What do you call a retrospective for something you’re currently doing? I’m currently running the largest and most successful OSR-style campaign I’ve done so far, with fourteen players across three different parties in the same world, using a system of my own creation (read: cobbled together from other people’s blog posts).
I’ve yet to find a way to talk about this campaign to people in an engaging way but as a high-level overview the characters are adventurers seeking great deeds in the Moss Woods, a borderland adjacent to their home city-state of Von Tar. Gameplay has mostly consisted of bouncing around the sandbox looking for treasure and glory. One party is currently a hundred and fifty miles underground in the Unterzee-styled underworld, stranded on an island with a malign lighthouse. Another has taken a castle in the Moss Woods themselves and is currently under siege by its previous inhabitants. The final party recently got hired as hunting guides to some nobles and got caught up in an assassination, but generally have been focused on trading with the inhabitants of the woods and giant snail ranching.
Regrets
As successful as the campaign has been, there are things I wish I had done from the start which might have improved it even further.
I wish I had put a large and obvious dungeon close to the starting town. We’re something like thirty sessions into the game and people have only gone dungeon crawling a handful of times, mostly due to not being able to find the dungeons. I had the player most immersed in the OSR stop playing (prefering to come behind the GM screen and help me out, thankfully) due to the lack of dungeon crawling.
And this leads to another wish, stronger hooks earlier on. Even in a sandbox (maybe especially in one), providing concrete hooks to lead the players to the fun is necessary. I did and do provide new characters with rumors, but while these provided useful information about the Woods the rumors meant to point to locations weren’t strong enough. There’s a huge difference between “They say the belt of Rodda is in the Moss Woods” and “They say the Belt of Rodda can be found in the ruined castle in the woods”. Aside from showing the existence of kobolds, the second rumor also primes the characters to look for the belt when they encounter them.
Of course part of the issue with giving more information is that I’m not entirely done prepping the woods, and I’ve been burned before by giving the players information which I’m not prepared for them to act on yet. Having that big dungeon upfront would have bought me more prep time initially and over the course of the campaign as players go back to it.
I should have had more active factions for the sandbox. While I do have clear factions in the world, they’re too passive. For a lot of them I intentionally baked in reasons for them to be essentially in stasis until the players interact with them, but this leads to the world not feeling as dynamic as I’d like and has hampered my efforts to make the factions more active now that I’ve recognized the issue. Particularly lacking are factions the party can align themselves with or which oppose each other directly. The actors in the Moss Woods are mostly uninterested in each other and unfriendly to outsiders. Town factions could be filling this niche but players haven’t had much interest in the town, probably due to its fuzziness initially in the campaign. I am working on refining factions and using procedures curbed from Mausritter to make them more proactive, so hopefully this will bring player interest to the town factions (I think it’s too late for the ones in the Moss Woods).
I wish I had provided a group identity for the players beyond adventurers seeking the same deeds. While it’s fun having the parties all going their own way and doing their own thing, I don’t think the multi-party nature of the campaign is living up to its potential. The parties haven’t really been communicating at all. There were some early rumblings about the players forming their own adventuring guild after one party finished off a location someone else had mounted the initial assault against, but nothing has come of it. Part of the difficulty is that one of the parties is in-person and not active on the same discord as the others. Having a group identity and having some kind of shared resource like a base or reputation would help encourage the players to communicate. Alternatively, I’m not opposed to the prospect of indirect PvP between players, but direct PvP is hard to manage from a scheduling perspective and this group has players who can’t handle it emotionally. That said, one party is planning on opening up a shop to sell goods to other players so we’ll see where that goes.
I should have had a smaller encounter table for the region, or broke the region into different sub-regions with smaller tables. I have a d10 table for the region and it’s large enough that there are things the players haven’t seen even 30 sessions in. As cool as that is, I think it hampers the players ability to gain knowledge about the world. Tying the tables to smaller regions would also add more texture to travel.
Lessons Learned
There are several things I had to change as the game went on which were only apparent through play.
