Dolmenwood Campaign Goals & Bib- and Blogliography

But doctor, I am Blogliography.

If you are a player in this campaign, you probably want to skip this post!

This post is the second in my series of play reports on our current campaign of Dolmenwood. It’s not a real report though, but basically an interim post between the session 0 and 1 reports. Kind of like a session 0.5, I guess. Here, I want to talk about a few things in a centralised place that would otherwise be littered across a lot of the following reports, but wouldn’t really fit there, as they don’t relate to a particular session and I’d rather keep the session reports as focussed as possible.

In this post, I want to talk about two things: my goals as a DM for the campaign, as well as blog posts, materials, and maybe even books that I used during preparation and will probably continue to use throughout the campaign.

Goals

So with this campaign, I’ll be doing a lot of new-to-me things already anyways. As I said in my session 0 report, it’s my first time running a B/X-like. And if I’m entirely honest with myself, it’s probably the first time I’ll be running a true “OSR campaign” (please don’t ask me what that means), and not a trad or neo-trad one onto which I grafted OSR procedures like an oozing tumour (please don’t ask me what any of this means either). I have certainly run OSR games in the past, but not campaigns. So simply doing that is kind of like the implied goal number one here.

Still, I wanted to write down a few things I’d like to keep in mind when preparing and running sessions, kind of as reminders to myself throughout the process. What follows is a bit of an edited down, editorialised view of a very chaotic list of bullet points that lives inside the Obsidian vault which I created specifically for this campaign. In it, there’s a note called “Campaign Goals” that, among other things, contains these notes in no particular order:

• Make good use of factions
  • Use faction turns
• Keep strict time records
  • Use a calendar yourself
  • Give one to the players for them to keep
  • Use timers/clocks as much as possible
• Get better at prepping and playing NPCs
  • Actively think about using them for world building
  • Stay with them for a bit
    • But also find better ways to end conversations
• Make resources count
  • Torches, Rations, Inventory Space, Time, Information
• Let players make their own dungeon maps
  • But only abstract ones
• Make settlements feel alive
  • Use NPC miens
  • Use settlement events
• Make languages count
  • Not speaking a language should be a problem players need to solve
  • Make player draw, gesticulate, etc.
    • Do the same when playing the NPC on the other side!
  • Remember that languages can have both positive and negative social implications
• Present the settings as it’s written as much as possible
  • Because this is my first time experiencing it as well
    • … and deviating from something in ways you don’t know the implications of can lead to a lot of extra work I don’t have the time for right now
  • Might just be my OCD though
• Always keep TUNIC (Time Until Next Impactful Choice) and the ICI (Information, Choice, Impact) doctrine in mind
• Accept that the players won’t know (or care about) what’s going on as much as you do
  • Use this fact to take some of the pressure off

In the real document, there are a few more small ones. But I think these are the important ones.

As you can see, many of these act more as guiding principles or value statements, as well as reminders. Listing them doesn’t mean I haven’t used them in the past, just that I want to pay particular attention to them here.

I’m fully aware that I won’t be able to always adhere to all of them at all times. But in the end, I’d like to be able to say that the influence of most of these was felt in most of the cases they were relevant.

Bib- and Blogliography

There are always a bunch of blog posts I read, of course. And all of them might influence the way I play and run RPGs in subtle ways spontaneously and at all times. But I thought it might make sense to list a few that are obvious heavy-hitters when it comes to this campaign in particular, to trace my influences.

• All of elmcat’s Dolmenwood posts on factions, settlements, and calendars
  • Probably the most obvious ones. elmcat has done an absolutely amazing job of expanding Dolmenwood’s factions and settlements and turning his legwork into useful resources.
    • Honestly, the faction turns should probably all be part of the core books.
• Patchwork Paladin’s Dolmenwood resources
  • Useful tools, like cheat sheets. But even if you don’t plan on using these, it’s worth your time to take a look at how she’s applying The Lazy Dungeon Master steps to Dolmenwood here.
• d4 Caltrop’s Dolmenwood Dozen
  • While the official modules for Dolmenwood all seem very cool, the simple fact is that there’s only four of them, and they’re all very long. So I will definitely use some of these lairs to drop a quick, small adventure in front of the players on occasion.
• Chris McDowall’s classic post on the ICI Doctrine
  • Probably obvious from the goals above.
• A Knight at the Opera’s “Navigation Games”
  • This is how I’ll handle player mapping in this campaign.
  • Funnily enough, it’s more or less exactly what we had just arrived at in our Shadowdark campaign before switching to Dolmenwood for the time being.
    • There, it was mostly evolutionary pressure from having to otherwise meticulously map a woods-dungeon.
• Grinning Rat’s “Languages and Frictionless Design”
  • The “last” in a line of posts on languages (all linked in its opening), that all influence how I like to approach languages in this campaign.
    • Though I’ll skip the mechanical implementations for now. Just want to keep in mind that languages can be used as all kinds of problems to put in front of the players.
• To Distant Lands’ “Zelda-Style NPC Personalities”
  • Dolmenwood is actually incredibly good at providing NPCs that are super playable with just the smallest amount of prep (and even that’s mostly due to the fact that I have to translate their info in advance, to not be fishing for the German words at the table constantly).
    • But the advice that NPCs should probably be “extremely on their bullshit” has seared itself into my mind for the times I have to come up with my own.
• A bunch of posts that influenced my thinking about running NPCs and the roles they may play in the world. Among many others:
  • Social Contracts Shall Be Splintered by Amanda P.
  • Building an Interesting World through NPCs by Hopeful Weird Wonder
  • Bastion is People by Chris McDowall
• Landmark, Hidden, Secret by DIY & dragons
  • Probably don’t need to say anything about this, other than that I’ll try to always keep its principles in mind
    • … but did I tell you that Anne’s my next door neighbour in the rootring? How cool is that?
• The Dododecahedron’s “The OSR Onion”
  • This is probably what’s behind my intention to present the setting as it’s written as much as is reasonable. The OSR onion says that the adventure is at the core of everything, and in the case of Dolmenwood, the setting is part of the adventure.
• Sam Sorensen’s “Three-Question Taxonomy”
  • Just to constantly remind myself of what exactly it is we’re doing.
• Viridian Void Productions on “Bottom-up organization for RPG notes”
  • Pretty much the way I organise my notes in Obsidian. (Though in general I probably allow myself a bit more unearned, top-down structure than Noel does.)
• Hobgoblin’s Dolmenwood Session reports and Blog of Forlorn Encystment’s AD&D 2e Play Reports
  • As inspirations for this series.
  • When I thought about starting to write these play reports, these were the first examples I found when checking Prismatic Waystation.
    • That doesn’t mean that I would’ve used the first thing I found if I didn’t think they were good though. I actually really enjoy both of these!
• Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master by Sly Flourish
  • At last, a book!
  • Yes, it’s mostly aimed at more traditional forms of play. But its principles of prioritising your prep by how much it will help you to improvise is something that influenced almost everything I do when prepping.
  • And I’ll always have an index card with a bunch of rumours and secrets on it.

There are, of course, many more posts, books, etc. that I will come back to or that will have an influence on me during this campaign. But this isn’t supposed to be an Appendix N, and parts of the ones above can very directly be found in either my goals above, or the way I prep for each session.

Finally, if you know of, or have written, a post (or book, or resource), that should be on this list, please send it to me!