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.

Between the Serpents of Smoke & Steel - Campaign Retrospective and Lessons

 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 

So, a quick recap on how experience is gained in OD&D. There are two ways. One is equal to the amount of treasure you retrieve in gold pieces (the standard XP for GP thing in the OSR), the other is by earning 100 experience points per HD of enemies defeated. Those values are then modified by a formula that takes into account the ratio between your level and the level of the dungeon, making it so you can't just "farm" easier dungeon levels for exp, you have to head deeper. 

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

In conclusion, I enjoyed putting together and running this OD&D campaign. The theme left me a bit cold, much to my surprise, and the system was deeply enjoyable. For my next campaign I will probably return to B/X as my system of choice, though I expect a number of ideas spawned from this game to make their way into the next one too. 

Oh and if you read all of this blather and/or any of my session reports as the game was ongoing? Thank you! 

Slumbering Ursine Dunes - A Play Report

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. Here's how the first of what (I am hoping to be) maybe 3-4 sessions went!

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
• Bautzen Wends - Level 2 Magic-User
• 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) and Jaro (A war-boar) 

Session Recap

The group had convened at Kugelberg, the fortified farmstead with pretentions to being a hamlet near the Dunes. After hanging out and chatting with Jaromir, the party ventured forth, through the burned forest and up the staircases that lead over the sand walls of the Slumbering Ursine Dunes and into the dunes themselves.

When the group ran into the centaur toll collector at the foot of the steps they balked at the asking price of 5 GP per person, with Crunchy the Thief deciding to load his crossbow and aim it towards the centaur (specifically, the shell token it was holding). The centaur blew the conch shell he was carrying and got into battle, stabbing and nearly stomping to death the thief, before Danica the Knight begged for a parley and a stop to the fight. The toll collector agreed, scolding the party. As the other centaurs arrived, the toll collector labeled the party as "shit starters", doubled the price for the toll to 10 gp (20 for the thief) and told  them to fuck off. 

The party then continued exploring south, looking for a magical field of wheat that Danica had heard about, however they instead managed to find a magical field of rye (much to the confusion of everyone involved). They harvested some of it, and in the process a trio of giant lizards made their way towards the party, curious as to what was going on. Verasha the Druid befriended the lizards, giving them food, scratches and just generally enjoying their company. However a shadow in the sky quickly sent the lizards scampering back into the wheat rye, along with the various hirelings the party had, as a pelgrane was circling around. It asked the party to please not run away as it was planning on eating them for an early lunch, and lunged at Bautzen, managing to take a good bite out of him, and also rip a hole in his hat. 

Verasha used some of her rope to lasso the pelgrane, successfully throwing a loop over its weird beak and with the help of Gigurg's inhuman strength pull it down to the ground (much to the creature's protests) where Jaro the warboar and the other characters killed it. Happy with their kill the party took trophies from the felled beast - its teeth, eye, claws and head were all severed. Unfortunately, as Verasha looked around for her new lizard friends, they were nowhere to be found! 

Perplexed the party kept heading south through the Dunes - Finding a black bear that was lazily meandering through the forest of ironwood and heading south, and eventually running into the old hermit Oldrich. He invited them for some tea and healed up Crunchy and Bautzen while having a lengthy debate with Verasha about the superiority of the Sun Lord over whatever pagan nonsense he perceived her religion to be. 

Oldrich also helped give them some directions - he pointed out the bearling shrine to Medved the Master (much to Tishomir's delight, as he wanted to go pay his respects there) and also directed them to the Glittering Tower of the Master itself. Thanking him, the party went to the bearling shrine, running into the same black bear from before. Tishomir went into the shrine, but the honor guard of soldier bears were in a bad mood it seemed, as they told the non-bear members of the party to all go sit down on some of the stones of the amphitheater and just wait. 

