Dolmenwood Sessions 0 and 1
My last adult campaign, a homebrewed sandbox running OSE, fizzled out at the end of 2024. Since then, I’ve run some on-and-off one shots, and my Sunday School campaigns, Kadmoniah and Labyrinth. I wanted to get back to a full-time campaign with peers. Two things stopped me:
- I wanted it to be in-person, but finding a venue that wasn’t too expensive or geographically problematic was difficult.
- I wanted to run Dolmenwood, but I didn’t have my physical books from the Kickstarter.
Eventually I realized the first issue was me self-obstructing with an overly stringent criterion, and I simply got comfortable with running the game online, which solved the venue problem while also widening my player candidate pool considerably (although it did cause one potential player to explicitly bow out based on it being online).
The second issue was mostly bullshit, since I had gone through the PDFs for Dolmenwood at least twice, but having them in my hot little hands felt like I would attain mastery sooner. The truth is, there is no mastery of a system to be gained from reading the system; only by running the system will you unlock proficiency (along with, yes, reading and reflecting on your sessions). Fortunately, the books showed up on my porch in November and I quickly digested them.
I got a group of four together, only two of whom had any experience at all with an OSR-type game, and we met for Session 0. Overall my findings are not dissimilar from my experience with OSE – rolling characters, while much swifter than 5e, is not an easy process. I only remembered NG’s character generator after the fact, but, to be honest, I wanted the players to be more engaged with the decisions and not just have the machine roll everything. In hindsight, I am not fully convinced there’s a huge difference, although having the patience to watch the broad outlines of a character form a piece at a time, versus just leap into the room out of the fog, probably does pay off.
There was plenty of consternation at the ability scores (I did 3D6 down the line, but had them roll two sets and pick the one they preferred. I also let them invoke the substandard character rule from Dolmenwood if they wanted to, although no one did) and class selection. I dropped the XP bonus for prime abilities because I think it narrows the focus too much, as well as it being a giant pain in the ass to remember to account for at XP granting time. I could see what people mean when they talk about OSR chafing.
I was having some major lag on the call, which conspired to make it so we didn’t get a chance to actually play during Session 0. The players were unable to clearly hear about every third sentence, so it just wasn’t going to work. But during the session we ran into the topic that’s most likely to kill a campaign over the long run – modern adult schedules. Only one player could commit to weekly play, so we settled on every-other-week, although that same one player was going to be unable to attend the first session, which he was bummed about, since it would result in a month between sessions. As “cappy” as Dolmenwood is, not having the butts in seats is a standing risk to the campaign. I left Session 0 not feeling great about our prospects.
Session 1
Short a player, we had Hogrid Dregger, human friar; Oblom Mossbeard, mossling magician; and Shander Underbleat, breggle knight standing outside the ruined keep atop Droomen Knoll, listening to eerie keening pipe music emerging from seemingly everywhere, clashing with the brash singing and braying of what turned out to be a pack of Crookhorns. The party had found an old map with clues pointing to a very valuable chalice hidden in the basement of this keep. They had approached from the north, away from the front entrance to the south. After exploring around some, they discovered a collapsed tower, out of which they saw some bat- or bird-like creatures flying, seemingly emerging from underground. Shander crawled down the hole to emerge into a dungeon of some kind, where the creatures were roosting sleepily, and all the stones were frigid to the touch. On a desiccated body on the ground, they found some treasure, including an oracle stone that, when touched, gave them a strange vision of a twitching stag corpse amid looming trilithons. They ventured further and discovered mural portraits of Frost Elf nobles, including noble but severe Prince Seven-Past-Noon and a defaced portrait of waif-like Famine-Whistles-Whither being chased by hounds.
The party managed to navigate around despite the increasing chill of the space, using the lore gained from the portraits to correctly surmise that they needed to shine a light on a sundial to make it show exactly 12:07, although they weren’t sure what the clicking sound that resulted actually signified. They followed the sound to a freezing cold door, behind which was a quite insane frost elf they soon determined what Famine-Whistles-Whither himself. He was mistrusting of them at first but started imploring them to let him go. Meanwhile, the Crookhorn leader, Grobnott, noticed the cessation of the pipe playing after hearing it for days on end, and he emerged from his office to see what had happened. Famine-Whistles-Whither ended up testing the door, finding that the warding rune that had been placed on it had been deactivated by the sundial trick, and, after wrenching open the door, flew past the party and toward the sunlight. Grobnott and one of his lackeys who had appeared were bowled over by the elf. The Crookhorns immediately gave chase.
