I finished an ADND 1e one-shot (well, the first session) I ran for my dad's birthday. Afterwards, I immediately ordered a large meal and downed a sprite. A long session will do that to you.
I had originally planned on re-introducing ADND to my dad with a short campaign that we would play every month or so. Something lighter but after I had done my required reading and sat and ingested the information for awhile.
That didn't happen, as it goes, and he asked if we could play for his birthday. My younger brother organized the group and I finished reading the books, got character sheets put together, went through Blue Bard's adnd combat blog posts a few mores times, and we went for it.
I ran U1 (The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh). I had initially wanted to run that as the start of a campaign, because I really really liked it after reading it originally. The first half seemed like a great length for a one-shot though. I've played in a few OSR-y one-shots recently and I've learned that you really want to run much less than you think you can get through. If you think it will take a few hours, it will take five.
My older brother also asked to skip the character creation because that takes too much time, and I was already thinking that same thing. I used the automated character sheets from the Blue Bard + the pregens from the last page of the module (plus their recommended magic items because why not, it's a one-shot) to make characters. I also used a write up of the equipment packages from a different module to give them equipment. Writing up the 7 characters (5 PCs, 2 NPCs) went much faster than I thought it would honestly.
We spent the first hour chatting and then I ran over the basics of the character sheets. I had no intention of teaching the whole game nor did I expect them to read the books beforehand. The books are too difficult to absorb without context. If I were playing a campaign, it would be different and I would want them to study up on their own. I don't think I would ever play a 1E campaign where I was expected to be the source of all information, it's just too obtuse of a system.
My older brother arrived after the explanation and then we started! I summarized the town bit, and played it out how the adventure expects it, and then put them in front of the haunted mansion.
I'm not going to do an in-depth summary of play, and the rest of this is going to be very spoiler-y and also have expected to have read or played to module.
Also my players shouldn't read the rest of this because we did decide to run the last half of the module at the later date.
Also I am tired, this will be brief:
- They never ran into the assassin! I wasn't sure whether to quantum-ogre him out of existence or what. I was looking for to dealing with that. Maybe I should have had him yell or something, but they weren't very interested in the upper level of the mansion. They were laser-focused on the basement from the first second. They did find his clothes though and tore them up making sure they weren't trapped or something
- They really blundered around in the basement/wine cellar, so I had the bandits all get ready to ambush them. It was several hours of in-game time between them getting freaked out by the rot grubs in the corpse in the wine cellar --
(side note: Is a paladin affected by rot grubs? It felt weird to have them be affected by it since you can use cure disease but also have them immune to disease. Rot grubs are weird and hard to run properly anyway. How many of the 7 come out of the corpse? Why have something that just murders someone with no context? How are they supposed to know to use fire on them???)
-- and according to the notes for the other room, the lookout is supposed to hear them if they blunder around the wine cellar, so I had the bandits set up an ambush for them. If it was several hours wait, maybe they should have just left? God that would have been a lame ending.
- I didn't know how to deal with them deciding that every member would look for secret doors in some rooms. We could have played it slowly but I just rolled 4 d6s every time and both times a 1 was rolled, so I gave it to them with a hefty time penalty (30 min each time I think). It gave the bandits lots of time to organize an ambush, so it wasn't helpful for them in the long run.
- Having the paladin constantly detecting evil behind every door was interesting. It really sold the fake haunted house bit quickly, when there constantly was no evil anywhere.
- They just ruined the bandit ambush. Those poor bandits were not prepared for a mostly in-perfect condition group. If we weren't playing a one-shot, they would have likely been on more equal-footing. The local PC (Alexandra L'Whore, named after a legendary drag performer from Denver) magic-user also got their sleep spell off and made the 8 smugglers fall asleep. The leader illusionist wasn't able to get their spell off but it would have been very dramatic if they did, probably would have change the tide of the fight. Plus none of the bandits had ranged weapons, so they couldn't interrupt the sleep spell. Actually, I should have had them throw their daggers probably.
- I used the combat rules from the Blue Bard and it was still weird. So much to remember. I think I forgot one or more rules in every fight, especially the tied initiative. Forgot all about weapon speeds and all that. No one realized of course, and I did push the fights to do quickly, particularly since we didn't have infinite time.
Oof, I'll probably talk about this more (and actually link links!)(DONE) and I wanted to talk about my impressions of Adnd when I have had more time to think, but the impending headache is telling me I should stop writing.
Take care!
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