The party tried to get some information out of them as well as some banter, but the guards were growing increasingly more grumpy and belligerent, so as Tishomir returned from the shrine the party were told, in so many words, to fuck off and they did (noting that that seems to keep happening to them in the Dunes).

When they finally reached the Glittering Tower as well as the actual beach, washed by the sweet Persimmon Sea, Crunchy the Thief (who had been told earlier that the shell tokens they all had were dated to several days to several weeks before)  decided to spend time to to gather some more shells, in a plan to make forgeries and avoid having to deal with the stupid centaurs and their tolls in the future.

The party then went into the Tower of the Master, being polite to knock on doors and met Medved himself in his usual state - distracted and completely naked. He chit-chatted with them for a bit (Landalf and Verasha telling him that they had met him before in another world, but he didn't seem to register that...or much of anything the party was really saying). When someone asked if there was anything they could be of service to him, he did immedietly take the opportunity to ask them to murder his cousing Ondrej.

The adventurers, being adventurers, agreed gladly to the job, as well as securing themselves a safe sleeping space in the tower. 

With this the session ended. 

Observations

I am running SUD using Old-School Essentials (makes sense, it was written for B/X after all) and allowed players from my OSE campaign to just use their previous characters, with others making new ones. The character generation was the same as in my Greylands game, which is why characters all started at 2nd or 3rd level. 

SUD is a delight, with so many fun NPCs and interactions to have, and the players seemed to have an enjoyable time bantering with the various denizens of the Dunes, while also still trying to stir shit up as is appropriate for adventurers. The session was kind of short, but honestly that felt okay. This is very much a time-filler game, and as such it works absolutely perfectly to just let you have a space to explore, fuck around with, and do stuff. 

I don't really have much in the way of gameplay observations, except that this reminded me why I like the Hill Cantons as a setting so much, and made me seriously consider revisiting my own knock-off version of it (The Greylands) from my previous campaign, and expanding it...also hopefully making it a bit more of my own in the process. 

BSSS - Session 14

Summary

The campaign goes on pause and the Hedgehogs of Mercy settle in after the big battle. 

• Shimsusa the Archer - 3rd Level Fighter
• Enlil - 1st Level Elementalist Sorceress
• Alorus - 1st Level Vivimancer Sorcerer
• Maru the Witch - 4th Level Diabolist Sorcerer
• Athra - 4th Level Fighter

Session Recap

After the battle produced a relatively clear victor the party got to have some Downtime in order to handle everything that happened. The first thing they did was to go inspect the Pale Portal housed in the previously unvisited section of the city, beyond the Temple District. 

Said district was itself being in the process of being utterly demolished. The Great Temple dedicated to the Pale Stillness of Justice, the Law-aligned patron of the city, had shattered by itself upon the death of the Voice of Stillness during the battle, and the subsequent magical energies released from the disrupted ritual. However, the powers of the Decomposition didn't feel like leaving things half-done, and so employed their forces to systematically level and desecrate all the temples there, permanently severing the city's connection to it's patron.

The Hedgehogs of Mercy were offered a selection of various magical items the chaos priests had found as they were doing their work, allowed to pick one as gratitude for their assistance in the battle. After some deliberation the party picked a masked iron helmet in the shape of a wolf's head. Once they walked past the new gutted gatehouse, they found themselves in the part of town unseen by most. 

The party of the city where the Pale Portal is located.

The entire section of the city was just a field, with no houses or buildings, and from wall to wall covered in the bleached bones of countless dead, along with some more recent corpses. In the middle of it all stood the Pale Portal itself, a 4ish meter tall structure of stone and bones, in the middle of which was a silvery glittering substance which seemed to block the view of anything behind it.

The Pale Portal itself.

After some experimenting and going back and forth through it, Alorus the Vivimancer decided to just go right in. First he stepped through into a dark room, and once he went back and got a lamp, stepping through a second time resulted in him falling through the portal and out into a clear sky. He was, for all intents and purposes, gone. 

