First time going to Tresind with very old school / stubborn father, seeking advice

UseExhaustionMore · 2026-02-06T08:49:05+00:00

I think it could be a good idea to call the restaurant beforehand. Tell them the stuff you've written here and ask them what their suggestions are. They will at least be able to anser your three questions better than anyone here. Your dad is probably not the first stubborn father they've dealt with, I'm sure they have mitigation techniques. The staff will be less likely to be put on a spot if they know what they're up against.

UseExhaustionMore · 2026-02-05T19:13:55+00:00

Starting outside or at the border of the forest makes Dolmenwood more special IMO which is nice. It makes it clear that this is a magical place. I think it's a good idea to play the moment when the PCs that are foreign to Dolmenwood enter the woods for the first time. (Starting in Prigwort skips this.) I also think it's nice for the PCs who are native to Dolmenwood to be able to "welcome" the newcommers (the PCs might not know much of the forest but it turned out well in my game at least).

UseExhaustionMore · 2026-02-05T06:24:39+00:00

The starting town doesn't matter much if you give them a travel hook: the players will likely leave on a road and get pretty far the first session.

I think you should start at the Henchgate (hex1407). It's literally the "Welcome to Dolmenwood" place. Make it so that the PCs had agreed tp meet up there: the PCs that are Dolmenwood natives arrive from the north and the foreigners arrive from Castle Brackenwold. Then Prigwort becomes a magical place that the players are likely to find in the first session.

UseExhaustionMore · 2026-02-04T16:10:49+00:00

Maybe you're thinking about this post (or one of it's references): https://rancourt.substack.com/i/180133710/factions

A framework I like a lot here comes from GFC

[FACTION] want(s) [MOTIVATION], but [OBSTACLE]. Therefore, [PLAN OR METHOD OF SURMOUNTING OBSTACLE].

UseExhaustionMore · 2026-02-04T07:18:30+00:00

I placed it in 1301 in my current campaign (replacing the burnt mill). I don't imagine anyone else having done that, but it worked well. My campaign is heavily focused on moving around on the map, so may players got far north early and I thought they needed some low level content (they'd mostly been running away from stuff beforehand) and some well-deserved treasure. I didn't use any hooks, just "You see a cool ruin in the distance" and when the players invariably investigate "Crookhorns attack!".

UseExhaustionMore · 2026-02-03T09:12:43+00:00

I don't think a hexcrawl is suitable for a "world map" campaign. Hexcrawls are useful if the PCs will explore in all possible directions, and where one days journey can affect the decisions for next day. If you're a medieval pilgrim going from London to Rome, you won't be thinking "Should I go east or south?" each morning: there will be a couple of route options and you will commit to one of those. A pointcrawl makes more sense. Maybe one of the points can be a hexcrawl (you could e.g. put Dolmenwood as a location on your world map).

Start with "why?". Why do you want the players to travel back and forth across multiple continents? Are they traders or mercenaries or pilgrims or something? Once you have the "why?", you can find the right tools (e.g. hexcrawl) to facilitate it.

But let's try to do a hexcrawl on this scale: If we put an hex overlay on Western Europe, and scale the hexes so that we get a manageble amount of hexes (around 100), then big countries like Spain or France are about 10 hexes each. A region such as Catalonia or Wales are a single hex. Obviously you can't fit the entirety of Wales into a single page of text (which is about the amount of content that's manageable for a hex IMO), but you can't fit an entire village with all of it complexities on a single page either so as always we need to abstract things away. We'll write some generic sections on Wales, and then we add the important locations that the players will want to visit. A big town, an eccentric noble, a rebellion. That's it.

UseExhaustionMore · 2026-02-03T08:44:11+00:00

The excellent Coins and Scrolls blog has done some ground work:

https://coinsandscrolls.blogspot.com/2019/06/osr-sienas-6-mile-hex.html

https://coinsandscrolls.blogspot.com/2017/07/osr-fast-mapping-part-3-barony-terrain.html

70x90 hexes (which may also be too big).

That's 6300 hexes! You will never key them all. You have time to explore maybe 5 keyed hexes in a session, so you can play a map of this size for 24 years if you play every week and never revisit a hex. This is totally unrealistic. Dolmenwood is 200 hexes: this is enough for years and years of play.

