Phaedra - Session 1

 Players and Characters: 

• C: Cassius the Cowardly, a 15 year old child (Thief 1)
• R: Devrin the Devious, a "shyster pyromanic" (Cleric 1)
  
• D: Braum Bitterstout, dwarf. (Dwarf 1)
  

Adventure: Caverns of Thracia

Rules: Old School Essentials: Basic Fantasy

Date: 05/08/2023

Play Summary

We started play in a tavern in a theocratic coastal village, controlled by a cult dedicated to the god Apollo. The tavern featured a constant rotation of religious lectures. The one today was extolling the virtues of purity and trying to sell some books. Devrin tried to light the priest on fire.

After being thrown out of the bar by the local gnoll bouncer, the group decided to hire Otto, a local fisherman and go out exploring the local island they had heard rumors about. They rented a small boat and headed off to the island.

After an hour's sailing, they reached the northeast shore of the island. They made their way to the interior, coming across a few different ruins. They found a dwarven tablet in one, and encountered a group of gnolls lead by a minotaur near the largest ruin. Cassius stayed behind and hid in the bushes while Braum negotiated with the minotaur, and Devrin attempted to light some trees on fire. 

Braum eventually payed the minotaur 5 gold and was told where another entrance was. The group ventured over to the other entrance and was slaughtered by a group of tribespeople lying in wait. The fisherman and Devrin managed to escape with the corpses of their companions and made their way back to sea.

Hello! I was inspired by this post to actually write something in this blog. I have 10 other draft posts that I will maybe edit and post eventually, plus another 12 sessions of my campaign to write up.

This is great, it feels good to write something public after engaging in my own research hole for so long. 

Thanks for reading! Back to talking about the session.

 

Reflections

My perfect world map. This wasn't actually made until a few weeks after the session.

Boy was this a nasty/wild session. This game was intended as a test game. I had spent several months obsessing about OSR-related junk and this was my first time running Old School Essentials (and really just anything with an OSR-vibe). I got together a group of 3 disparate people I know: 

• C is my youngest sibling, a major rpg-head with heaps of experience and is also into OSR stuff
  
• D is a friend from college who I used to play rpgs with
• R is a newer friend who doesn't have much rpg experience (and was very excited to play)

 I had a 4th player but they think R is annoying and didn't want to play.

This took place six months ago, so a lot of the details escape me, but I think we ended up playing around 2 hours. D and C played remotely over discord, and R was supposed to come over and play in person but stayed home instead. I was completely surrounded by books and print outs and graph paper and binders the whole time, plus I had moved my monitor with an arm attachment to my dining table so when R came over, it could still feel like a table-top rpg session.

Important note: I no longer try this hard. First time jitters, you know?

Making characters

I started the session by walking them through building characters. I learned that day that the bane of my existence is explaining where all the little stat modifiers go on an OSE character sheet and I have since moved to having people roll up characters with dnncharacter.com. Still, I think it's good practice to have players go through the process by hand once.

I genuinely don't remember how long this took, or what the players thought about the system or character gen. I am pretty sure C had played before but the others hadn't.

Starting the game

I rolled up the starting town using tables from Maze Rats, which was something I picked up from a post from The Alexandrian long before I knew what OSR was. I tried to add some Greek-theme to fit in with the Caverns. I mentioned Apollo and got a few groans from R (I still don't quite know why? I haven't gone in deep on myths about Apollo though, I just chose the first god that came to mind). The end result was a theocratic village and I conjured up with a Jordan Peterson-esque bitch shilling books at the tavern. 

This Session's "Problem Player"

Boy did my other two players not love it when R had his character try to set the book-shilling priest on fire. 

I had purposely played on R's distaste for Jordan Peterson (a consistent target for our little social group), and I had recently ran a game of Monster Hearts for R and some other friends that featured a slime-y incel-ish teacher that also had JP-vibes. 

So I knew what R was thinking at the time, but the other players didn't. C played along while D waited it out. 

No one really got in the moment later why R was lighting trees on fire. I asked them about it and they said they were trying to make a distraction. I wish I would have just had them clarify in the moment, instead of me just being confused and not interacting with it too much. They explained the 'shyster pyromanic' vibe later on that night, when I was texting them. I think having them explain their thoughts would have gone far to getting the other players on board with what they were putting down.

The rest of it

Honestly I am a bit tired of writing. The rest of the session was fine. I liked the negotiating with the minotaur. I had rolled both of the encounters beforehand and rolled difficult ones for first-level characters to handle. If I run Caverns of Thracia again, I'll probably treat level three as the minimum party level like the feature in Knock #3 recommended.

When the tribespeople ambushed the party and Braum was killed, I succinctly described his head getting lopped off. This would be the first among many times I would regret casually narrating a gruesome character death. 

I remember the energy of the players at the end of the game being ...not good.

I messaged each of the players that night after the game to see if they would want to play again. D didn't want to play with R again and was disappointed that the game wasn't more serious. C said he wasn't sure since he would feel compelled to join in R's debauchery. R said they were excited to play again. 

Legacy

A lot of little details from this session would go on to inform the setting as it came together in the months to come (although ***spoilers*** we have yet to return to the Caverns of Thracia).

I'm not sure if this session was a success for failure. It was a trial, and I definitely learned a lot, which was the goal. 

Thanks for reading if you got this far! I'll be writing up some more sessions soon.

 <3