Meanwhile the rest of the city was in lower c chaos too. Bel of the Lotus, the vampire noble and friend of the party, had gathered the remaining nobles of the Undying City and went on a killing spree of his own - finishing off as many of the old priests of the Pale Stillness that they could find, along with their retinues and, of course, a bunch of just random people standing by because why not? In the end he declared himself the new ruler of the Undying City, his claim backed by surviving noble houses ( who were eager to actually get back to having any real power) the Golden Fraternity (who were quite happy to have an actual noble from the actual old Empire in power) and the priests of the Decomposition (who were willing to allow him to do that since he seemed uninterested in reestablishing the city's connection with the forces of Law). 

The characters were invited to the talks, and Bel offered to essentially have the entire company of the Hedgehogs join him as his personal bodyguards and advisors. Everyone agreed, with Athra the fighter even being arranged a marriage into one of the noble houses, as an opportunity to get him into the Noble caste and from there allow him to achieve what he wanted in the long term - control over the armies of the city. 

Shimsusa the Archer, while thankful for the offer, decided to instead travel back south to the Bastion of the Raging Bull with intentions of joining the Bull Guards and Utu. When she arrived, awaiting for her at the inn the party had stayed at was an ominous threat, clearly from the invisible assassin that had slain Esho a few months ago. 

Observations

Well, this is it for now. I was planning on keeping the campaign going for another 3-4 sessions, before I have to leave for a few months and thus will be unable to run it. However, the next month and a half is shaping up to be rather busy and the situation in the campaign has gotten rather complex, with multiple factions and different elements all requiring more attention than I have available. 

My players seem to be generally okay with ending it here, especially after the high note of the big battle last session. It just makes for a natural break point. I have some plans on running Between the Serpents of Smoke & Steel for other people while I am in the US, and if that happens I will be posting recaps of that as well, however the in-person game is now on hold. Will I come back to it? I have no idea. 

I do plan on writing up some overall campaign impressions for this in the coming month or so, similar to the ones I posted about the Greylands, my previous campaign. I also have plenty of broader observations about the game - from system to setting and simple GM organizational stuff, which will hopefully be interesting for at least someone else to read!  

And this is it. The Hedgehogs of Mercy (god what a ridiculous name!) are, for now, in retirement. 

BSSS - Session 13: The Battle for the Undying City

Summary

We play out the big fight between the forces of Chaos and the Undying City's defenders using a tabletop wargame that I created for the scenario. 

Session Recap

Well calling this a session might be a bit wrong, but here we go. Since I could not get a full 6 player count for the wargame, I ended up participating as well. The way I have the game structured, both Chaos and Law each have 3 distinct bands of units, the control of which was split up between the players. 

Initial setup of the scenario.

The wargame itself begins mere moments after the events of Session 11. The party has just broken open the inner Gatehouse of the Eternal Bridge, and the forces of The Decomposition and their allies have swarmed into the city. With the Ritual Procession still not actually gathered in one place (various small processions leaving from different parts of the city to gather in the middle), the Chaos forces had to figure out what their general plan was going to be. 

In the scenario Chaos has 2 victory conditions. A Minor victory if they can remove all 12 Ritual Procession counters from the board by Turn 6 of the game, and a Major one if they can kill the Voice of Stillness, the otherworldly being that controls the Undying City in the name of its master The Pale Stillness of Justice. Law, conversely, only has one Major victory condition - Complete the Ritual. 

With Turn 1, things immediately went in Law's favor. The Blue band, the one that contains all the Procession counters, the Civilians and, most importantly, the Voice of Stillness itself, had the first activation. This allowed them to pull back some of the Citizens that were in the way of the Chaos forces, and bring them safely back into the Temple District. A very important move, as the Voice of Stillness needs to sacrifice a Civilians token every time it attempts to advance the Ritual, successfully or not, and it begins the game with not having enough sacrificial victims on hand to complete it. 