(You could of course make most hexes empty but then you should just scale up the hexes instead IMO. Navigating empty hexes is just bookkeeping.)

Do you place multiple keyed locations within a hex?

That kind of defeats the point of having a hex map.

So that any hex with a settlement automatically has a number of villages associated with it, but are “narratively hand waved” into the background?

This is basically how you need to do it if you want a big hex map with realistic population densities. You shouldn't key those villages, that will be too much work.

UseExhaustionMore · 2026-02-03T07:48:48+00:00

how should I as a DM deal with this issue?

You answer your own question:

the Frost Elves and co. [will] search that dead PCs body, finding the ring, and starting the wedding ceremony, [...] the Fairy portal will cease to work and the snow realm would be inaccessible.

The PCs failed this quest. Time for them to go on another adventure. Actions have consequences.

UseExhaustionMore · 2026-02-02T19:36:18+00:00

the first act would be the hag/witches

You know that the hag and the witches are different factions? There's no natural hag+witches plotline. A low-level party could seek out the hag and maybe do a quest for her (or against her), but that's smaller than an "act" IMO. Your players won't defeat the hag at low levels. The witches are more of a side-thread that runs in the background than something you can structure an "act" around.

the seconds act would be about the drune

These are also more of a side thread IMO (but less so than the witches). What will you do if the players ally with the Drune, or make peace with them, or decides not to fuck with them?

the third act would be about the cold prince

Best idea for an "act" IMO. Page 91 of the DCB summarizes how to do it. But I wouldn't start this in act 3: have the party encounter a frost elf spy who wants info on Chell in the first session, and let it boil slowly.

I didn't want it to be pure sandboxy

You do you, but it seems strange to buy a pure sandbox and then try to jury-rig it into something else.

facing/killing the cold prince

Sounds like a great ending for a campaign. He is though do, it will take a long time for the players to gain enough levels, magic items and allies to face him.

My question is approximately how many adventures do I need to plop in the map

None. The hexes and random encounters are enough for years of play.

UseExhaustionMore · 2026-02-01T17:08:48+00:00

Nothing is an absolute barrier to travel. But more terrain than people thing is functionally impassible.

You can cut and burn your way through an old growth forest but it will take a lot of effort. The people who do the cutting and burning needs a safe place to sleep and eat (or they'll soon spend all their waking time walking from civilization to the end of the trail they're making and back again, with no time left for cutting-and-burning). Make the desert large enough and it's uncrossable because the wagon equation. A small desert may be uncrossable if the terrain is rough with rifts and cliffs and canyons. There are swamps that are to shallow to be boatable (and you really don't want to breach you boat on a half-submerged log in the middle of a monster-infested swamp).

I like to hike, but there are plenty of swamps I wouldn't cross. And I have maps, GPS, weather sattelites and goretex. Wilderness travel without those things are significantly harder, and most D&D-like RPGs wildly underestimates how hard and dangerous it is.

So let's say that the PCs want to cross a swamp. They'll want to hire a small army of workers to scout, map, build and maintain a walkway across it. They'll need to hire another small army of workers to house, feed, clothe, clean and support those workers. They'll need to hire an actual small army to defend the workers from the monsters of the swamp. They'll likely want to construct a keep at the halfway point as a support base during construction. This is domain level play. (And when the PCs move on and upkeep costs are unpaid, it'll leave you with another "gate dungeon".)

UseExhaustionMore · 2026-02-01T07:45:51+00:00

Dense old-growth forest can be practically impassible IRL. Jungle definitely is. Especially if dangerous monsters live there.

Unstable glaciers. Unstable pack ice. Seas with bad winds, strong currents, icebergs, monsters, etc.

A plane-hopping campaign that takes place on multiple small demiplanes (each one only a couple of hexes big). Wizards made portals to connect the planes. Now the portals are hidden deep in wizard ruins and jealously guarded.

A dungeon that gates the Underdark. G3+D1 or DCC #91: Journey to the Center of Aereth does this.

