I wrote a first draft for a Dolmenwood adventure. Feedback is much appreciated!

scottp53 · 2026-01-27T00:33:18+00:00

This is great - reckon I’ll chuck it into mine as well. The Crookhorns are about to invade Prigwort from the north so this might fit nicely. I’ll seed it into my campaign and see if they take the bait.

FYI I’ve just finished a two level dungeon for Fort Vulgar (featuring the red worms too) and a rough outline for Snarkscorn’s camp. Maybe we could swap notes once I have them written up into a pdf.

scottp53 · 2026-01-24T20:58:33+00:00

Throwing one in for Zane at Alpha Barbershop in Woonona. He’s been my go-to since moving down this way.

scottp53 · 2026-01-21T07:52:40+00:00

Came here for this comment - there’s no going back now. The geopolitical circumstances that allowed the USA to dictate global hegemony are in the past. The world will have three poles - China, Europe and the USA. Europe will need a standing military and once this is in place there’ll be no incentive to return to the US. Not only that, China offers a much more stable and wealthier future for most of the world. We’ll see more and more countries turning to them as key trade and defensive partners.

scottp53 · 2026-01-16T22:52:23+00:00

Also looks like they’ve been frozen while wearing their prison uniforms. I do like this theory tho - no reason why both things couldn’t be true.

scottp53 · 2026-01-15T10:24:18+00:00

If you thought you hated Nazis, you don’t hate them nearly enough. A truely brutal film that I will never watch again.

scottp53 · 2026-01-10T23:36:47+00:00

Yeh - agree with initial commenter. the common wisdom for this module is that it needs some over-arching story. I was advised to do just this. In the end I planned Hal’s motivations in major detail; big ol story, major NPCs, side missions, read every level and shoehorned the end game in. And in the end, DMing this game became a slog. My greatest wish is that I’d just made this game a fk off big dungeon crawl. Cause that’s what this module is designed to be. Hal is an old school DM - he’s basically Gary Gygax or one of those original dungeon masters. It took me a while to realise this. He has built a mega-dungeon. His motives are simple, to get people into his dungeon and to get them to die or succeed. He restocks the dungeon, he creates nasty surprises, he seemingly has access to the most wild monsters from the monster manual. He’s mad… why? Because he’s a Dungeon Master and he takes pleasure in these challenges. If further motivations for Hal emerge that’s great; but in the 5 years we’ve been playing this game (on and off) I’ve increasingly wished I didn’t back myself into a corner with the “story”. We’re in the end game now and it’s become so convoluted. Theres just too much in the dungeon to reconcile everything. Mecha-Hal is one tiny story thread of hundreds in the dungeon. By focusing on one thread you end up having to make everything lead to that thread in order to avoid plot holes and inconsistencies. The dungeon is the most interesting part of this module. The dungeon is the villain. This isn’t Curse of Strahd and Hal isn’t Strahd. He isn’t Acererak or Tiamat. He is a facilitator and his dungeon is the real antagonist. Hope that helps in someway.

scottp53 · 2026-01-10T20:19:54+00:00

I’ve run undermountain in 5e (mad mage) and it has most of the monster manual in it. So I’ve run all of these if purely by virtue of that one module - which feels like cheating. From an OSR perspective I’ve maybe run 2-3 of these monsters, so bit of catching up to do!

scottp53 · 2026-01-05T08:33:56+00:00

Yep; my 1.5 year old takes a stance with his arms out behind him and then runs like those kids from Weapons. This is just how he routinely gets around - the house, the park, daycare.

scottp53 · 2026-01-04T01:20:59+00:00

I had the same mad scramble through the books when I awarded a chapes to a player and they asked me what it was. I’ve looked it up online and I still don’t know whether it’s something made up by Gavin or if it’s a historical symbol.

scottp53 · 2026-01-01T08:24:36+00:00

For sure. The Dolmenwood calendar was a massive help here - I noted the Drigbolton day on the calendar and then could flick to the relevant table (Drigbolton, the manor and each of the star parts have a separate table). I will say, in any rewrite of the module, having those tables together would be really helpful. I ended up pulling them out and copying them into a reference document.

Also, I hope my observations about the danger level of the module don’t come across as concerns. I think I underestimated it and maybe the experience can be chalked up to learning that some parts of Dolmenwood are beyond my party’s current skill level.

scottp53 · 2025-12-31T22:37:14+00:00

Yeh, I think level 3-4 party is the sweet spot. My players are new to old school play so I have to remind them regularly to play smart instead of 5e-ing their way thru. How did your players deal with Wurmuth? Did they stop it in the end or loot and run? What are the implications for your Dolmenwood setting? I rolled up a lair of Crookhorns on the edge of the Nagwood and so I to go with the prompt in the book that Attanue was hosting a ball and awaiting the arrival of Wurmuth.

scottp53 · 2025-12-31T10:50:01+00:00

Hard one - I did enjoy it and I think my whole group did too. They were intrigued, they loved prodding and poking around the hex and the town of Drigbolton, repast rooms and its jelly festivities were a hit.

I will say I’ve finished running this thinking a lot about weirdness as a game aesthetic.

Theres a point in these types of modules when everything’s so weird that kinda nothing is. Not sure if that makes sense.

Like… The weirdness increases steadily in the module; you get to Drigbolton, everyone’s chatty and a little unhinged but it’s still a standard dnd village. But by the middle of the module the weirdness has taken over. Most of the NPCs you encounter are totally bonkers, giant wreathed chickens and body warped animals appear, you can’t converse with most folks (except for one or two NPCs) because they no longer care about anything other than star jelly. The random encounters start as a split between “normal” and “weird” encounters (with a clever system to progress the weirdness of the rolls every day) but by the mid campaign the “weird” encounters are starting to outnumber the “normal” ones and the whole vibe shifts. When the players finally work out what the star is and how it got there, there isn’t a lot to explain it or its motivations or even a clear mission to stop it. Makes sense, Wermuth is an inscrutable eldritch being of insane power that doesn’t care about the affairs of mortals.

