Aryngrave - A Retrospective
Recently my first Old-School campaign came to a close, rather sooner than intended but alas, that is the way of things sometimes. In all we played around 12 sessions over the course of a few months, and I wanted to talk a bit about what I learned over the course of running the game.
The first thing I learned is I need less than I thought. This is common advice you hear across TTRPGs in general, but particularly in the OSR sphere where sandbox games are very prevalent "start small, you only need a couple of locations." WeirdWriter has a brilliant post on exactly this topic, outlining the basics of setting up such a sandbox game; and Mr Mann made a response to this where he actually goes through the steps WeirdWriter talks about and demonstrates them. Both of these were extremely helpful to me in getting into a good mindset for setting up my first game.
However, while I knew and understood the advice on a rational level, I did not follow it. Not out of a sense of "I know better than them" but because understanding good advice and actually having the experience of creating a larger play area than you need before starting are two different things. Over the course of those 12 sessions I played with my group, we used the following: 1 town, 1 dungeon, 4 hexes, 1 encounter table, and 1 rumour table. To better illustrate how little of my setting this was, I've attached the map of the island I created for the game.
I really did not need something of such scope for this game. At the rate we were getting through things I think we probably could have played for 2 or 3 years and not explored all of the island. A hex flower of either 19 or 37 hexes would have been more than enough for a year or more of play. And the advice in the posts linked above is absolutely true, you need very little to get started. And I'll certainly be keeping that in mind for future games.
The second thing I learned is that I need more than I thought. "Hang on," you may be thinking "didn't they just say the exact opposite?" Yes, reader, yes I did. While it's true that in terms of scale and number of locations, I need far less than I started with, what I needed more of was detail. Because of the scale of map I started with and the number of locations I made before the game started, they lacked detail and depth. Everything was spread very thin, and what this meant was I ended up needing to improvise a lot of stuff I wasn't really comfortable with improvising. I felt like I was constantly in a frantic state of laying down the tracks ahead of my players, and that was uncomfortable.
Now, certainly I don't want to know absolutely everything ahead of time, because I enjoy being surprised and I think my games would be too rigid. But I do want to drill deeper on the things I create ahead of a campaign and set up structures that help me improvise things at the table when needed. I had lots of stuff but none of it was very robust and most of it felt disparate, which was unsatisfying to me as referee.
I've read some great blog posts to this end, and have a short list of things I want to try out:
- Retired Adventurer's Encounter Grid caught my attention recently. In my first campaign I used Nick LS Whelan's 2d6 Encounter Table Structure which I really enjoyed, but felt like I needed a little something more to spice things up a bit. Using these two in combination with each other should give me a very robust encounter table that has longevity and diverse encounter types.
- Elmcat has a great post on Faction Turns which I really like the look of as a more structured approach to factions and kind of turns faction turns into a game of its own. I felt my own approach to factions was a little lacking and too loose for my own tastes.
- Another post I liked a lot from Elmcat was this one on Downtime which provides a robust yet simple procedure for handling downtime. For a future closed table game I will probably give this a try!
- However, if I end up running an open table game, as seems likely, I will probably go with Colours of Pentagrams' Naively Simple Downtime Actions as a way to provide structure while keeping things lightweight and easy to manage with a potentially larger pool of players.
The third thing I learned is to create things I'm excited by. When I set up this campaign I wanted to create something that felt classic and accessible, which I do think was a boon to both myself and my players. It gave us a common language to work with, we all understood what classic fantasy was and what it looked like. However there were definitely times where it felt somewhat bland to me, and while I was excited to run sessions for my players, the content of them wasn't especially thrilling to me. So next time I'm going to give myself the freedom to push the boat out a bit and play with some less vanilla ideas, and let myself get excited about them.
While there's certainly more I learned from the campaign, I think that about covers the major things that are worth talking about. Overall I had a great time running the game and I'm excited to see what comes next. For the next few weeks I'll be running some Mothership for my group which should be a nice breath of fresh air, but what comes after that is up in the air currently.
Until next time folks, peace!