From there, Chaos decided to focus on the Ritual Processions then, which both works into their minor victory condition, and also makes performing the Ritual action a bit more uncertain for the Voice of Stillness. That and breaking into the temple district is quite difficult, with all forces having to be funneled through the streets and a very easy to defend gatehouse. 

The city's defenders sent out a properly huge stack of units out into the Great Market plaza to fight off the forces of Chaos, who in turn responded by summoning a rain of acid over the entire place, reducing every single unit that was in the area. This is done by placing a Miasma counter in the area, one which saps the strength of full units (or even kills reduced ones) and stays there for 2 entire turns, suddenly making the most central space in the board, the one which most roads go through, kind of an awkward place to move through. 

The beginning of Turn 2.

As Turn 2 began, Chaos was actually not looking too hot. While they had managed to take out some parts of the procession, it was not enough to actively hinder the Ritual from being advanced, and their nuclear solution at the Grand Marketplace meant that actually going around and doing anything was difficult as their own units would have been equally affected by the miasma that still lingered.  Law was generally looking in a strong position - well defended inside the Temple District, having enough sacrificial fodder to complete the ritual, and mostly just needing to bide it's time. 

Chaos, conversely, was on the back foot. They lost some of the Slime Priests, which was a problem as they are the primary way the Chaos forces could bring in more reinforcements. 

As Turn 3 started though, things changed. the Miasma had cleared, finally, and the giant stack of slimes, oozes and jellies, lead by the horrific Slime Titan now had the chance to actually move through the central market. 

Additionally, the force of Law decided to take on the offensive and, being lead by the 3 units of High Priests, rushed out and attacked one of the last remaining units if Slime Priests. However, Law's fortunes quickly turned at that moment. With the Temple district now vastly underdefended, the Slime Titan shuffled its lesser cousins through the city, devouring everything in its wake. Soon it broke through the Temple Gatehouse, and while the Voice of Stillness was hurling magical attacks at it, it only weakened the group, rather than demolish it. 

Finally, the oozes swarmed into the Great Temple. After a quick fight everyone was dead, except for the Voice of Stillness which had been reduced in strength and had to retreat away. Things were dire, but not impossible - as long as Law got to act next, they had plenty of spells that could wipe out the big green tide, allowing them to both stabilize and severely reduce the chances of Chaos to act in future turns.

That, however, did not happen. With Chaos still being on the initiative, and the Hedgehogs of Mercy, the band of player characters in the Between the Serpents of Smoke & Steel, having quietly also made their way into the Great Temple, the time of Law had come to an end. The Hedgehogs seeing the chance to end this Ritual for good summoned forth a spell and struck down the Voice of Stillness, shattering the control of Law over the Undying City. The game finished only halfway through Turn 3. 

Final state of the game as of Turn 3. The Voice of Stillness was in the Temple District Area which has a unit of yellow Archers in it.

Observations

This, I think, was a rousing success. While I am generally very pleased with how the wargame itself works, and have had several people now tell me that it just works really well as a stand alone wargame (and even 2 of my players expressed an interest in playing it again in the future, just as its own thing!), it is always nice that it actually worked on the one "official" playthrough that it was designed for.

The game definitely took way longer to play as a 3v3 team game, rather than a simple 1v1 game as I've played it so far in my playtesting sessions with other people. As people were still learning how to play this and also consulting with their team mates, there was a lot of time spent simply discussing potential moves rather than making them. That's fine, though it did mean that a 2 and a half turn game took nearly 4 hours, when 1v1 playtests I've done before took about 2 hours to complete the game (usually going up to Turn 5 or so).

The bit of game design I am most proud of, and one which my players also appreciated in having really captured the spirit of things, was how the Hedgehogs of Mercy were used in the game, being a sort of strike team that Chaos or Law can use to mess with the other side, plus the absolutely perfect storytelling beat of having the Hedgehogs themselves be the ones to land the decisive killing blow on the Voice of Stillness also really helped. 

