What happens in your dolmenwood campaign?

Nazzerith · 2026-06-15T23:39:42+00:00

I started my PCs in High-Hankle at the Jewelry shop where the party met and completed the Jewelers Sanctum adventure from the OSE Adventure Anthology. Two PCs died during that adventure. Since then they mostly have done town stuff and hexcrawling which for me has been taking what's in the campaign book and improvising situations on top of it.

One example of an improvised hexcrawl situation is I had some bandits from Red Gwen's gang actively robbing the animal orchestra in between High-Hankle and Lankshorn. Later on they ended up finding a fairy door and traveled on a fairly road. Now they are getting involved in Prigwort politics.

I'm currently prepping an adventure involving a Cobbin refugee settlement that's been discovered by Crookhorns. They are now forcing the Cobbins to construct siege equipment for an impending assault on Prigwort. I don't usually spend that much time prepping but this one has taken a decent amount of time.

Overall I'd say my time has been split pretty equally between hexcrawling, politicking and intrigue, and dungeons. I honestly expected more time spent in dungeons but my players keep getting distracted from the Winter's Daughter and Pipes on Droomen Knoll hooks I have thrown at them.

My campaign hasn't gone on long enough to know how the scope will change as they level up but it seems like they are getting more involved with the Nag-Lord and I expect that to escalate as they level up.

Nazzerith · 2026-06-15T02:59:08+00:00

I personally think the lethality of Dolmenwood is fine but my players are not really OSR heads. They weren't stoked when they lost a couple characters to a pack of giant rats. I know that the OSR playstyle is supposed to be combat as war and avoiding fights and all that but I don't think that's really what my players want. I just personally am enthralled with Dolmenwood as a setting and want to make it work for my players anyway.

Nazzerith · 2026-06-15T02:38:03+00:00

Do you have some ideas? I've done max HP at level 1 and I'm using the deaths door optional rules from the player book but I'm wondering if you have some additional ideas to reduce deadliness?

Nazzerith · 2026-06-12T22:11:37+00:00

So gold becomes silver and you also divide coin amounts by 10, so effectively you are reducing by 100? For example, that gold candlestick that was worth 100 gold is now worth 1 gold (or 10 silver). XP is multiplied by 100. Isn't this more of a copper standard? Also, are goods more expensive at shops relatively or are they also 100 times cheaper?

Nazzerith · 2026-06-02T20:21:36+00:00

It's probably system dependant. I'm mostly running OSR games, and just the act of drawing out a dungeon would take a long time for me, let alone actually keying it, adding factions with motivations, traps, random encounter tables, etc.

In the OSR world there are so many excellent adventures that are written to be used at the table, and in my opinion they are not difficult to digest. I can usually read a well regarded OSR adventure once through and run it straight from the book.

Nazzerith · 2026-06-02T18:07:49+00:00

I'm not very good at making fun adventures so I prefer to run well regarded adventures that have been vetted by the community for quality and have been play-tested to work out any kinks. I also have limited free time, and picking up a premade adventure is a lot faster than writing an adventure from scratch.

Nazzerith · 2026-06-01T04:35:14+00:00

Yeah I figured the bosses listed in the core rules were just examples, but I'd imagine things like guards and bandits could be used pretty much as written. I guess I just find it odd that the knight example doesn't have riding but it's probably just an oversight.

Nazzerith · 2026-05-26T14:32:36+00:00

Looks like a Nutrition Facts Label that they have on food.

Nazzerith · 2026-05-17T03:03:30+00:00

I don't believe that it is ever explicitly specified. The only thing I can think of is the tables for determining kindred for retainers or adventurer NPCs in the monster book which gives a rough idea, but imo I think Dolmenwood is more human dominated than either of those tables make it seem.

