The Greylands House Campaign Retrospective

 

Between August and November of 2023 I ran another campaign or iteration of The Greylands, which was my first ever OSR focused campaign that I ran back in early 2022. In this case rather than running it as an open table with a bunch of players, it was a house game for only two players, each of them running two characters initially (and eventually a fifth PC joined the party).

Due to how slow I have been in getting to this post, some of my thoughts are no longer as fresh as they were in December, but there are still some things I would like to look back on with this campaign.

Running a game for just two players

It has been kind of a curious progression between these last three campaigns. In the first Greylands game I had a very healthy pool of 17 players, most of which played in at least two sessions, and most sessions were 5-6 players (one time even going to 7).

With BSSS the overall open table player pool was smaller (11 total) and the game quite quickly formed around a core of 4 players with occasionally having a fifth person join in for a session or two.

And now with this second Greylands game it was just two players. Obviously this also wasn’t an open table, so it was never going to be more than that anyway, but it’s still a trend I hope reverses drastically in my next game!

But, how did it feel to run for just two players? Kind of odd. After running much larger games this one felt much smaller and a bit more personal I suppose. A thing I definitely noticed is that without the larger group of players there is both less game time spent on waffling about and trying to decide what might be an option to maybe proceed to take an action. Conversely there were no “outside” voices and perspectives to offer solutions or courses of action. If the two players didn’t think of something or didn’t consider an element, then there wasn’t anyone but me as the referee to potentially point it out to them.

Also both my players were very much not people used to the OSR play style, nor entirely comfortable (or that interested, let’s be honest) with it. As such they did not exactly have many sessions of dungeon delving and problem solving to draw upon, and there was no third party to also offer potentially different points of view.

I also decided to give each player two characters (plus any hirelings and animals they had) to control, which while it helped beef up the party numbers requiring little adjustment on my end, probably did not work AS well as it could have. I think if I was to run something like this again I would instead have players still just run one PC at a time (though if they want a troupe of potential PCs to use, that’s always cool of course) but beef them up a bit to make it so they won’t just get killed at the first fight they get into.

On my end, I can’t say I am particularly a fan of just having two players, as I enjoy some of the chaos of having 4+ people playing in the game, but I won’t say it’s awful and I hate it either.

Running a regular campaign versus an open table

So here’s the simple fact - I’ve not really run many campaigns, despite playing RPGs fairly consistently for 20 years. I’ve played in some, I’ve tried running, but before the first Greylands I think my longest campaign was maybe 4 sessions long? That’s not a campaign. It just isn’t.

The reason I went with an open table approach for the past two campaigns is because I did not (and technically still don’t) have a stable and reliable group of 4-5 people who could play in a weekly game, and so an open table allowed me to draw from a big enough group of people that I could consistently have enough players for a game to fire. My usual approach was that if at least 3 people sign up for a session, the session is happening.

Open table games tend to necessitate some concessions and adjustments in how play flows during a given session. I made it a point that all sessions always begin and end in a safe location (usually the closest town), with downtime happening between sessions. This is pretty standard stuff - it allows for PCs to join and leave the group from session to session without needing any explanation or justifications as to how they’re now here, when they weren’t here last time.

However, with a stable closed game, and even more so one where both the referee and players all live in the same place (as was the case for this one) there is no need to have that kind of setup. So we regularly had the game pause just in the dungeon, or even in the middle of a fight (coming back to finish it later in the day, or maybe the next day) and it felt….weird.

Not bad,mind you, but after 20+ sessions of open table playhaving characters just frozen in place simply felt weird and unusual. I don’t know if I dislike it though.

Downtime still happened, but now it was not this regimented thing of “downtime is always between two sessions!” instead simply happening when the players wanted to deal with it, and often spending more than the 1 week minimum, occasionally spending close to a month in pursuing various projects unrelated to the dungeon.

Running the same thing twice and limited campaign scope

Since this campaign was both a continuation and also a soft reset of my previous Greylands campaign, I decided to use Dyson’s Delve (an absolutely excellent dungeon for this kind of game, in my opinion) again as the tentpole for the game, which with some occasional forays into nearby regions, ended up being the main focus of the game.

And since I had already run this same setup before, it gave me a rather interesting opportunity to observe how different playgroups handle the same dungeon. The first Greylands campaign’s players ended up fighting the goblins on level 1, using flaming oil and murdering prisoners after they had already surrendered, and so the goblins became immediately hostile to the party, setting up traps, then barricades and employing firebombs of their own, eventually hiring an ogre to go stand outside the entrance to the dungeon. The party never made it through level 2 of the dungeon, let alone any deeper, while declaring that the dungeon was “too dangerous” and going to other places instead. (Too dangerous, in this case, being that over multiple delves 1 PC was killed and 1 was injured and then recovered.)