So, with this I am now happy to have the game just be something I can play with friends now and again if I want to, and I think this helped make my campaign a fun and interesting experience for everyone involved. While the BSSS campaign is going to be winding down soon, due to other obligations on my time, it will always have this high point to look back on! 

How I made a tabletop wargame in about a week

 As a direct result of the actions of the players in my current campaign, the Undying City now has a fairly sizeable strike force (calling them an army might be giving them too much credit) of Chaos-aligned cultists that serve the Chaos Lord known as The Decomposition, along with allies they have managed to rally to their cause. And what is that cause? To disrupt the ritual currently being performed in the Undying City which will transform every living being in the city into undead, and in the process (and of actual concern to these Chaos cultists) will completely cement the city as a stronghold of Law in this plane of existence.

Initially, my plan was to simply have the fighting on the city streets happening either in the background or maybe even having the party directly participating in it. However my players have been reluctant to really pick a direct course of action, their current stance mostly being that they want to wait and see which way the fight will go, and if possible try and stop both forces from actually keeping control of the city. 

So I was left in a bit of a dilemma, where in order to logically progress with the game, the battle for the city had to be resolved at least to some degree. Well, I didn't really want to just come up with a way for it to go, or come up with some broad strokes system to simulate it and then just tell my players how it went. Because, after all, this is a gaming campaign. The point is to game!

That got me thinking - I really enjoy tabletop/boardgame wargames. So couldn't I come up with a quick and dirty one to allow my players to actually play out the battle as the commanders of Chaos and Law, and then let them zoom back in on their characters and have them react to the situation? Well yes. Yes I could. And so I did. 

Concepting and Design

So, first things first I had to figure out what the system for this game was going to be. I personally enjoy card-driven wargames, but that would involve way way too many cards to have to design and make, and I did not feel like that was a productive way of doing it. After some quick and rough brainstorming, I settled on using the main combat system (and from there, unit stats) from Brotherhood and Unity, which I've played a couple of times and quite enjoyed and found to be pretty straightforward and light for a tabletop wargame. 

With that I had to determine how the map of the city will be traversed. Initially I was going to use areas similar to the board game Dual Powers, but after actually trying to draw that as a map it just looked way too cluttered and hard to read. Instead I just went with point to point movement, another staple of tabletop wargames, except the ones that use hexes of course. 

From there, I had figure out how to model the two forces involved. The Chaos incursion were easy, as I had previous already written up their numbers and so just used those as a base for my units. With Law I had to finally sit down and figure out just what forces they actually had in the city. 

An interesting design challenge was how to handle all the damn magic-users running around the place. Between the party, the leaders of the Chaos force and the ruler of the city (an otherworldly being known as the Voice of Stillness, and the individual actually casting the ritual of undeath) there were a lot of magical types around. In the end I took another idea from a game I like - Dragon Pass. In that game magical units have a sort of spirit that they project that can be used to perform attacks on other enemies.

In my game this ended up simulating the combined magical attacks or defenses of a unit of magicians. I also came up with Spell Cards, which players can play and usually require a magical unit to be near the target to actually do the spell. 

This whole thing took about 3 days of on and off writing and rewriting of ideas.

Designing the Game Pieces

Next up came probably the most fun part of the project - designing and drawing all the game elements that I would need for the game. In my case that meant creating unit counters, spell attack counters, a playing board, spell cards, activation cards (which I ended up using to determine play order) and then reference sheets for unit special abilities and general game rules. 

One of 3 counter sheets of units for the game.

The unit art is also a direct inspiration and reference to William Church's wonderful and evocative art on the counters of White Bear and Red Moon/Dragon Pass and Nomad Gods. The units themselves are relatively simple (by wargaming standards) as you can see. They have a name, artwork, and then 3 stats - Attack, Health and Movement (a star over one of those indicates some special rule assocaited with it that is listed on the reference sheet). A white bar indicates that the unit is an Individual (as opposed to a group of similar people or creatures), and on the reverse side the counter has a grey bar across it to show that a unit is of Reduced strength. 

