Attending the Old School, Part 1

Over the last few months, I have been a player in pen-and-paper RPGs far more than I have been the referee. However, I recently received all of the adventure PDFs from the Old-School Essentials Advanced Fantasy kickstarter. Reading through them immediately had me itching to get back into the saddle, and this week I started my first ever Old School Essentials game with Necrotic Gnome's excellent adventure Winter's Daughter.

This will also be the first time any of my players have used the Old School Essentials rules (though one of them did play Basic long ago as a kid).  I have decided to write a series of blog posts peeking behind the curtain of a first-time OSE referee running the game for first-time OSE players. The posts will include basic recaps, but will primarily focus on what I learn about running OSE every week. I will look to Thursdays in Thracia for my inspiration, as I love how it dives into the referee's thoughts while running old school adventures.

Baby's first retroclone

Dramatis Personae

Flynn Four-Fingers, Level 2 Thief

Russell, Level 2 Fighter

Ancin, Level 1 Magic-User

Notable Events

• A church bureaucrat named Symart Bourne delivered an inheritance to Flynn and Russell during a game of bocce ball. Uncle Terrance had died and bequeathed upon Flynn (the elder brother) a deed to the burial mound and belongings of Brigford the Wise, brother of the legendary war hero Sir Chyde

• Flynn and Russell recruited their extremely tall mutual acquaintance and Russell's self-styled academic mentor Ancin to join them in investigating the burial mound

• Outside of the mound they found evidence of Drune rituals, so they quickly made their way into the tomb through a small natural tunnel that turned out to be the egress for a nest of 4' long tongue-like worms; Russell slew two wormtongues with the help of a Sleep spell and a third slithered away

• The tunnel led into a sort of office or living quarters that had long been used as the lair for the wormtongues, and within they found a book containing a fancy poem about Sir Chyde's hunting dogs

Referee Insights

Character creation took up the first half of the session. We ended up with a very traditional fighter, thief, magic-user lineup, and I awarded them each 2,000 XP as a "welcome to OSE" gift. I also gave an overview of the rules differences between OSE and other systems we've played. The group caught on quickly - I probably went into more detail than necessary.

Before the session, I had corresponded with another blogger (IdleDoodler at There Could Have Been Snakes) about moving from minimalist OSR systems to OSE, a system with well-defined classes and procedures. My players have struggled a bit with classless systems for any adventures that went on for more than a session or two, and I speculated in our correspondence that even the streamlined classes of OSE could provide them with archetypes to lean into.

In addition to a class archetype, we also rolled on either the Personality or Mannerism table from Maze Rats for each character. It amazes me how much a single descriptor can bring a character to life. Russell the Fighter, who likes to share random facts to impress his mentor Ancin, proved to be a highlight of the evening. 

Right off the bat, the role-playing had a little more meat on its bones. You don't need pages of backstory and limitless class options to find a personality for a new PC, but it helped my players to have a class and a trait to provide that initial foundation.

As for the adventure itself, I went with the inheritance hook with the added caveat that they only had one day to venture out to the property to claim it, just to ensure that they didn't dawdle. I hand-waved the starting town and the wilderness travel to get there. If we continue with additional adventures after this one (which is my hope), I will flesh things out more at that time.

My party chose not to bring any retainers with them, so they actually did not have enough cumulative Strength to move the stone blocking the entrance. I hinted that it could be broken, but they decided to look for other ways in instead. This led to an encounter with the ravenous wormtongues in a narrow tunnel. 

The wormtongues weren't capable of penetrating Russell's armor. Even with a surprise attack on him, they never landed a blow. I narrated one trying to slide across the "ceiling" of the tunnel to get by him, but Ancin hit it with a Sleep spell and Russell slew it. I rolled Morale for the final monster and it retreated, so the encounter turned out to be pretty easy.

In the priest's quarters, they missed the loose flagstone, which is one of the bigger caches of treasure in the adventure. I have decided to play the Thief skills more as preternatural abilities - anybody can locate a trap by examining an area, but only a Thief can detect it on instinct alone without specifying where they look. I started long ago to break my players of the habit of calling for Spot checks instead of narrating what they do, but I still think it's a bit weird for us to have a class with a bunch of skills that the player doesn't "use" and instead the referee rolls for them passively behind the scenes. I quickly saw why the Thief class has been bemoaned and debated so thoroughly over all these years.

My Find Traps roll for Flynn failed, and no one described inspecting that part of the room, so the treasure went undiscovered. It did make me wonder how players trying old school adventures for the first time should learn to think in a way that would lead them to discover that treasure. Should I have described loose stones throughout the room to pique their interest and then, when they asked to check them out, say they're scattered throughout the room so they need to specify where exactly they examine? 

I know that players will miss treasure sometimes. It happens. But something about this specific scenario didn't sit well with me. I need to put some thought into how to train my players to learn that sometimes they have to sniff out treasure - it isn't always in the most obvious places.