Dungeon Merlin
Run 2026/03/10 with 4 other players in person.
Characters present: Bin Go, Edmund Blackadder, Henrick Candleswick, Rowan Malksmilk
In-Game time covered: Morning of Colly, 1st of Symswald - ~11:00 PM of same day.
Player-Safe Session Report
If you are a player in this campaign, don’t click on the footnotes!
The game started with the characters all finding themselves on the back of a cart, riding into the High Wold from the south. They were travelling together for the first time, so after giving the players a quick description of their surroundings, we started with everyone describing their character from the outside. 12
Afterwards, I described how they rode through High-Ankle, giving them a glimpse of what they could find there, then continuing onto the swallop road to the east, taking them through the high hedges of the High Wold.
The first real interactive scene came when their mute carter stopped the cart at a shrine by the roadside, a bit more than halfway between High-Ankle and Lankshorn. On inspection, this shrine revealed itself to be a shrine dedicated to King Pusskin, asking any travellers to leave a tribute in the form of milk or mice. The mute carter then revealed that he was offering small bottles of milk for them to buy.
The players being players, none of them took him up on his offer. Bin Go the hunter decided to try and hunt for mice in the surrounding bushes. We decided this would be modelled by a Hunting Survival Check, which she aced. So in the end, she was the only character who left anything at the shrine.
Afterwards, I had the players reveal their character backgrounds and why they came to Dolmenwood. This is the stuff I already wrote about in the session 0 report.
With this, everyone was up to speed and ready for their first encounter. 3
The cart suddenly stopped, with a goatish creature about 40 feet away with its back to the players up ahead. Edmund decided to try to talk to it by shouting something in Caprice — the language of Breggle nobility, but all that did was draw attention from the Devil Goat they were facing. 4
By turning towards the cart, the goat revealed a unicorn corpse it was biting chunks out of on the road in front of it. 5
At this point, the carter was cowering behind his cart, but Henrick’s survival instinct kicked in, and he took the reins of the two horses in front of the cart. Without anything in his background suggesting that riding a cart during a stressful situation was among his skills, we decided to see what the dice were saying about this. I think we modelled it as a Dexterity check, which he passed, but only barely.
While driving the cart around the goat in the road, the goat got to use its evil gaze on Henrick, causing him to flee in terror for 5 turns. To him, this meant abandoning the cart and jumping off mid-ride, causing 1d4 damage, which he rolled a 4 on, leaving him with just 1 HP.
During the ensuing fight, the rest of the party managed to keep the goat away from him though, finally defeating it mostly using Bin Go’s archery skills.
Afterwards, they decided to load the carcasses of both the goat as well as the unicorn up onto the cart and continue their journey to Lankshorn.
Along the way, a young Breggle boy named Ghrend hopped on the wagon, telling them that he’s on his way home to Lankshorn as well 6. They asked him a lot of questions, he answered them. Henrick told him to go to church, he said he would if Henrick also came next Sunning (Dolmenwood’s version of Sunday) — of course he would. Most players hated him for being a know-it-all, which was perfect.
Before arriving in Lankshorn proper, the party decided to ask Ghrend for a place to hide the two carcasses they were transporting, so that the townsfolk wouldn’t be immediately weirded out by them. They stashed them in some bushes by the town’s graveyard. 7
Finally in Lankshorn, they headed directly for the Hornstoat’s Inn, meeting its proprietor as well as the local sage, who ended up giving Bin Go a bit of info on where unicorns and stones could be found in Dolmenwood, as well as — and probably more importantly — an old map of Dolmenwood. 8
Two local constables arrived, loudly talking about Crookhorn-sightings on Droomen Knoll, about 10km to the north-east of Lankshorn.
Finally, Rowan learned that there was a local bladesmith who might know something about the fairy sword that slew her father, so she decided to buy a bottle of the cheapest spirit available and headed there at 11PM. Arriving, she started to hammer at his door and shouted that she needed someone to drink with.
We ended the session with her hearing footsteps of two people coming down the road, and the bladesmith finally opening his first floor window to see what all the ruckus is about. 9
DM Notes
Overall, I was super happy with how this session went. Here are a few behind the scenes thoughts:
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As I said in my report on session 0, my goal for this campaign was that the players’ characters would be exploring Dolmenwood for the first time the same way we the players are. So all characters would be coming from the world beyond Dolmenwood, travelling to Lankshorn on the same cart during session 1. So I knew going in that this first session would be both a bit more on rails than future ones, as well as not an especially exciting in medias res. Instead, I wanted to have something like Gandalf’s cart-ride through the Shire as the opening. A bit of a risky opening, as it could’ve easily been extremely boring for the players, but one that simply felt right to me, so I decided to go for it. ↩
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Unbeknownst to the players, I decided that I’d use RedMageGM’s map that combines many of the most well known OSR adventures and settings into one big world map, as the map for the world beyond Dolmenwood. So if they ever decide to leave Dolmenwood for any reason, I’ll have this giant map to place in front of them. ↩
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This encounter was actually pre-planned by me. It actually took me a long time to decide what I would put in front of the players at this point. For the longest time I thought it would be two Crookhorns that were supposed to have wandered here from Droomen Knoll, foreshadowing that quest a bit. But in the end I decided to go with something different, leading to a higher variety of encounters, assuming they were going on to actually do the Pipes on Droomen Knoll quest. Thus I ended up simply picking the coolest-sounding encounter in the High Wold encounter table. ↩
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Here I actually forgot that the monster book explicitly states that Devil Goats possess a basic understanding of Caprice. Probably one of my most regretful blunders. It would’ve just been such an amazing coincidence that this actually worked. ↩
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I got this from the d4 Encounters table for the Devil Goat in the monster book. These encounter tables are so incredibly useful. I used this one specifically because one of Bin Go’s goals was to hunt down a specific unicorn. ↩
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I created this character specifically as a kind of free-talking tutorial character they could drill with any first questions about Dolmenwood they had. This is something I picked up from the first two seasons of Quinns’ Play to Find Out podcast, realising that structurally, they both begin with the characters in a mostly unfamiliar world. ↩
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And so the first clock was started. I made a note here to research how fast large animals decompose during springtime. ↩
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At this point, I handed them both the player-facing cloth map of Dolmenwood as well as the empty hex map for the first time. I think pushing this moment so far into the first session worked well. ↩
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Actually, because we’re using Dolmenwoods optional rules for inebration, and the spirit Rowan chose to buy has the effect of “bringing on a state of rampant disorientation” (and because had taken a sip at this point (AND had failed her consitution check)) I decided to roll a navigation check for her. She actually passed that, but I didn’t tell her, and in the end, she couldn’t really be sure where she was. ↩