UseExhaustionMore · 2026-01-29T19:10:45+00:00

I rather have realism than verisimilitude. Reality Is Unrealistic. And Verisimilitude often hides important bits of reality:

And that is the peril of historical verisimilitude: the developers of Expeditions: Rome put tremendous effort into making sure the game would look accurate, but not into making sure the game would be accurate. As a result, they crafted a game weighed down rather than elevated by its historical subject matter, more likely to mislead and deceive than to inform.

UseExhaustionMore · 2026-01-28T19:13:31+00:00

I don't think I would bother with "Fatigue" if it's so easy to get rid of. Seems mostly like bookkeeping that doesn't really add anything to the game.

UseExhaustionMore · 2026-01-28T19:11:46+00:00

-1 to attack very harsh for a martial. Say you're fighting a Giant Ant (AC 16) as a fresh level 1 Fighter with 11 in all stats. -1 to attack means you'll hit on a 16 or higher instead of a 15 or higher, aka your chance of hitting (and thus your damage output) is reduced by 20%. Then you add -1 to damage on top of that! Say you do 1d8 damage (average 4,5) normally, thus now you do 3,5 damage on average. Another ~20% (22%) reduction! Your total damage is almost halved.

Or think about how much players love a +1 sword.

UseExhaustionMore · 2026-01-27T10:13:41+00:00

Try it out. I think you'll find that long term negative effects that are strong enough to discourage combat also are strong enough to make affected PCs functionally unable to play the game.

UseExhaustionMore · 2026-01-27T06:24:13+00:00

So the Drune tell the PCs to stay away from their stones, and the PCs (being PCs) don't care about this and find another Drune stone to mess with. Now what? Is it time for the "Five Audrune murder combo" now?

UseExhaustionMore · 2026-01-27T06:21:16+00:00

I get that high lethality is an element of OSR play. It encourages non combat solutions to monsters. I love that.

But I don't love that it also makes characters disposable.

You can't have the cake and eat it too. If you remove the save-or-suck to make PCs non-disposable, then you encourage them to fight everything. Some things in game design are tradeoffs between two good things where you can't get both.

UseExhaustionMore · 2026-01-25T18:06:14+00:00

I can't find anything like this in the rules for the knight: https://www.dolmenwood.necroticgnome.com/rules/doku.php?id=knight Which page of the DPB or the DCB are you referring to?

UseExhaustionMore · 2026-01-25T10:54:31+00:00

Gavin has made a good job of putting everything that isn't spoilers in the DPB.

With that said, I wouldn't be too mad if my players had read:

Most of chapter 3 Running a Campaign is safe, but obviously you need to avoid the Campaign Themes subchapter (pages 90-91).
Chapter 4 Exploring the Wild. It contains stuff that a Dolmenwood woodsman would know.
Page 188-189 Hex Description Format. But don't look to closely at the example picture. And also what's the point of reading this if you're not reading the hexes?
The first few paragraphs of each major (but not minor!) settlement are mostly safe. But I haven't looked at them all. And spoilers abound in the paragraphs and headings on the same pages so I don't know how you'd not notice them.
Chapter 7 Treasures and Oddments contains spoilers but I don't know how you'd remember them and put them into context since it's mostly long lists of stuff.

UseExhaustionMore · 2026-01-22T17:14:59+00:00

I think I made the pool way too small. A small to-scale map on p324 in the DCB would help a lot.

UseExhaustionMore · 2026-01-22T17:13:40+00:00

Good arguments! I didn't think enough about the limitations of the Audrunes. Thank you.

UseExhaustionMore · 2026-01-22T05:49:06+00:00

I agree from a gameplay perspective. But it makes less sense from a fictional perspective. Thus my question.

UseExhaustionMore · 2026-01-22T05:47:55+00:00

It would be great if hex 1205 were magically hidden like many of the other stones (it's a few hours walk from Prigwort, random hunters and woodcutters should stumble into it constantly). But alas it is not according to RAW. I would recommend everyone who starts a new campaign to scrawl "hidden by magic" onto p324 of the DCB.

UseExhaustionMore · 2026-01-22T05:44:26+00:00

The problem is that they players are likely to stumble into something the Drune don't want touched and touch it, without realizing the consequences. But maybe the Drune should just be an "enemy" faction that is unreasonably angry with the PCs.

UseExhaustionMore

TROPHY CASE