The actual game board, representing the Undying City as a series of locations connected by pathways, all broadly aligned with the map of the city I had already drawn.

The board took a few tries to get it looking right, but I am personally pleased with the final result. The color of the location's artwork indicates which part of town it's in (which doesn't really matter for gameplay purposes, but was just a nice visual element), the bar on the bottom indicates what type of Terrain it counts as, as well as the number of non-Individual units that can be stacked in it at the end of an activation. 

Then I included a turn tracker, a Ritual tracker and a chart for terrain and combat for ease of reference during play, along with supply boxes for both sides. There could have been other elements that are worth including in the map, and I might eventually get those printed and pasted onto it at a later date, but for now it has been quite serviceable. 

Spell cards

The drawing and design of the elements took a couple of days of very intense work, and the kind of work I absolutely adore as an artist. Of being completely in the zone, thinking at any given moment about simply opening photoshop again and doing more art! 

Making the physical components 

And next came the hardest part -actually getting these made. In total I made 160+ unit and special counters, and those took a lot of work to cut, a lot of them ended up kind of crooked (inevitable when cutting by hand), but I am generally pleased with them. The board and tokens are also quite large, in fact almost absurdly so by the standards of most commercial tabletop wargames, however it makes them a lot easier to handle when one considers the game can be played with up to 6 players, and it would be helpful if they could actually see what is going on. 

A slightly blurry photo of the board and counters all set up.

This whole process took 2 and a half, almost 3 days total to actually do, mostly because at one point I had to just force myself to take a break since cutting the counters was giving my left arm a very painful muscle cramp (which took about a week to completely clear off).

Playtesting

The final, and often most important, step of any game design is of course playtesting. I played a couple of games by myself, which helped iron out some of the rougher ideas in the activation system, the actions each band of units takes during their activation, and so on. 

I have so far also done two playtest sessions with a fellow wargamer friend of mine, and while there have been minor tweaks in special abilities here and there, the game more or less works quite well, provides various ways for each side to achieve it's victory conditions and offers several not-so-obvious avenues for strategy. I consider all of that a success of design! 

The true and final test, of course, will be once I actually run the game for the players in my campaign. That will happen this upcoming Sunday, and I absolutely plan on writing up a session report for it, though it will of course be rather different than the usual one. But even after that, I am pleased enough with the game (and have had enough of a positive response from my friend) that I will likely keep playing it as a game in and of itself in the future too. 

Review - Muster, A Primer for War

Time for another review! And since I just finished re-reading Muster, let’s talk about it! This is going to be a bit more rambling as a review than the two modules I did, because, well, it’s a different kind of book!

Muster cover art.

Overview

Muster is a rather interesting read, as it is not really an RPG book or a module. Instead it’s a book of theory and advice on how to place D&D in what the author calls “the wargaming way” - a style of play similar to or adjacent to OSR play, though with some interesting peculiarities. This puts it in a similar category to Philotomy’s Musings, or perhaps smaller works like the Old School Primer by Matt Finch and the Principia Apocrypha.

The book was written by Eero Tuovinen and illustrated by Sipi Myllynen. I am not sure who did the layout and editing, but it is published by Arkenstone Publishing so…someone from there, presumably?

What works for me

I like this book a lot. I mean a lot. It’s 250 pages and I’ve read it twice now, which considering the size of my To Read list is probably unwise, yet here we are.

Let’s try and go over some of the things present in the book, because there’s a lot. The book begins by laying out first off what is meant by “wargaming way”. It is a curious term, as it refers to the old Prussian kriegsspiel which are generally seen as the progenitor of civilian hobby wargames that came in the century or two after it.

On one hand, it is rather odd why this term was chosen, as opposed to simply using the much more popular label of OSR. However I think since this method of play was developed within a relatively small group of Finnish gamers (from what I can gather from the text at least), I think it is also okay to give it a distinct name.

