretly werebears in human form) who exchanged pleasantries and directions for various places in the Dunes.

Verasha used her Sense Danger spell to see just how bad the crack in the ground might be, and her brain nearly barfed in on itself with the overwhelming sensation of death and potential bodily harm. 

Taking the hint the party continued onwards, eventually stumbling into a camp of very colorfully dressed pirates (Ondrej's Reavers). Landalf the Elf managed to cast Charm Person on one of them, and so they settled in for some "wild pork" stew and chatted with the pirate's bossman. However the pirates had had enough and decided to ambush the party and take them as prisoners to their leader. 

They, then, proceeded to utterly fail all of their attacks and bumbling uselessly through the advantageous position they had over the party, eventually simply running away once most of them were killed. The party then went exploring again, running into a rocky outcropping overseeing the sea where they cut the ropes on the canoe the pirates had been using, and eventually stumbling into another rather more curious sight.

On another rocky shelf overseeing the sea, they met Sir Eld - a nobleman from the extraplanar evil elves, having a nice and pleasant lounge on a chair made out of a shellacked human peasant. The party exchanged pleasantries with Sir Eld (who was not in any rush to start a fight with several armed people, bears and assorted large angry animals). The conversation went some weird places, with Danica the knight asking for advice on life, to which Sir Eld simply stated "Kill yourself." and then proceeded to utterly demoralize the poor knight with a rather somber and predicable pathway of their future. 

"Well..shit. Now I kind of am thinking about maybe just killing myself." mumbled Danica after all of it.

Showing some of his more sadistic side he used some of the plegrane teeth the party had gifted him to torture one of his attendants and then politely offering to do the same with Crunchy the thief, who bafflingly accepted, and then proceeded to have a pair of sharp teeth jabbed into the palm of his hand.

Not wanting to overstay their welcome (and Sir Eld's patience) the party decided it had gotten late enough in the day and headed back to Kugelberg. Luckily for them, the pirates they slaughtered had some treasure hidden in their tent and so the party now had at least enough money to afford food.

Observations

Not much deep to observe, except that this was a rather fun exploring and talking session, with a relatively big fight in the middle of it.

The whole thing took on quite a farcical nature (an expected thing for the Hill Cantons from what I gather) between the utter failure of the pirates to do anything in a fight, Milkshake the lizard distracting people by waggling its butt so hard it tail-whipped people, and then more or less the entire conversation with Sir Eld, during which the players who play Landalf and Verasha were more or less just on the edge of panicking, remembering what the Eld were like in my own Greylands campaign (brutal and efficient is what), while everyone else was just having a genuine laugh at Sir Eld's detailed and brutal explanation as to why the noble life is not going to end great for Danica, so the knight might as well just end it now while it's early. 

Overall a great session and exactly the kind of low-stakes bullshitting that I wanted out of these filler games! We'll see how the next one goes, with only 3 players left. Probably not going to be doing any shark-fighting I suspect.