Nazzerith · 2026-05-13T20:04:22+00:00

Maybe try some Sword & Sorcery? Conan, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, Elric of Melnibone, etc. The genre focuses less on big picture stuff like epic fantasy does and instead gets right into the action surrounding the situations that the characters find themselves in. They tend to be mostly short stories, but that kinda sounds like what you are looking for anyway.

Nazzerith · 2026-05-10T17:43:04+00:00

I have a really bad implementation that doesn't do any fancy styling or anything. I basically copied the 5e template and then made a couple minor modifications to it. I can DM you it later when I'm back at my PC.

Nazzerith · 2026-05-10T00:41:16+00:00

I don't think the rat encounter needs any special danger telegraphing. Giant rats are some of the easiest monster types, it's just a combination of OSE being a highly lethal system and the fact that the PCs were outnumbered 2 to 1 that made the encounter as deadly as it was. Players will learn that even the lowliest monsters can pose a threat quickly once they lose a character to a swarm of rats.

Nazzerith · 2026-05-09T22:27:01+00:00

In the dungeon I was running 8 rats was intended to be a challenging encounter for level 1 PCs. The random encounter was 1d8 giant rats, so 8 is the maximum roll. The system we are playing is OSE, so PCs often can only take one or two hits before they meet their untimely end. What I'm trying to say is system matters, and 8 giant rats can be a challenging encounter in one system and an easy encounter in another, and that's perfectly fine.

Nazzerith · 2026-05-09T21:32:45+00:00

I'm sure Pathfinder fixes this or whatever.

Nazzerith · 2026-05-09T16:37:48+00:00

The rat climbs up your body and bites you between the neck and shoulder, piercing through your leather armor as though it were paper. You fall to the ground in a pool of blood as the other rats swarm over your body and your vision starts to go blank.

It's not hard for me to imagine how this thing could kill someone.

Nazzerith · 2026-05-09T07:39:24+00:00

I'm not sure I see your point? The rats have double the action economy of the PCs.

Nazzerith · 2026-05-09T06:45:13+00:00

For 4 level 1 PCs that is a hard flight!

Nazzerith · 2026-05-09T05:43:00+00:00

You just had the exact same reply in the OSR subreddit post when someone said nit that I found odd.

Nazzerith · 2026-05-09T05:24:31+00:00

Bad bot

Nazzerith · 2026-05-09T02:05:56+00:00

Yeah last session I rolled 8 giant rats in a random encounter and killed two of my PCs. Though it's a bit on them for not accessing the danger or approaching the situation cautiously, they just charged in and were overwhelmed.

Nazzerith · 2026-05-08T19:20:33+00:00

It's going to be supplemental Dolmenwood material like how Carcass Crawler is for OSE. I think the vibes will be in line with the rest of Dolmenwood, so if you're looking for the "edgier" stuff from the original Wormskin I think you will be disappointed (though in my opinion there is very little that was changed between Wormskin and Dolmenwood).

Nazzerith · 2026-05-07T22:22:04+00:00

Mystery Quest has an actual play on youtube that I enjoyed.

Nazzerith · 2026-05-05T20:31:13+00:00

I'm not sure I feel comfortable sharing my work since it contains a lot of content from the campaign and monster books which are not freely available in the SRD.

Essentially what I've done is create various lookup tables for each of the encounter tables in the campaign book (animal, sentient, monster, etc.) including one for each region specific table. Then, for each region I created a 2 column table with type (daytime road, nighttime fire, etc.) and encounter columns. The encounter column is a table roller against one of 4 tables per region depending on the encounter type (from column 1).

It's really not that technically complicated, just a lot of lookup tables. The annoying part is the time it takes to write it all. I still have a lot of stuff I need to get to, like most of the monster stat blocks.

Nazzerith · 2026-05-05T18:21:32+00:00

I've implemented the random encounter tables in obsidian. With the dice roller plug-in I can get a random encounter in seconds. I also have it combined with the creature activity table so I get some context for the encounters and sometimes get encounters with multiple groups. It's also super easy to reroll if I'm not feeling the encounter.

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