Between August and November of 2023 I ran another campaign or iteration of The Greylands, which was my first ever OSR focused campaign that I ran back in early 2022. In this case rather than running it as an open table with a bunch of players, it was a house game for only two players, each of them running two characters initially (and eventually a fifth PC joined the party).
Due to how slow I have been in getting to this post, some of my thoughts are no longer as fresh as they were in December, but there are still some things I would like to look back on with this campaign.
Running a game for just two players
It has been kind of a curious progression between these last three campaigns. In
the first Greylands game I had a very healthy pool of 17 players, most of which played in at least two sessions, and most sessions were 5-6 players (one time even going to 7).
With
BSSS the overall open table player pool was smaller (11 total) and the game quite quickly formed around a core of 4 players with occasionally having a fifth person join in for a session or two.
And now with this second Greylands game it was just two players. Obviously this also wasn’t an open table, so it was never going to be more than that anyway, but it’s still a trend I hope reverses drastically in my next game!
But, how did it feel to run for just two players? Kind of odd. After running much larger games this one felt much smaller and a bit more personal I suppose. A thing I definitely noticed is that without the larger group of players there is both less game time spent on waffling about and trying to decide what might be an option to maybe proceed to take an action. Conversely there were no “outside” voices and perspectives to offer solutions or courses of action. If the two players didn’t think of something or didn’t consider an element, then there wasn’t anyone but me as the referee to potentially point it out to them.
Also both my players were very much not people used to the OSR play style, nor entirely comfortable (or that interested, let’s be honest) with it. As such they did not exactly have many sessions of dungeon delving and problem solving to draw upon, and there was no third party to also offer potentially different points of view.
I also decided to give each player two characters (plus any hirelings and animals they had) to control, which while it helped beef up the party numbers requiring little adjustment on my end, probably did not work AS well as it could have. I think if I was to run something like this again I would instead have players still just run one PC at a time (though if they want a troupe of potential PCs to use, that’s always cool of course) but beef them up a bit to make it so they won’t just get killed at the first fight they get into.
On my end, I can’t say I am particularly a fan of just having two players, as I enjoy some of the chaos of having 4+ people playing in the game, but I won’t say it’s awful and I hate it either.
Running a regular campaign versus an open table
So here’s the simple fact - I’ve not really run many campaigns, despite playing RPGs fairly consistently for 20 years. I’ve played in some, I’ve tried running, but before the first Greylands I think my longest campaign was maybe 4 sessions long? That’s not a campaign. It just isn’t.
The reason I went with an open table approach for the past two campaigns is because I did not (and technically still don’t) have a stable and reliable group of 4-5 people who could play in a weekly game, and so an open table allowed me to draw from a big enough group of people that I could consistently have enough players for a game to fire. My usual approach was that if at least 3 people sign up for a session, the session is happening.
Open table games tend to necessitate some concessions and adjustments in how play flows during a given session. I made it a point that all sessions always begin and end in a safe location (usually the closest town), with downtime happening between sessions. This is pretty standard stuff - it allows for PCs to join and leave the group from session to session without needing any explanation or justifications as to how they’re now here, when they weren’t here last time.
However, with a stable closed game, and even more so one where both the referee and players all live in the same place (as was the case for this one) there is no need to have that kind of setup. So we regularly had the game pause just in the dungeon, or even in the middle of a fight (coming back to finish it later in the day, or maybe the next day) and it felt….weird.
Not bad,mind you, but after 20+ sessions of open table playhaving characters just frozen in place simply felt weird and unusual. I don’t know if I dislike it though.
Downtime still happened, but now it was not this regimented thing of “downtime is always between two sessions!” instead simply happening when the players wanted to deal with it, and often spending more than the 1 week minimum, occasionally spending close to a month in pursuing various projects unrelated to the dungeon.
Running the same thing twice and limited campaign scope
Since this campaign was both a continuation and also a soft reset of my previous Greylands campaign, I decided to use Dyson’s Delve (an absolutely excellent dungeon for this kind of game, in my opinion) again as the tentpole for the game, which with some occasional forays into nearby regions, ended up being the main focus of the game.
And since I had already run this same setup before, it gave me a rather interesting opportunity to observe how different playgroups handle the same dungeon. The first Greylands campaign’s players ended up fighting the goblins on level 1, using flaming oil and murdering prisoners after they had already surrendered, and so the goblins became immediately hostile to the party, setting up traps, then barricades and employing firebombs of their own, eventually hiring an ogre to go stand outside the entrance to the dungeon. The party never made it through level 2 of the dungeon, let alone any deeper, while declaring that the dungeon was “too dangerous” and going to other places instead. (Too dangerous, in this case, being that over multiple delves 1 PC was killed and 1 was injured and then recovered.)
Contrast this with the party in this iteration, who approached the goblins without hostility and over the span of half the sessions in the game eventually not only befriended them, but actually became allies with the goblins, effectively taking control over the 4 topmost levels of the dungeon, and giving them access to a lot of goblins, if needed! While, yes, this approach means that some magic items and experience was left at the table, it also meant that they didn’t really need those, as they had access to the goblins that already had the items and were willing to help if push came to shove.
The way the two different groups approached the same simple situation has been fascinating to me, and is something that has really made me want to run the same adventure or dungeon for multiple groups some more, to observe what novel ways of approaching it can happen.
Playing with people you are more emotionally attached to
This one is a bit of a personal note, but an important insight from the campaign and thus worth mentioning. Seeing as I was playing with my partners, I actually have found that process at times more stressful than running for my usual group of acquaintances, friends and strangers that would be at my open table games.
With people you care deeply about any dissatisfaction with the game or even strong emotional response to the game tends to then affect me quite more as well, making me rather hesitant to really remain as a neutral referee (which of course I don’t have to be, but I find is good practice in OSR games). It’s not like I pulled back when danger presented itself to the PCs, but rather it made me more hesitant to run the scenarios when danger was present in the first place. A curious thing, and one that I am not sure what to do about, or if there is much to do about in the first place.
Final thoughts
I was overall pleased with this campaign, so that’s good. I think some interesting world building happened as a result of, allowing me to flesh out aspects of the campaign setting that I didn’t have during the first iteration of it, and also helping create a lasting, player-driven change in the setting by reestablishing the manor house under which the dungeon was located. Conversely, I am not sure if the campaign will be returning to this area any time soon, but if it does then at least I will know that the manor is now rebuilt and is there.
I felt like the focus on a singular dungeon worked quite well, even if that was not my starting intention (it mostly happened due to overwhelm not allowing for prepping more expansive events and opportunities during the campaign) and helped further bolster my decision to aim for a megadungeon focused game for my next one.
There are no stats for this campaign, since technically speaking this is still the same Greylands game as the previous one, so I have not compiled any for this next installment, though through my notes I can probably recreate some of those later down the line. I also know of maybe only one or two other people who even care about campaign stats anyway, so it’s fine, hah.