The party was still on the hunt for the chalice, whose secret Famine-Whistles-Wither had explained – the clue “fairy ice and mortal blood” scrawled at the bottom of their map meant they could open the ice concealing the chalice by pouring their own blood over it. They entered Grobnott’s quarters, where an evil smell met them – a ring of candles giving off a noxious smoke was burning in a ring in the center of the room, where a young human male was bound and delirious. They knocked over the candles, snuffing them, and the young man began to come around. They searched for a secret door the frost elf had told them about, behind which lay, they assumed, the chamber with the chalice. At this point, we wrapped for the night.
GM Notes
Overall the session went well, although we had a hell of a time with mapping. I was trying to go with description and let the players map it out from there, but with no visual reference at all they were swiftly getting lost. I had no issue simply screenshotting the overland map for the keep, which helped immensely, but once they got into the basement it was a mess. I would like to avoid a VTT at all costs, given how, in my experience, they represent a ton of extra work for the GM. I ended up simply drawing in Notes.app with my iPad and sharing that same doc from my Mac, but it was slow to update. I was already considering using Miro for this purpose, the 3d6DTL boys already having blazed that trail for me, but I am definitely going to pull the trigger now. I think I can manage with a free account for the moment.
Surprisingly mapping was the single biggest hurdle for the OSR style for the group, although “what can I do to search this room”-type questions cropped up a couple of times. I can see the group getting into the mindset pretty quickly though. Admittedly, one of these players I ran through Knave 1e/Tomb of the Serpent Kings/the beginnings of Stonehell for over a year in a work team D&D game (which I cannot recommend highly enough as a team-building exercise if you can find a game that works for everyone), and another I ran through all three vol 1 Wicked Little Delves on Knave 2e, so there’s some familiarity at the table.
Notes on Dolmenwood
The aforementioned Wicked Little Delves have kind of spoiled me, and Pipes On Droomen Knoll let me down several times. In many room blocks, there’s no mention of NPCs, monsters, or major points of interest in the initial blurb at all. Example: Grobnott’s Den mentions nothing about Arda Vague, the doped up youth, in the opening paragraph, which means you have to purposefully read the a good chunk of the 14 paragraph entry for the room before beginning to lay out the room for your players. I missed Arda completely when I first described the room and had to rewind. After the session was over I realized I’d missed another item in this room, the treasure chest, which I’ll need to throw at them first thing when we’re back. I similarly had to retcon finding the corpse in the stirge lair because I’d completely missed it, and only thought to reread the entry when I realized we’d been playing for half a session already and hadn’t found any treasure.
A room description block in Wicked Little Delves vol 1 looks like this:
The low ceiling arches over wooden crates and barrels. A splotchy carcass hangs on a hook. Dense white webs fill the space. A body lies at the back.
For each of those bolded terms, there is elaboration below. That gives the GM something to refer to as an initial read, then elaboration where the party might investigate the webs, or the carcass, or the barrels. (Hot tip: don’t look at any of this shit, this room is a death trap.) I would’ve liked Pipes to lean more into this. Glancing at Winter’s Daughter, it looks like it’s more like WLD / Dungeon Age than Pipes is, so maybe this is just a shortcoming of the included adventure. It would’ve been nice to have it play a little better though, without having to retcon things out of the gate. I get very anxious about first impressions with a game/setting, so having it run a little more smoothly would help me.
Another thing I’ll note is I’m used to much simpler chargen thanks to running Knave, Labyrinth, and Dusk City Outlaws. Both my OSE experience from a few years ago and this Dolmenwood Session 0 resulted in chargen that was, while nowhere near as excruciating as rolling a D&D 3.5e, 5e or Pathfinder 1e character is, somewhat painful and boring. I almost do think simply using the online generator would be better because it would get us to playing more swiftly, but I do think we would miss some of the niceties of actually seeing the trinkets table and finding yours, instead of simply hitting a button and seeing the entries appear.
I was fairly adamant, to the chagrin of a few of my players, that we do 3d6 down the line, twice, using the subpar character rule, and then choosing which of the two sets of stats you want. In hindsight, I think being staunch on it wound up making a bigger deal of it than it actually should be. Ability checks are somewhat brutal in Dolmenwood, since they’re d6 checks, but they also don’t come up that much, and frankyl I want to engender missed rolls as simply grist for the fun mill. I think doing swift chargen the first time, and then having them go through the entire process by hand for backup characters would be preferable. Oh well, for my next party!