Summary
I decided to run the excellent
Slumbering Ursine Dunes by
Chris Kutalik as a casual pick up game while I am busy with family stuff. This was the third and final session of the game.
Party MembersFollowers
Spyro (Landalf's longstanding porter and valet);
Brown Thomas (Man-at-Arms);
Hedviga the Harridan (Woman-at-Arms);
Tishomir (A level 1
War Bear),
Marko (A magically charmed pirate),
Jaro (A war-boar) and
Milkshake (A giant lizard)
Session Recap
After 2 weeks of downtime the party decided it was finally time to try and have a go at killing Ondrej the Wereshark. They headed back into the Dunes, down the familiar path to the Glittering Tower, and after arriving there they had realized they weren't actually sure how to get to the dungeons underneath the tower so they decided to take the radical approach of....asking someone.
Pan Orso, the majordomo of Medved's portion of the tower showed them how to get to the dungeon and wished them luck. Along the way they also went through the Kitchen and ran into the Cave Dwarf cooks, offering them some of the magical rye from the field to add to the stew they were working on.
Heading down the stairs to the dungeon the party encountered the Eld "sigil" that was blocking Medved from accessing the lower levels. After fucking around with it for a bit, getting zapped for their troubles, they decided to just move on. Once in the dungeon proper the party started exploring all the doors in order.
First door they ran into a chest guarded by a not-too-subtle mimic pretending to be a mosaic on the wall. It flopped on top of Landalf, but managed to be quickly ripped apart by the elf, along with some help from Verasha's animals. In the next room they found some deeply ancient and crumbly scrolls, one of which, much to the dismay of Landalf, had a spell encoded in it, but was too fragile to realistically take back in one piece.
In another room they discovered a pile of molding rags with rat skeletons hidden among the detritus, and connected to it - a series of urns containing soul juice. After experimenting with the urns and their contents and finding them mostly harmless, the party discovered a curious contraption. A reed boat facing a black wall of seemingly empty nothingness, save for the glimmer of stars in the distant Void. A way to traverse the universe (or universes, perhaps?)!
Deciding to at least have a go of killing Ondrej, instead of just getting on the boat and going on a different (and hopefully less suicidal) adventure, the party explored some of the other doors and hallways, eventually finding a room full of suspiciously new and well-maintained ship ropes. Digging around they discovered a trap door in the ceiling and a way into the hidden cove where Ondrej and his pirates keep their flagship.
After some futzing about with trying to get Jaro the pig to actually get up through the trap door (involving much squealing, protests and fighting on the war-boar's part) the party decided to just have a go at it, and went out into the cove.
Ondrej greeted them as soon as they were out on the platform. He couldn't see them, but they had not been exactly quiet in their entrance. After some chitchat and a very obvious trap of him offering for them to get on the ship so he can talk with them, the party had secretly decided to just try and deal with the problem by having Hedviga and and Brown Thomas try and set fire to the ship itself. While their efforts were slow, they were starting to get some scorching and smoking from the ship's brow, which was all the provocation the psychotic Ondrej needed.
The rest of the session was one rather protracted fight. Ondrei chucked his smoldering samovar, apparently filled with some strange magical materials in it, as it produced a Sleep effect which luckily only managed to get Marko the pirate knocked out. He then transformed into his wereshark form and, along with his creepy pair of halfling "remoras" hanging off his tits, lept off the ship's prow and onto Brown Thomas and Hedviga, ripping them apart with his claws and teeth.
Verasha slid into the water and around to the ship, using the small brazier of coals used to maintain the samovar's fire to set the pillows and other flammable objects on the deck ablaze, before jumping back into the water in an attempt to flee the entire thing (her attempt thwarted, unfortunately, by the sea's tides.)
While that was happening Landalf the elf, now levitating safely out of wereshark range, cast another Charm Person spell onto one of the remoras, as Ondrej gleefully ripped apart Marko and Tishomir, and the party taking down the other remora and piling onto Ondrej.
Realizing just how tough the pirate was, Verasha went back to the docks and with a very lucky roll managed to shove a sack over Ondrej's head, giving the rest of the party a round of easier attacks and making Ondrej flail uselessly in trying to hit them. He eventually fell to the party's attacks, with the charmed remora then being tied and its throat slit.
Retrieving Odnrej's head the party went back to Medved, received their reward and session came to an end, with Verasha and Landalf heading into the reed boat and hopefully back to their own home dimension.
Observations
So, for this session I decided to be a bit soft-touched with consequences. By that I mean that this whole foray into the Slumbering Ursine Dunes was mostly just an excuse to play some more games without needing me to do too much prep. As such I allowed some of my players to play characters from another campaign (as you can clearly tell from the character list above).
However, it also presented me with a question - does this game "count"? Is what is happening here actually a part of the story of these characters, or just them playing those for the sake of convenience and not having to roll new ones?
Well, for this session I decided that no matter what happens, the events of this session, essentially, don't happen for the sake of my Greylands campaign from which the two characters are from. If they died in this session, well they wouldn't. Conversely - any treasure or experience they would gain? Also doesn't happen.
It helped endcap the general casual nature of the game that I wanted to have, so I felt okay with it and, of course, presented it as an option for the players and it was ultimately their decision if they wanted it to be this way or not. They did have to debate about it for a bit, but decided that - sure, let's go with that.
With that in mind, the session was quite curious in that it still produced a very very tangible feel of anxiety and stress, especially in Verasha's player. Ondrej ripping hirelings apart in a single round definitely underscored the point of just how creepy, dangerous and kind of off-putting he was and the tension was enough that we had to take a break just so the player could collect their thoughts.
There's often talk about OSR dungeon crawling being, in essence, a horror game ,but I've not seen too many people discuss how that actually plays out in practice. And how having a player that is especially empathic and sensitive to the tension of a situation and the fictional reality of going into a dark, horrible and extremely dangerous place can actually affect one's mental state. Verasha jumped off that boat and tried to swim away because, at the time, that was the only remotely sensible and self-preservational action her player could make. Because how suicidal does one need to be to decide to go back into the fight with the wereshark that rips people apart with his bare hands?
I've talked before with my BSSS campaign about authentic emotional responses arising from OSR gameplay due to the real stakes in place during those games. In this case it was curious that even a game with, in practice, no stakes could still produce such a strong emotional response.
That player is okay, by the way, and if anything right now sees the whole experience as a broadly positive and growing moment, but hopefully nobody thinks Nordic Larps or horror TTRPGs are the only ones that can evoke strong emotions in a player.
General Thoughts on the Game
So, let's cap this off with my general thoughts on Slumbering Ursine Dunes. tl;dr - it's fucking great, I loved running it and my players had a blast playing in it. It's got charm, quirkiness (without becoming grating, a thin line to walk) and...well it is one of the pieces of writing that inspired me to give this whole OSR thing a try, because hey if it can produce something like this then there must be something to it!
I again highly recommend seeking it out and reading it, along with Chris's other writing both in published form and on his blog. It does not disappoint, and if anything it can be very enlightening to a GM on just how much adventure you can pack in a small and discrete location like the Dunes.
