Wolves Upon the Coast - Session Reports and Observations, part 1

    I've started playing in NBateman's Wolves Upon the Coast campaign being run from the Rainbow/Purple OSR Discord.  While this post is, ostensibly, a session report in practice it's mostly going to be me talking about observations from the game so far.

Current explored parts of the giant WutC hex map. Hexes marked with a red dot are ones we have actually visited, not just seen.

 

Session 1 + 2

The campaign started, as per the WutC way, with our party of now former thralls having killed our masters and taken over the raiding ship we are on. My character, a man who only gives his name as Thorgo rolled high enough stats to get the meager bonuses offered by them, but only 2 HP. Questionable.

After sailing around a bit the party ran into the isle of Rhus and met with the local aristocracy - the demented king Maritz and his two daughters, Sophia and Louise. The island, it seems, has been under a sustained assault by merfolk from the depths of the ocean who have killed numerous people, sunk every single ship sent out for help, and have been a general nuisance. Stigandr boasted that he'll bring back an army to push away the merfolk and take the princess's name in marriage (nobody is still quite sure which princess that is, including Stigandr himself).

The whole army getting process gets delayed due to a rather prolonged rainstorm, during which the party explore the island, get into a fight with some merfolk, kill some more merfolk, make friends with the locals and explore a seaside cave that has a merfolk idol of some kind with its head missing (a likely reason they are so agitated and attacking the island).

As the weather finally clears the party make final preparations and sail west to Albonn, to seek help. As they were warned numerous times by the princesses, as soon as the ship cleared away from the coastline a gathering of merfolk ambush it. The preparations come in handy - nails sticking out of the gunwale of the ship along with everyone in the crew being armed with javelins or bows manages to whittle away the merfolks' numbers and only a few get on board, with Thorgo declaring a boast that he will defend the entire right side of the ship by himself, which he does, and Friggis (who has 1 HP) declared he will not be touched by a merfolk's weapon for the entire fight...which he did not. 

With their anime protagonist bullshit aside, the party manges to clear the boarding party and speed away from the second wave of attackers, having suffered only 1 PC casuality and a couple of followers. The ship soon makes its way to Albonn where they run into a rather dodgy looking village, apparently run by exiles, outlaws and thieves. Getting some directions and the lay of the land from the locals the party rest on their ship and prepare to sail north the next session.

A short summation of the two sessions so far.

Observations

 So overall I quite enjoyed these two sessions and look forward to the campaign ahead. Below is a non-exhaustive list of things that stood out to me throughout the games so far.

General Campaign Setup

The game is being run on Discord, through a text chat and a voice channel (no video). I find online games rather exhausting and mentally taxing, making it very hard to focus, but with several sessions now between this and the ASE campaign I mentioned in another post, I have found that perhaps the presence of video is what really makes me wiped out after gaming online. With audio only, and having to simply follow a text chat along with it, I am able to shift my focus a lot more easily to the various spreadsheets and map and other such things.

Speaking of, the campaign has a shared Google Sheets document with a roster of the characters, individual character sheets, a quartermaster sheet showing everyone's inventory and then a sheet for the ship and our fellow escaped slaves and newly joined Rhusian warriors. It is very well laid out and makes tracking what is going on a lot easier, especially in sessions with 6+ players. 

The combination of voice + text is also surprisingly useful. As people are chatting or discussing things, declaring actions and so on, what we often end up doing is then making action declarations or comments in text, which  reduces the level of overall noise while still allowing everyone to act simultaneously  (which in turn speeds up the game). A good example is in session 2 during the fight on the ship, as my character became more and more pumped up by adrenaline he would start shouting taunts at the merfolk, which I always just typed in chat rather than add more noise to the already busy voice chat of running a small skirmish-sized fight.