Contrast this with the party in this iteration, who approached the goblins without hostility and over the span of half the sessions in the game eventually not only befriended them, but actually became allies with the goblins, effectively taking control over the 4 topmost levels of the dungeon, and giving them access to a lot of goblins, if needed! While, yes, this approach means that some magic items and experience was left at the table, it also meant that they didn’t really need those, as they had access to the goblins that already had the items and were willing to help if push came to shove.

The way the two different groups approached the same simple situation has been fascinating to me, and is something that has really made me want to run the same adventure or dungeon for multiple groups some more, to observe what novel ways of approaching it can happen.

Playing with people you are more emotionally attached to

This one is a bit of a personal note, but an important insight from the campaign and thus worth mentioning. Seeing as I was playing with my partners, I actually have found that process at times more stressful than running for my usual group of acquaintances, friends and strangers that would be at my open table games.

With people you care deeply about any dissatisfaction with the game or even strong emotional response to the game tends to then affect me quite more as well, making me rather hesitant to really remain as a neutral referee (which of course I don’t have to be, but I find is good practice in OSR games). It’s not like I pulled back when danger presented itself to the PCs, but rather it made me more hesitant to run the scenarios when danger was present in the first place. A curious thing, and one that I am not sure what to do about, or if there is much to do about in the first place.

Final thoughts

I was overall pleased with this campaign, so that’s good. I think some interesting world building happened as a result of, allowing me to flesh out aspects of the campaign setting that I didn’t have during the first iteration of it, and also helping create a lasting, player-driven change in the setting by reestablishing the manor house under which the dungeon was located. Conversely, I am not sure if the campaign will be returning to this area any time soon, but if it does then at least I will know that the manor is now rebuilt and is there.

I felt like the focus on a singular dungeon worked quite well, even if that was not my starting intention (it mostly happened due to overwhelm not allowing for prepping more expansive events and opportunities during the campaign) and helped further bolster my decision to aim for a megadungeon focused game for my next one.

There are no stats for this campaign, since technically speaking this is still the same Greylands game as the previous one, so I have not compiled any for this next installment, though through my notes I can probably recreate some of those later down the line. I also know of maybe only one or two other people who even care about campaign stats anyway, so it’s fine, hah.

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! 

The Greylands Campaign - Part 3

 Well this is fun. I had half this post written out before Blogger decided to yeet it into the yawning Void. 

Most of this will be just me sharing some player maps, some artwork related to the game and any final thoughts I may or may not have. 

First off though - why even make a post about this? Because I personally love artifacts like these that a game generates. Note sheets, maps, artwork, portraits, sketches and scribbles. This to me is what makes the game last after you actually stop playing. It's what shows that it even happened. 

So, let's start with the player-facing overland map that I gave them at session 1 and that they slowly added to over time:

Player-facing map of the region

Note that there are no labels or notes anywhere on it - I did not put any to begin with, and the players generally seemed uninterested or unwilling to add stuff to the map.  While there's a few extra locations added, mostly in the forest to the southeast, that happened quite a few sessions in.

Player-made map of region and tower.

Compare to this player-made map that the usual mapper in the group drew at some point. While more abstract than the one I made (and the one I made is plenty abstract already!), it does feature notes, labels and annotations for the locations listed. 

Next up we come to player maps made of the various dungeons. While I did not insist on any specific player necessarily taking on a mapping role, I also would not draw a map for any location in a dungeon for the players.

Part of it is because I feel that mapping adds an important step to slow the action down and make it (hopefully) a bit more thoughtful, but part of it is also simply me, as a GM, having to juggle plenty of other elements already. I don't want to also have to do the mapping for the players. 

So, onto the maps!

Player map with extensive notes and annotations.

Here's an example of a rare occurrence in the campaign - a player actually taking notes as we play. I am not sure why there was not that much note taking throughout the campaign. It might be simply people enjoying the game enough to not want to stop and scribble down this or that, or it might be most of my players coming from a more Trad play culture and thus just not used to writing down information, as one of the GM's duties is to keep all that information accessible to the players upon request. After all, can't have a plot-driven game progress if literally nobody has any idea what the plot actually is, can you?

That map, by the way, was impressive enough that another player copied it for a different trek into the same dungeon:

Copy and expansion of the above map by a different player.

Here is an example of a much rougher type of mapping:

Map of the Boyar's Manor, a central dungeon in the campaign.

What happened is that the usual mapper was not playing in that particular session, and the party was venturing into a yet unexplored part of the dungeon, so they could not rely on simply redrawing a copy of an existing map and using that to navigate.

The mapper for that session was quite reluctant in their role. The player didn't really feel comfortable with trying to follow directions (and, in fact, managed to draw the map completely opposite in the first go and had to be corrected by another player. Hilariously the mapper's character is the only one that owns a compass in the entire group.), and it shows in their mapping. This is a cave system, but drawn using squares and lacking in most forms of annotations or navigational aids. 