My game is essentially a really fucked up Knave hack, and so initially rations took up one slot each (with players having 10). I liked this as it played nicely with rules cribbed from Ultraviolet Grasslands for “sacks” denoting how much mounts and vehicles can carry. However, the ration economy had to be changed. Because rations took up so much space (and unlike in Knave they do not get more slots as they level), they couldn’t carry enough rations and too much of their inventory was forced to be rations rather than anything more interesting. They didn’t feel free to travel deeper into the woods due to their low capacity for supplies. I think one ration per slot would work fine in a dungeon game or one where I had put a big dungeon up front, as it would have essentially gated the further woods behind purchasing a mule, but parties did not have the funds to get out of this initial bind. So eventually I caved and made rations three to a slot. This has had the knock-on effects of ration tracking becoming less important and pack animals having far too many slots, but the game is much more dynamic for it. Having tracked rations and torches for years, I’m starting to burn out on the bookkeeping required, but don’t want to abandon logistics wholesale. I’m going to look for alternatives for future games.
Another issue was food being too easy to forage. My brother questioned the design purpose of being able to forage for food, as it ran contrary to the desired goal of having players have to consider logistics and plan ahead. In his eyes either foraging had to go or we should stop tracking food entirely due to it being evidently abundant. A lot of systems have foraging as an action which is done alongside movement, whereas in my game you had to be stationary as it was envisioned as a camp action. This unfortunately led to players trying to stock up on food via foraging during sessions instead of actually adventuring. I made foraging much less lucrative returning it to the original intent as a stopgap measure to avoid starvation and killing both birds. Perhaps allowing mobile foraging would be a good idea, but something about it rubs me the wrong way from a realism perspective, though I profess no experience with foraging myself. I’m also realizing while writing this that a foraging downtime action would allow the fairly boring foraging to be pushed outside of valuable session time.
A more recent change was decreasing the amount of random encounters. I had based my tables off those found at Whose Measure God Could Not Take many years ago, but I had missed that they were rolling daily instead of per hex like I was. This led to a 25% chance of combat encounter per hex which slowed down play immensely for little gain, and I eventually started ignoring non-combat encounters during the night or when in camp. This still slowed things in camp down too much so I started decreasing the odds of an encounter in camp. I’ve since tied the encounter chances to watches (wilderness exploration turns) instead of hexes and reduced the encounter chance to 3-in-20 based on the travel systems by OSR Simulacrum and The Alexandrian. I also only roll once for the entire time the players are camped and still ignore certain encounter types completely during the night. As part of the random encounter rolls I’ve also started rolling for the encounter distance. The idea here is to allow the party to potentially avoid the combat or engage in fights at range. I’m still having trouble with the precise distances, but tying my stealth and chase mechanics into the range bands has helped make the distance more meaningful. The encounter table is overloaded with other events and the range table is overloaded with surprise, but this still means a combat encounter takes like five rolls between number of enemies, reaction, etc. Pre-rolling encounters is one option, but I like not knowing what the party will face ahead of time. Maybe I should just pre-roll the range and their reaction and leave the rest to fate.
A few other smaller things were changed during the campaign based on experience. One of the nice parts of having three parties is the ability to move players around if they don’t mesh well. One of my players took advantage of this and is now in a party much more amenable to their interests and playstyle. I initially ran my downtime on a week-by-week basis aligning with one-to-one time. This proved to be too much, as with 14 players playing every other week I’d be dealing with 28 different downtime actions every two real weeks. Making the downtime turns more abstract has helped immensely. I’m more and more a proponent of a modified one-to-one system where time is abstracted unless it doesn’t need to be, but I’ll talk about that later. Something I’ve identified as an issue and will be changing is my weather tables. I’ve been using this system from A Blasted, Cratered Land but as the state is being shared among three parties and the variance in results increases over time it’s very hard for players to notice one type of weather leading into another. I’m going to switch to a hex flower system as the weather changes are more directly related to the current state; if the weather is currently X players will be able to build a better intuition about where it could go next.
I’m going to break this into two parts, with the second covering things I’m struggling with, things which have worked well, and thoughts for future campaigns
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