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| Medea |
Not having OSE on me, I grabbed Swords & Wizardry for most rules and my brand new AD&D Monster Manual for treasure types and In Lair rolls. I established that I would treat 0hp as unconscious and dying, and -3hp as dead, and otherwise keep to vanilla S&W, although I used the Monsters' saving throws published in the module.
I chose to run the game using a party made up of Hector, Bellerophon, Perseus, and Medea.
The other night I was browsing through DrivethruRPG when an adventure module, Arête caught my eye. I looked over it and tossed it on my wishlist. The gods must have been watching, as the next morning one of the first things to cross my twitter feed was Ahimsa Kerr asking if anyone wanted a review copy of Arête. And I am really glad that I hit him up!
Arête is an adventure module intended to be used as a one-shot for Old-School Essentials, and includes some characters using classes from the Old School Essentials Advanced Fantasy rules.
The premise of the adventure is simple: Cerberus has run away, and monsters across Mythic Greece are running amok due to his presence. As the Underworld is already overflowing, Hades selects a number of great heroes and offers to return them to the land of the living if they will return Cerberus and quell the monsters.
The characters are pregenerated OSE characters based on Ancient Greek heroes such as Orpheus, Medea, Theseus, Atlanta, and Bellerophon. Aside from reasonably good stats for an OSE character, they each have a special power, a special advantage against one foe or type of foe, and one special weakness. These are taken straight out of myths about the character and made mechanically apropos to OSE.
The characters begin at first level, and the monsters have had new stat blocks tailored to make the scenario work without inflating levels.
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| ‘He took his place once more on the bench at the inn-door’ by Arthur Rackham c.1910 |
That last one can take a number of forms: strange lights or smoke on the horizon, a job from a local patron, the site visible from a distance, someone staggering into the wilderness pleading for help... there are dozens of ways to seed information into your town, but one of the most valuable ways is by having gossip that the players can pick up around town.
Twitter user @SivorKhalid mentioned in response to my article on using gossip as a campaign tracking tool that he has trouble coming up with rumors, so I thought I would try to create a helpful resource.
I found my original hex map drawn for the region around town of Orhan that became the Imrani Waste as my "Silver Gull" Swords & Wizardry campaign advanced.
It is stunning to me that this A5 page of notes managed to spur 21 sessions of my campaign (the first two were set in a dungeon hundreds of miles away.
Some of my readers asked me to keep them posted about the events of the Silver Gull campaign, so I wanted to post a quick one here.
On the eve of the Fall Equinox, the PCs flew to the mouth of the Oracle of inkandus, armed with clockwork horrors, alchemical mortars, and magic weapons. They instructed their succubus minion, Delgradia, to help them put the host at ease.
The host, once summoned with a sacrifice of prickly pear wine, led them through the upper floor of the Oracle to an ancient theatre. Finch took the stage and begane doing a comedic routine to amuse the demon that ended with the party's go-word for violence: "pineapples"
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| Tarrasque as featured in The Monstrous Manual ©️ 1993 TSR, Inc. |
I realize that it isn't actually very useful to have too many monsters. You don't need more than a handful to make for a good game of D&D. Not to mention that building a new monster for a TSR-era edition of Dungeons & Dragons doesn't actually require very much work, You can put one together in about three minutes if you know what pages to look at.
A good book of monsters is more of a convenience, or a piece of art on the wall of your campaign.
This is fair. I have been playing in the Weirth campaign for two years with the treasure for XP rules, training, and expensive hirelings... Not to mention very profitable carousing. I enjoy this style of game. But it has had it's downside. Some players feel a pressing desire to follow certain emergent plots... Like a prophecy we believe we can follow to put a stop the walking dead from rising... While others just want to level up, even if it means putting big heroic deeds off to tomorrow.
I personally prefer a slightly looser system of rewards that keep the players seeking adventure, but don't require them to chase the almighty gold piece if they don't feel like it.
I have used a hybrid system based on a mix of Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG from Goodman Games and the system presented in The Dozen Dooms by Baldrage. Here is my basics:
PCs are rewarded XP for overcoming challenges.
What counts of overcoming is contextual. The encounter must carry risk of mission failure, injury loss of resources, or humiliation to count as a challenge. And players must require more than a single roll to solve the problem: it must be role-played in some way other than "making a check."
The challenge is overcome when the PCs neutralize the problem in a way that lets them move towards their current goals. But the how is not important. In fact, creativity is encouraged.