The party still did okay, but the player declared that they are absolutely not doing that again. This is a player who enjoyed the game immensely and was one of the most enthusiastic for the campaign itself, but even that could not overcome the struggles of mapping it seems.

Player map of a tomb in The Barrows.

Player map of level 1 of the Boyar's Manor dungeon.

Player map of level 2 of the Boyar's Manor dungeon.

A variety of other player maps from different dungeons in the campaign.

In my campaign I also made it a point to reward mapping and session reports, as those required additional effort on the part of players, and also saved me the trouble of having to do either of them. The reward was a standing 100 exp per session spent mapping or report written. However I think in the future I would likely bump up that experience to 100 exp per PC level, thus making still be a relatively meaningful activity even for PCs of level 3or or higher.

Tishomir the War Bear, a hireling.
Portrait by a player.

Landalf the Fragile, MVP of the game and a staunch survivor.
Portrait by me. 

So then, in my first post about this game I laid out my goals - Have a weekly in-person game, introduce people to the OSR style of play, have fun. 

On the first goal I would say I succeeded, even if some weeks were missed for this or that reason. The game became a steady element in my week to week life, and I enjoyed having it. My plan is to return to running such a game once I can.

On the second goal, I think I also mostly succeeded. Different players had different experience levels and expectations of this style of gaming, and some had more difficulty than others wrapping their heads around how to play in this manner, but I think I got at least a few people introduced to this way of play and I hope that it will stick (Only time will tell). 

On the last and probably most important goal - was the game fun? Yeah I think so. It was fun for me to GM, which has been a struggle for me over the years. The players generally seemed to enjoy it, and judging by how many of them ended up joining at least a second session I would say that is a good barometer of enjoyment from the activity. After all, nobody was ever under any obligation to come play. So if they did, it meant they wanted to. Any further notes on this would have to come from the players themselves, not me though. 

What's the future of the Greylands?

Uncertain. I am currently unable to run it as I am out of the country and thus don't really have access to my players or my notes and documentation, and I have zero interest in trying to run the game online. 

Some number of players have expressed interest in continuing the campaign after I return, and I would agree it might be nice to continue it as there is already established connections and story lines have emerged organically from the sessions. 

On the other hand I feel drawn to different things, different campaigns and systems to try and refine my idea of what the OSR is and what it means to play in that play style. The Greylands were very much a testing ground for me, and so while I am attached enough to this little campaign to have written 3 blog posts about it, I also feel no problem moving onto something else. 

The Greylands Campaign - Part 2

 In this post, I am going to just go over some stats that I tracked the duration of the campaign. I enjoy reading bits of info like this about people's games, and I figured that at least one other person out there might be interested in this, so here we go!

STATS!

Sessions played: 11

Players in the campaign: 17
PCs crippled or mangled by the Death and Dismemberment Table: 3
Highest character level achieved: 5
Highest total XP earned in one session: 11,356 xp per character
Classes Unlocked: 2 ( War Bear and Cleric)
PC Class Breakdown

• 4 Fighters

• 4 Thieves

• 1 Magic-User

• 2 Illusionists

• 3 Dwarfs

• 2 Elfs

• 2 Acolytes

• 1 Druid

• 1 Cleric

Most unlucky class: Thief
Most unlucky character: Big Pavol, the illusionist retainer
Longest surviving character: Landalf the Fragile
Longest surviving retainer: Spyro, a porter and torchbearer
Number of war dogs in the party: 3 good boys
Number of war hogs in the party: 1 sort-of-good boy

Number of "nodes" on the overland map explored: 7
Number of dungeons partially explored: 4
Number of lairs cleared: 1
Magical items acquired: 3
Single most expensive piece of treasure acquired: Silver serpent crown worth 5000 gp
Toughest monster defeated: Basilisk
Number of dragons the party ran away from: 3

Players who have played in two or more sessions: 11

Most players in a single session: 7

Fewest players in a single session: 4

Total PCs in the campaign: 20

Rolls on the Death and Dismemberment table: 6

Dead Characters: 1

Dead Retainers: 7

Number of PCs that slept with Medved: 1

Overall MVP of the Campaign so far: Evtim, for getting a level 1 elf with 4hp to level 4 without a single Death and Dismemberment roll. Good on you, man!

Observations

Something I noticed quite early on was how surprisingly forgiving the Death and Dismemberment roll can be. Despite PCs rolling on it 4 times (and on retainer - twice!) it only ever resulted in 1 actual death. Sure, people got their arms and heads broken, suffered concussions and so on, but ultimately they survived. I am seriously considering making the table a bit more brutal, or outright removing it as a rule. 

