GM: Ben Longman
Players: Jerry McCoy, Mark Phagan, Elizabeth Ruifrok, Laura Quinn, Eric Rollins, Adrian Romero, Sean Nittner
System: Old School Essentials
I was looking forward to checking out Old School Essentials (OSE) and this game lived up to my expectations. It felt very 1st edition (that was my early gaming experience) and reminded me of many nights listening at doors and checking for traps (we did that a lot).
Here was the pitch:
Explore the Dungeons outside of Jotunsberg – including the Ruins of Castle Gygar.
And that’s what we did. The previous session (Ben was running a long call all weekend so everyone picked up where the last group left off) had explored most of the dungeon outside Jotunsburg, but for completionism sake, we returned (with a Wizard who could cast detect magic) and thoroughly cleaned it out before moving onto the eponymous ruins.
Here were some highlights:
- Playing Rosa the barber/surgeon. Somehow that meant more to me than being a fighter.
- Adrian playing teamster turned wizard…how far he had fallen!
- Jerry and his singing magical sword. If it told him to a jump off a bridge…
- Liz constantly looking for horses to steal (or to pet or to make friends with, but mostly to steal)
- Eric having his one shot to consecrate an alter and having it ripped from his grasp!
- Mark, then praying and getting blessed by the same alter. IRONY!
- Laura being first through every door, regardless of the danger.
- Mark and Jerry tag teaming with the scissors to slowly reveal the map
- That ritual circle…we never found out what it did.
- Meeting Boris the Ogre, the only person that wanted to talk to us in dungeon. He paid us as well.
- Trying really hard to make friends with a cantankerous druid who just wanted to be left alone…so we left (that took some doing as several folks saw her as a treasure/XP repository).
- Discovering relics…and then realizing most of of undead origin. Spooky.
- Reginald…still lives! Sorry to Ann, the beastwoman, telling us that you were going to kill us made our budding friendship a challenge.
- Finding an old man and getting him home safely.
- Losing our very expendable torchbearers, but a lucky death save saving one!
- Having 14 HP, plate and shield and still being felled by a single skeleton rolling a crit and max damage.
- FEAR THE GARGOYLES. We didn’t dare cross their path
- Eric giving last rights to the dead…out of respect and so they wouldn’t be raised to attack us.
- Fighting that deadly Hunger. It was brutal. It literally chewed us up and spit us out, but we tanked it.
Thoughts on the Game
We listed at doors, we searched for traps, we killed what moved and looted the rest. I don’t think OSE is my OSR game, but it is certainly the most faithful OSR game I’ve played yet. Counting turns, burning torches, getting XP when we returned to town, all felt like my childhood experiences and it was blast to relive them for a few hours.
Also, hats off to Ben. He managed seven players plus three torchbearers and we still explored two different dungeons. That’s incredible. If I was running it they would have gotten through three rooms and already made and broken two alliances. Hah!
After the game Jerry and I talked about his 48 session (so far) campaign and the exploration his players have done. He showed me the maps they had made and it was a true artifact!
