Moss Woods Campaign Review, Part 1
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
2024-01-29
A Shadow World
The World. A great irregular mass of matter and light and life suspended in space. It contains within it the Sun in a colossal spherical chamber constructed for the purpose. At great distance lies the moon, bathing the moonward world in silver light as it progresses through its phases. Yet further orbit the handful of stars, on their erratic but predictable journeys. All else is darkness.
The people of the world are shadows. This makes them uncomfortable both in the light and in the dark, forcing them to cover their shadow-flesh from the light to avoid withering away, and to avoid true darkness lest they return to that from which they came. They do not hold memories in their heads like you or I, but in their possessions. Each item is not only a thing to them, but a symbol of self. They are the sum of their belongings, and a little more besides.
As they age they accumulate things and memories to fill them with, but their shadow-stuff also grows stronger, allowing them to survive just a little more exposure to light, keep their sense of self just a little longer in the dark. Their bodies fill their containers like a gas. A larger body means more room for things, more room to tailor their physical form, but a smaller body means their shadow-stuff is more potent, less fragile and more suited to workings.
Folk come into being when memories are left behind in the twilight, usually by accident, and most do not survive long before succumbing to light or to darkness. Those who do survive find themselves one among many in a world teeming with folk and other life.
They are the creators of their own world. From darkness their workings can sublimate stone, water and ash. With memories they further differentiate that crude matter into myriad forms. Light may be woven into the base patterns, sunlight turning iron to gold to glowing orichalcum which will be used in lanterns far away from the central Sun.
Light comes in many forms. First, sunlight. Golden and tautological. Second, moonlight. The moon is a relative newcomer to the world, appearing in the record only after the Sun was encircled in stone. Then the three invented siblings of firelight, arclight, and luminescence. Firelight was only created with the invention of combustibles, luminescence with the development of biology. Arclight is the newest, created with careful manipulation of the recently devised electric. Finally, elusive starlight touches faintly on the world, drowned out by all the others and barely noticeable in the everpresent dark.
Life resembling that which we know, usually referred to by the folk as flesh or vine to distinguish between plant or animal, was created to unknown ends. Plants were created first, then insects and the small creatures of the world. Bigger and more complex forms were thought up later. The arts of creating life from nothing were lost, now novelty is only created through the recombination of existing traits or careful modification to that which exists. Mushrooms, slimes, and molds (collectively called rot) were created as a mistake, but have found a surprising number of advocates. Each of these things, vine, flesh, and rot, are unrelated. Life was created three times with three different patterns, and it may yet be created again. Microbes are a fantasy, you cannot create what you cannot see.
The creation of complex biology created new developments in embodiment. Folk have always been able to add matter to their persons. It sometimes becomes useful to have extra arms for example. But organs are a new phenomenon, as they have paved the path for new sensations. Shadows are quite capable of sight and hearing, and have been fond of scents since time immemorial but touch and taste were foreign. Other organs such as stomachs, hearts, and nerves originally designed for the maintenance of fleshy appendages have revealed their capacity for the darker sensations of hunger, heartbreak, and pain. Even more concerning are the rumors that some shadows, once embodied for extreme periods of time, lose the ability to remove these extra components, facing death when they inevitably wear out.
The encirclement of the Sun was done long, long ago. The sphere is offset such that some parts of its surface are closer than others, leading to differing temperatures in the eternal day. Its surface is a patchwork of glittering ocean and ancient sands, marred with an expansive lush jungle. The desert landmasses of the encirclement are controlled by various splinterings of the Church Solar, each considering the others heretics for their disagreements on theological questions. What is the Sun? Was it begat by folk, or folk begat by it? What is the nature of its light, and why does it burn the worst of all? These questions are debated with ink and with steel. Here folk are urban, hiding in shaded cities from the damning light which brought them forth. Legends circulate among them of hermits and prophets, the strongest and the oldest, who wander the sands alone. The seas are plied with boats and ships of these cities, but also of itinerant freefolk. With no need of breath, there is nothing stopping underwater settlements, and many folk take on aquatic forms beneath the waves. The jungle was an intrusion of the lifemakers, needing sunlight to fuel their creations. Once expansionist but since tamed by treaty and time, some still work to spread its borders.
The moon waxes and wanes from its fixed position, defining both time and space. Moonward and Darkward are the two principal directions of the folk, and its cycles inform their long calendars. As the light comes and goes, it shines on a monument to its glory, or to folk’s hubris. The Moonbridge is estimated to be a quarter completed, reaching out from the great uneven mass of the world towards the divine moon. Here the phases are more than an arbitrary tally of passing time, instead a fact of life as workers hurry to build the bridge further before it is once more enveloped in darkness. The greatest stoneworkers of the age are drawn here, embellishing the bridge with sweeping spans and arches. The work is opposed with vigor by secretive star cults among other groups who wander the outside surface of the world, where stone terminates in darkness.
The vast majority of the world between these two extremes is shadowlands, beneath or above the surface of the encirclement, depending on how one orients. Mostly they take the form of long dark corridors of stone, formed and shaped by unknown folk long before the arrival of the moon. Outcast or uncontacted folk wander here with lanterns filled with old sunlight, making their small places in the world among the ancient labyrinths. Innumerable corridors were flooded when the oceans were filled, and abandoned biological creations wander. The largest settlements maintain networks of lenses to pull sunlight down into their domains in order to keep away the dark. These cluster in groups and bands towards common goals or against common enemies. The most notable in recent years is lensless Arctown, where the secret of the electric originated and is kept. It glows blue in its spider’s web of copper cabling in fierce defiance of the Sun.
And so this is where the folk live their half-lit lives, forging memories into form. Those who survive their unlikely creation find comfort with others of their kind, working towards goals material or ideological. They break into innumerable cultures and sects, which split, merge, and re-interpret. All the while they grow older and stranger as they shape themselves and the world around them to suit.