Attending the Old School, Part 4

Base towns are a staple of old school play: Hommlet, the eponymous Keep on the Borderlands, or Helix from Barrowmaze. They provide necessary elements in the old school gameplay loop, serving as a place to sell treasure, level up and heal up, gather rumors, and obtain goods and services. 

However, despite having clear procedures for the other core game modes (combat, dungeon adventuring, and wilderness adventuring), the OSE (and therefore B/X) rules curiously omit procedures for spending time in a base town despite specifically calling out designing a base town in the Referee's Tome:

When do you use the base town that you designed? (screenshot from the OSE SRD)

Last week, my players finished up their first adventure and returned to town. While running their time in town went fairly well, I felt the absence of the game structures that I had enjoyed during my previous sessions. I wanted a procedure for returning to town. So, I made one!

But, before I get to that, a quick recap of my last session:

Dramatis Personae

Flynn Four-Fingers, Level 2 Thief

Russell, Level 2 Fighter

Ancin, Level 1 Magic-User

Chadwick, Level 2 Cleric

Notable Events

• Back in the mortal world, the party returned to Chyde's tomb to pilfer a few more things now that his ghost was in the Fairy Realm. However, still suffering from the floating effects of the green slime, Russell decided to go ask the dancing skeletons if they knew how to end them.
• Amaranda and Brigforwith had no idea how to end the effects, but they did implore Russell to help them find whoever had violated their son's tomb! Russell promptly excused himself to go "find the perpetrators," and the party quickly made their escape back out through the wormhole.
• As the only party member not floating, Chadwick tied a rope around the others and pulled them back to town like balloons, clearly enjoying his time in control of their movement.
• Upon returning to the town of Fourtower Bridge, the party divided up their treasure and paid the local sorceress (Mistress Hecuba) to dispel the floating effects. After resting, they introduced themselves to a few more townsfolk, including the thief Silar and Moira the Holy.
• Moira told them of a rumored relic lost in the "crystal caves" to the west - the gold teeth of St. Orlo - that she would love to have as a part of the shrine she's building. They decided that it sounded like a good lead on more treasure and that they would set off in search of these caves next week!

Referee Insights

As mentioned above, we wrapped up Winter's Daughter during the first 30-45 minutes of the session. You can read more about my thoughts on that adventure overall in my collaborative blog post with Wandering Wombat. I used the dancing skellies as a bit of pressure to keep the party moving, though I allowed them to go back and get more loot from Chyde's tomb - they had earned it!

Since Winter's Daughter does not include a base town, I had to find my own. I ended up mashing together the town of Fourtower Bridge from the blog Paths Peculiar with bits of Lankshorn from the second issue of the Dolmenwood zine Wormskin as well as a few tweaks of my own. I seeded the town with rumors for the adventures The Hole in the Oak, The Incandescent Grottoes, and The Waking of Willowby Hall. The party seized on the rumor for the Grottoes, so that's where we'll be heading next.

As the party returned to town and began all of the typical things that one does in a fantasy town, I couldn't help but notice how the OSE rules lacked a procedure for this part of the game. I missed having that to fall back on, so I created my own:

Between Adventures (PDF)

I had a very specific goal here: to outline a procedure for time spent in town that looked like it belonged in Old-School Essentials or B/X. 

I didn't aim to create an exhaustive list of downtime activities or to define all of the possible actions a faction could take. That's not really the spirit of the system. OSE provides a simple foundation that gives the referee plenty of room to make it their own. That's the charm of it.

These procedures do assume a pretty specific type of game, one where adventure rarely happens in town. You gather rumors, travel into the wilderness, find an adventure site, explore it, and then return to town with loot. Rinse and repeat.

However, the concept of "scheming factions" does give the referee the option to add some ticking clocks like approaching armies or impending disasters. For instance, one of my schemes is that of the rival party from Willowby Hall, who will eventually bring Bonebreaker Tom smashing through town. I plan to elaborate on scheming factions more in a future post (edit: HERE).

I will use this procedure as my party moves on to their next adventure. It mirrors what they did naturally, so I expect it to be pretty seamless. But, it will help to give me some structure to fall back on as I run the game.