Next up the book presents the basic tenets of the Wargaming Way of play, divided into a Basic Outlines portion and an Advanced Matters portion. The Basic Outlines covered are things one can find in the other theory or instructional texts that I linked above - do not fudge dice rolls; always start at 1st level; the importance of the campaign as a coherent world rather than an individual character or party of characters; goal-based XP (usually 1 exp point for 1 gold. We’ll get to this later); player-driven gameplay and general disregard for formal rules texts in any situation where they do not actively contribute to helping run the game.

One thing that is a common feature of OSR pedagogical texts and has become a common mantra, and yet is missing from this text, is the whole “combat is a fail state” declaration. The book does not seem to agree, with that combat is in fact often the entire point of the specific scenario or situation set up by the GM for the players, and figuring out how to tackle it in a way which can lead to victory may be the entire point.

The book also covers stuff like Dungeon Doctrine and how a group can go about developing it - how to open doors, how to explore corridors, how to react to given situations. The kind of play that groups playing in high-lethality dungeon crawling scenarios tend to quickly learn how to do simply so they don’t just get wiped out every 10 steps.

There is also advice for the GM on how to set up this type of game, denoting two forms of campaign - the basic and extended campaign. The basic campaign consists of simply picking a module, running players through it, then picking another one, and then another one and so on. The extend is what is commonly called “sandbox” play where you have a wide open world through which the players are free to explore and direct the game.

I do wish the book actually went into a bit further detail on how to actually do the work of organizing this however. Of course every Referee’s workflow on preparing a campaign is slightly different, but outlining good common practices to keep in mind like how to organize players, how to keep track of time, location and note taking, how to incorporate modules that do not quite fit with your world’s setting into it - those are all good pieces of advice I think would have fit quite well within this book.

Next up a thing that I like is a small chapter titled D&D and Chauvinism which covers D&D’s ties with adventure fiction of the early 20th century and the implication that has for what kind of stories D&D tends to replicate - tales of colonialism, imperialism and so on. If you’ve read anything by Traverse Fantasy or Zedeck Siew you probably already know all this stuff. The book also does come to the same conclusion that I have come to regarding all of this, which is that attempting to seek some kind of political (or god help you, moral) purity through playing elfgames is probably misguided and it’s a lot simpler to just acknowledge that the characters in these games are, well, amoral (if not immoral) assholes.

The inclusion of this chapter is one I feel was a good call. While it is mostly unrelated to the rest of the text and feels a bit shoved and out of place…that’s also kind of the point, I feel. It acts as a good stopping point for the various flavors of self-deluded reactionary elements in the OSR. And anything that reminds those people that they’re fucking idiots is alright by me!

Other things of note - the text comments on experience points and their importance to the wargaming method on numerous occasions. It instructs using exp as more or less a victory points score in an old arcade game. An indicator of how far you’ve gotten and how well you’re doing in the game. The book is very very clear that experience points should be earned through clearly predefined goals, and not as participation awards or awards given for doing any out-of-game activity.

While I do agree with this sentiment to some degree… I also give experience in my current campaign for numerous activities such as carousing, players doing mapping, acting as a quartermaster or as a caller or writing session reports. However my reasoning behind giving experience of those things is that that experience acts, in its own way, as a teaching tool - it rewards what I consider good practices for players in an OSR play style.

An interesting aspect of this approach to XP is that I did not find anywhere in the book a mention of giving experience points based on enemies defeated or killed. The only concrete example is giving exp for treasure retrieved (the typical 1 gp = 1xp practice found in a lot of OSR games). I am not sure if that is a deliberate omission or simply one that was not mentioned but still used. The whole “goal-oriented exp” thing is also something I’ve been thinking about as well in my own campaign. In the session where my players were attempting to break into and disable the garrison of a gatehouse I had decided early on that they were not going to receive experience points for killing the guards or the loot they foud in the gatehouse, as giving experience for that means that the next logical step would be simply murdering people in the streets for exp too. However, as you see in the Observations part of that session recap, I also in the end decided to grant the party exp based on the fact that they had a specific goal for this session and they managed to achieve it.

