Play Report: Dolmenwood Session 0

Run 2026/03/03 with 4 other players over Discord (as an exception).

Intro

Simply reading about Dolmenwood was one of the things that originally convinced me that TTRPGs could be cool. Make of this what you want, but it’s true. So I pledged late on Backerkit in February of 2025, and did so at the “Limited + Loot” tier, meaning I’d get a big cloth map I could give to my players, in addition to beautiful editions of the book. And then, I… waited.

Due to several factors conspiring, the Dolmenwood kickstarter took famously long to fulfill. And then, when it finally arrived in October, I didn’t have the capacity to run it.

But when the DM of our weekly in-person Shadowdark sandbox game recently got a new job which left him temporarily without enough time to continue running that game, I thought it might be a good chance to finally try out Dolmenwood with a group that’s already accustomed to its OSRish sensibilities.

So pretty much exactly one year after “ordering”, I finally got to run it. And even though I have encountered many, many more games since first reading about Dolmenwood that also convinced me that TTRPGs could be cool, I’m happy to report that Dolmenwood? Yeah… still pretty cool.

Meta

Besides the notes on new systems I play this year, I haven’t done any play reports on the games I’ve run in the past. But as a practice, it has always intrigued me. I like the idea of having this record of a collaboratively imagined world, even though I also see a lot of beauty in the fact that, on average, what happens at any given RPG table is very ephemeral, with no audience but the players themselves. But for this game, it somehow feels right.

I’ll try to keep a consistent structure, where any meta comments and information not found in the session itself is relegated to the intro and a “GM notes” section at the end. So that I can give the report of the actual session contents to players if they miss a session for example, without them getting spoiled.

Session Thoughts

Initially, I had planned on doing character creation in the first session of actual play. But then I got sick, and it was either cancelling the session or moving part of it online. So we did the character creation via Discord.

This turned out to be a happy little accident, since character creation took way longer than I had anticipated. Besides one solo session over a year ago, I haven’t really played any OSE or B/X myself, so I didn’t really have a good intuition for the process.

The players took very well to the randomness of it though, and we simply did 3D6 down the line, without any re-rolls, even though some of the stats were complete dogshit.

I decided early on that I’d like this campaign to be focused on discovering the world of Dolmenwood together, and that the initial roster of characters should come from somewhere outside Dolmenwood, travelling to Lankshorn in the first session.

To this end, I only allowed Humans as the kindred, with the other kindreds unlocking once the players encounter them in the game. This is a neat little trick I stole from our regular DM, who did the same for our Shadowdark campaign.

Even with these constraints in place, the process already involves a lot of Dolmenwood-specific lore, like languages, moon signs, etc.

Luckily, I had already started my immersion-process at that point. Having a generally very bad memory, especially when it comes to game rules and lore, I’m constantly creating Flashcards in Anki, which I then review as part of my daily spaced repetition habit. Without this, these parts of the character creation (and all of session 1) would’ve gone way less smoothly. With it, I was pretty confident in my knowledge of the broad strokes of factions, kindreds, places, etc. inside of Dolmenwood.

If you think that’s a bit much, I’m inclined to agree. But you also don’t know how bad my memory is, and how much worse it still gets in the heat of running a session. At this point, I have around 300 cards for only a small portion of the setting and rules, so lots more to come.

One part I didn’t expect is how far the human trinkets, backgrounds, and desires tables would carry us in firmly establishing pretty fleshed-out characters. Each of the players did absolutely incredible jobs coming up with characters that are fun, interesting, and above all, very playable. All using just the random rolls as inspiration and without producing pages upon pages of backstory.

Anyways, we ended up with the following four characters:

• Henrick Candleswick
  • A human cleric, who used to be a Dockhand (background), but was saved by the pluritine church, and now wants to repay his debt to them by banishing the undead creatures that are rumored to roam the north of Dolmenwood.
• Rowan Malksmilk
  • A human enchanter, who used to tend to her father. A great potter (background), who was slain in an incident Rowan can’t remember, but which left her deformed. A fairy sword was found by her father’s corpse (trinket), leading to rumours about her father doing shady dealings with a fairy. Now she wants to clear her family’s name (desire).
• Edmund Blackadder
  • A human magician, who used to be a stonemason (background). He’s a wannabe villain and desires to own his own secret underground lair (desire). He’s convinced fairies steal human souls.
• Bin Go
  • A human Hunter, who used to be a unicorn hunter (background). She’s coming to Dolmenwood to map all of its stones (desire).

Everyone rolled for a moon sign as well, which was a nice little foreshadowing of the role time records will play in this campaign.

At this point I can also say that I think the official Dolmenwood character sheet is a thing of beauty. Absolute top-notch design that does a great job of making a pretty complex set of data fun to look at, and even effortlessly supports two different methods of tracking encumbrance.

We had a few technical hiccups during the call, and I had sessions in the past which might have soured due to these small obstacles. Not so here. Everyone was very concentrated during the whole process and I left the call energised and looking forward to our first real session of play.

DM Notes

If you are a player in this campaign, stop here. Below there might be some spoilers!

So it probably speaks to my inexperience with running B/X-likes that we have two neutral characters, two chaotic ones, and zero that are lawful. Right now, I’m not expecting it to play a huge role during most of the campaign, but you never know. We’ll cross that bridge when we get there.

I also have a lot of respect for the sheer size and complexity of the setting, which basically requires me to learn its intricacies alongside my players. Hopefully, the setup where everyone is new to Dolmenwood will make that process feel a bit more natural, and allow me to more elegantly tape over any gaps in my knowledge at the times they arise.

Conclusion

Overall, I’m very excited to finally be able to dive into Dolmenwood this way. It’s such a beautiful setting that I think is able to appeal to a very wide range of tastes, spanning truly magical, fairy-tale-like imagery, while also preserving a lot of the weirdness that I love about OSE’s style in its affinities.

Aud frengd Hellr.