General Engagement 

A combination of having most of the players in the game also being referees of their own games, as well as the shared space used for characters and inventory creates a pretty high level of engagement from all players during the sessions. While a few of the players choose to step back a bit, most everyone else is always doing something, rather than waiting for the referee to give us a prompt. That includes maintaining the shared roster, handling mapping in tldraw (see above), or just taking notes.

Boasts and Gear

A standout with Wolves's built in system (a sort of stripped down OD&D affair) is the way character advancement happens. For those who don't know, in Wolves you don't gain experience, but instead your character can loudly and in public boast about attempting some kind of feat or other (slaying a monster, finding a specific treasure, doing a heroic deed of some kind) and that boast comes with an instant bonus of either +1 Hit Die or +1 (+2 in our house rules) attack bonus. Once the character succeeds at what they boasted they will do, that bonus is permanent. If they fail, the bonus is lost, but they can simply boast about something else. If they actively avoid or are seen to be dragging their feet about achieving what they said they will, they also lose the bonuses and, more importantly, can never boast again, as their reputation has taken a permanent hit.

There is also a mechanic where a rival or party member can challenge the boast, one-upping it which in turn gives another bonus, but if the original person then concedes that challenge, the challenger now must fulfill the challenge themselves. 


This whole setup, while very evocative of the kind of Beowulf-like setting of the campaign, does present some interesting challenges to the more typical OSR party-based advancement and cohesive action. It is a lot more individualistic, as each person has to stand out on their own, and in fact any subsequent boasts must, kind of by necessity, be more and more bombastic. Conversely, the bonuses you get from the boasts are both good and yet...kind of not good enough for the effort required. Case in point - Thorgo, my character, started with 1 HD and 2 HP. During the fight on the ship he declared his boast, getting another +1 HD and rerolling both to now get 11 hit points! Awesome, right? Well...sort of. He did get hit for 2 at one point, which would have killed him before his boast, but whether had 3 or 11 HP did not matter for that fight.

What mattered, however, was his gear. I started Thorgo using chain armor to help compensate for his low hit points, and while the party was mucking about on the island waiting for the rain to stop, he exchanged his starting spear for a greatsword. In Wolves Upon the Coast all weapons have some kind of special ability related to them, as well a a weight class which says if they do 1d6 hits (for medium wepaons) 2d6, drop lowest (for heavy weapons) and 2d6, drop highest (for light ones). And having that extra damage from the greatsword definitely helped out a lot more than the extra hit points from the +1HD.

I own &&&&Treasure, the Wolves treasure and gear book, and have used it in my own campaign before, so I know what kind of insane trinkets and weapons you can find in this campaign, which again makes me think that advancement in this campaign has to be, by necessity, more individual rather than cooperative.

I wonder perhaps if the natural way of doing this wouldn't be a semi-cooperative, but also semi-competitive game, rather than the generally accepted heavy cooperation of your typical OSR dungeoncrawl. It would fit with the literary references for this campaign, that's for sure. This is something to explore and keep an eye on as our campaign progresses. So far some people, me included, have felt that boasts are a bit awkward and rather forced, though that might also be due to our rather limited environment (you could only really boast about stabbing fishmen, since there was not much else happening on that isle).

Playing Fighters is Cool, Actually

If you have looked through my blog, you might have noticed that I quite like Fighters. I tend to talk about them way too much, if nothing else.

Well guess what, in Wolves Upon the Coast you all start as Fighters. There are no "mental' stats, no classes or backgrounds (aside from all of you being former slaves and whatever languages and character background you come up with yourself).  Magic exists, and is powerful, but requires ritual, specific ingredients (some quite rare to find) and is often one-off spells unless you want to go to some drastic measures.


And it fucking SLAPS! Even just two sessions in our characters feel so different from each other, despite mechanically being the same. People gravitate towards different weapons, armor, tactics and approaches and that naturally creates different ways of handling mechanically similar actions like combat. Fighters are great, and Wolves Upon the Coast is a fucking proof that you can make them work.