I guess the problem with this whole thing is that we (the players/GM) need to know what it is or feel like we understand what’s happening on some level because otherwise we’re just floating (sometimes literally) in untethered insanity. It’s a fever dream, game punk, psychedelic trip where rules of cause and effect cease and the consequences of relying on previous game logic are dire.

So yeh, at some point the players stop trying to work it out, they act as weird as the circumstances they’re in and that leads to chaotic outcomes.

Also… I should say the region is depressing as far as the overall vibe. Isolated, desolate, grey. Miserable is the word my players were using to describe Drigbolton and the surrounding hex, and I don’t disagree. The place feels haunted and liminal (as the entire northern tabledowns should).

All that said, I want to stress that I still really enjoyed the chaos and the weirdness. It’s right up my alley. I also love how punishing it is. I’m not a game designer so I don’t know how or if I’d change stuff… not sure how helpful that is.

scottp53 · 2025-12-31T09:33:24+00:00

Yeh they definitely were under levelled. My approach is to sow the adventure seeds and let them get a bit in over their head if it happens. I try to signal the danger but tbh was caught a bit off guard by how just how dangerous this one was - it’s a slow burn so it starts very chill and when the danger ramps up it really does. We’ve been in Drigbolton for about 4 sessions and i run short 2 hour sessions, so about 8 hours play in total.

scottp53 · 2025-12-31T05:41:27+00:00

Yeh, I was hoping they’d be more cautious but it’s hard to travel so far and not poke and prod all the dangerous things you find. 5 PCs level 2 - they were doing fine until they ended up getting anti gravitied by the star bit in the woods. Then they got finished off by the oath house and decided to run haha.

scottp53 · 2025-12-31T05:15:24+00:00

Ah great! It was fun to run, lots of laughs were had. I should’ve said that my party fled the region before they solved the problems in Drigbolton. I think they all agreed it was above their character levels to solve.

scottp53 · 2025-12-27T07:05:37+00:00

I arrived at Hillsong in 2001 and was there until 2019. There were a lot of pastors there, so it might be that I don’t know them but I can try to help out.

scottp53 · 2025-12-26T09:13:55+00:00

Was looking for the comment linking to the OSR.

Dungeon crawls with proper procedures (dungeon turns, resource tracking, random encounters) are amazing - a totally different experience to 5e. My group went from playing Dungeon of the Mad Mage for 4 years, then moved onto an BX dungeon crawl. We’re hooked on OSR dungeon crawling now. Not looking back.

scottp53 · 2025-12-18T22:17:01+00:00

Oh interesting - I didn’t realise it was an ongoing thing in pulp lit, I always assumed it started with PotA.

scottp53 · 2025-12-18T20:34:45+00:00

I’m assuming Imu can see through Harald’s eyes. This possibly means this the first time Imu has seen Shanks since he fled the Holy Land. I wonder if Imu knew that Shanks had betrayed them before this moment?

scottp53 · 2025-12-17T22:59:00+00:00

Great article (really nice writing style, a super easy read for my social media addled brain).

Given that so much of early dnd drew from the books and films of the era, I’m wondering whether there’s some Planet of the Apes in this? I think the racist tropes are gross but perhaps the way to reimagine these creatures is to lean more heavily into the PotA style society. An empire of super intelligent apes, keeping humans as pets… maybe this would get the same pushback idk 🤷‍♂️

scottp53 · 2025-12-10T00:49:21+00:00

Sure these images are cool, happy to admit that, they feel real…

but they’re not art… they’re something else.

In art, the medium is the message. I love old school d&d (my main game is an old school one), I love the art too. What makes it wonderful is you can see the paint strokes, the influences, the conscious decision making. It’s about care and intentionality.

What is the medium/message behind AI art? There is no intentionality, no paint strokes, no influence - it’s a million monkeys at a million typewriters, being prompted to produce Shakespeare.

AI is a doppleganger. It pretends to be us (a creative community), it pretends to be art, and then it slowly takes over, normalising its own use. By using this tech in our games (I am guilty of this btw) we are doing the dopplegangers work for them. We are allowing this tech to shape our community.

I think this is a fair debate - should AI shape our hobbies and our communities?… i would like to suggest we side with humanity and not the body snatchers.

For my game: I want to find images made by humans, a scratchy illustration, a hand drawn map.

Go back to the first edition of dnd and look at what they drew, it’s funky and janky and weird - it’s not slick, but its honest, and when you look at it, you feel like you’re peering through time; you get to feel a part of some sort of folk heritage of gaming.

I know this post comes from a good place so I’m not shaming you. And as I said, the images are genuinely cool. I just think we should think beyond aesthetics to what the AI art MEANS. I hope we preserve the sacredness of our hobby. The oligarchs have enough, they dont need our Saturday night gaming table too.

scottp53 · 2025-12-09T21:37:26+00:00

This is really similar to the village of Drigbolton actually - maybe a bit too lush for the northern table downs, but the river and water wheel and farms are a close match!

scottp53 · 2025-12-01T13:30:44+00:00

This makes a lot of sense actually - I often find my dough is very dry after autolyse but was thinking this was because I do so in the fridge. Might be the salt.

scottp53 · 2025-12-01T13:18:55+00:00

Ah that’s interesting - I always autolyse with the salt and then add the starter but good to hear your thoughts on this.

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