Another observation might be the rather absurd number of exp listed in there. That's not a typo, and not a mistake - the party had an absolutely enormous haul in session 9. And since I give experience per SP, not GP (while not adjusting treasure numbers in the modules I use to populate my game), it meant the party actually ended up bumping up against the "only one level gained per session" rule! 

Speaking of levels, level 5 might seem high too, but I start all new characters with 2500 exp, meaning that everyone but the Thief and Elf start as level 2. Thieves start at level 3, and Elfs only halfway through level 1. If anything I'm surprised there's nobody at level 6, but I think there's a few characters that might be quite close to that. 

Next post I think I'll write down some more personal observations from the campaign - memorable moments, lessons learned, etc. 

The Greylands Campaign - Part 1

 This year I ran my first OSR campaign, which also has the (dubious) honor of being the longest campaign I've ran, as well as the one with the most sessions in it. As I will not be able to run the game for several months, it is currently on a (hopefully non-permanent) pause. 

I thought this would be a good opportunity to write down some thoughts, observations and stats for this campaign, for the benefit of mostly myself. 

This is going to be a series of posts, and in this first one I would like to present a general overview of campaign, my goals with it and some details on how it actually was organized and run. 

System

The game was ran using Old School Essentials with a bunch of house rules and on the fly decisions, as one would expect in any real tabletop experience. The majority of those house rules were collected in a Google Docs document, but for the sake of both presentation and ease of use at the table, I also made them into printed booklets which the players could reference during gameplay:

Player booklets for the campaign.

I made 6 of those in total and they are one of my favorite things about the campaign, providing a wonderful physical artifact for the game and also serving to impress people at the table.

Campaign Structure and Format

This entire campaign was started because I wanted to have a weekly, in-person, OSR game to play in. As none of those were available, I had to make it happen myself. The game was ran as an open table, with no single player ever being required for the game to commence. 

The campaign was ran in person at my LGS, with sessions usually averaging around 4 hours, though we've had some short ones and some that go for 6+ hours too (with breaks included of course).

The initial recruitment for the game was done through either just telling people I knew would be interested, as well as making a recruitment post on said LGS's Facebook page. I had also spent a good few weeks telling people I was going to launch the campaign, drumming up interest, which I think helped in the long run.

The image accompanying the first player recruitment post.

From there on most week to week games were organized through a discord server I set up for the campaign, and I'd say it worked quite well overall. The game would consistently have 5-6 players, with only a few occasions where there were not enough people available to actually get a game to fire.

The actual sessions themselves followed a pretty standard pattern. Wait for everyone to show up, tell them any rumors or news that their characters have heard over the previous week of downtime in town, finish up any last-minute gear purchases (for characters who chose to spend their downtime buying and selling stuff), retainers hiring and so on. Then, ask them what their plan was for this expedition, usually them following up on events from the previous week's session, or exploring places on their map they've not run into yet. Then the bulk of the game happens, and once we reach a natural stopping point, or it gets too late, the party goes back to town and we do downtime activities for the next in-game week.

Setting

The setting for the campaign was quite sparse, serving more as matte painting in front of which the action takes place, rather than having exploration of the setting and its themes, characters and so on being a primary aspect of gameplay. As such I decided to just make the campaign's setting be a very broad strokes rip-off of the excellent Hill Cantons by Chris Kutalik with the serial numbers filed off. The entire setting bible is this very sparse Google Docs file that I sent to the players after they asked me for some setting clarifications.

The tl;dr version of it is this - In one of the border territories of a NOT!16th Century NOT!Holy Roman Empire a cataclysms of some magical origin causes the entire region to lose some of it's vitality and color (hence the Greylands) and makes dungeons and treasures and weirdness start popping out of nowhere. The place turns into a frontier for adventurers, outlaws, heretics and other such assorted Player Character types. There's only one major settlement, a town whose inhabitants and the rest of the empire have even forgotten the name of. The adventurers who hang out there call it Greytown, in a stunning display of creativity. And...that's it.

Goals

The main goals I had for this campaign were to have a weekly game happening, to get over my problems and anxieties associated with GMing, to introduce people into the OSR style of play (whatever the hell that even is or looks like these days), to have an actual campaign that runs for longer than 3 sessions and to just have some fun.

How well that that work out? Well, pretty good I think! This was one of the more enjoyable GMing experiences that I've had, and despite an initial hump of prep work most week to week game prep was quite minimal and tended to follow just obvious progression from what happened in the previous session.

I also think I did an okay job in showcasing and introducing the OSR play culture to people of varying familiarity with it, plus helping me get some more experience under my belt. 

The game also was quite consistent, only missing a few weeks usually due to me being unavailable, which resulted in a total of 11 sessions over the span of roughly 3 months. Compared to some other games I've run over the years, this has been outright unprecedented! 


I think this is enough for now. In the next post I think I'll write up some interesting stats that I've tracked for the campaign.