So I suppose I do see the value in goal-based experience points, however this is another case where I wish the book actually laid out a much more practical example of “This is how this Referee in our game used experience points” and lay out what kind of goals were used in the game as well as what kind of experience points were given. I suspect not a lot of exp though, considering that the book says that getting a character from level 1 to level 2 takes about 10 to 12 sessions of play!

There are a few “war stories” sprinkled throughout the book of various players from that play group discussing situations that occurred in the campaign(s?) they’ve played in over the last few years, and used as illustrative examples of the wargaming way. They’re neat, and also can easily be skipped which I think is probably the best way to handle these types of stories. They did, however, offer some amazing bits of writing like the party in one game deciding they will bring down a group of body-possessing witches by…framing them for witchcraft. Or the curious cultural touchstone of the module B9 Caldwell and Beyond and its place in Finnish D&D culture.

The last thing I’d like to single out to comment on is what the author terms the Nihilistic Void, which is the strange situation that results in this style of gameplay - the fact that the Referee, despite moving the enemy pieces, should ideally not actually play as an enemy of the players. Which then means that the players simply are struggling against the void of failure itself. The book spends a few pages discussing the implications of losing characters and the emotional impact it has, and I’ll admit that this is something that I’ve struggled with on how to handle as a referee myself.

There is a lot of good in this book, and honestly, for me to cover all of it would be to essentially write a very messy synopsis of every chapter, so let’s move on.

What doesn’t work for me

I have only one main criticism of the book, and that’s to do with layout. While the actual text itself is laid out perfectly well and is easy to read, at some point there was an odd decision made to include these pages of schematics which are, at least in theory, supposed to visualize what the text around them is talking about.

This is not really helping.

However the issue with them is twofold. First off they just kind of don’t do a good job at actually explaining the text in a visual way, and I personally found the more confusing than the actual body of the text, not less. Secondly, they are inserted often right in the middle of a chapter, basically splitting the text from one page to another, which is not unreadable ro anything, but definitely a baffling layout decision regardless. For my money, they could have easily been moved around to split the text between chapters or topics…or just outright dropped.

The layout issues continue with the fact that the Table of Contents is not really in the beginning of the book. Instead there is a manifesto of sorts for the wargaming way, and only then do you get to the table of contents. I personally would have switched them around.

Lastly, the artwork in the book. The book actually has a surprisingly high amount of art, and some of it in full color (so are the pages of visual aids too, as you can see above). Meaning no disrespect to the artist who illustrated the book, most of this art could have simply been cut. While the actual style of the illustrations itself is sketchy and generally fine for this sort of book, their implementation within the layout and text is mostly just “waste of space”. There has not been a single page in the book which I felt was improved by the inclusion of art in it and so that made the art feel peripheral and sort of just solved in, rather than an actual contributing element to the overall quality of the book.

Beyond these minor quibbles though there is not much really bad with the book. For me at least these were, at best, minor irritants rather than something that actively made me unable to read the book.

Conclusion

I would say this book does a very successful job at what it attempts to do - act as a primer and instructional text for how to play in the so-called wargaming way. I have found a lot of useful ideas and approaches in the book that I’ve either implemented in my own games or am considering for future ones. There’s also been several things that I don’t really agree with and so would not use. I’ve not really mentioned those here though, because to me this isn’t a problem with the text itself, simply a difference in opinion on playstyle.

My conclusion to this is simple - this is a good text and I think most people who play or run OSR games should read it, if for no other reason than to simply see another similar approach to this style of play.

Where to get it

You can get it for free from DriveThruRPG. Print options are also available. You can also find more from Eero at Arkenstone Publishing.