Castle Mordengard Postmortem
Last year I ran eight sessions of Castle Mordengard, my first time refereeing an OD&D campaign. It is currently on indefinite hiatus (for reasons given below), so I wanted to reflect on its best moments & lessons learned.
Background
I had started playing OD&D in the REDUX campaign, described on the Scribbles & Horrors blog. Scribble took a bit of a hiatus, and I, wanting to try running OD&D, ran Castle Mordengard for the same group of players. CM is nominally in the same campaign universe as REDUX, on the other side of a large river. Characters could pass between campaigns, but in practice there was little back-and-forth transit.
Last September, two of the most consistent players moved away, and in November Scribbles relaunched REDUX, so CM is on indefinite hiatus (though I do want to return to it at some point).
Developing the Campaign
Much of CM was cobbled together from material I had been working on for other projects.
Mapping the Dungeon
I assembled Castle Mordengard from a bunch of maps I had drawn on regular (non-graph) paper. I had intentionally been trying to make big, sprawling, megadungeon levels, though I had been drawing the maps without any particular idea of setting or content.
Mapping the Overworld
I used the same tech as the Outdoor Survival Remix: QGIS to lay out terrain types on a hex grid, R to make a preliminary height-map, Wilbur for simulated erosion, then back into QGIS for styling. The overall map has the same dimensions as Outdoor Survival, but I added some ocean & grey Terra Incognita to shrink the size a bit.
I ended up placing some dungeons by Eldritch Fields when players started exploring the overworld.
The Milieu
On a whim, I started by throwing together a little brochure for my region (called "The Concavity" after the toxic waste zone alluded to in Infinite Jest). I knew I wanted the region to have a main dungeon, a river crossing where players could enter from the lands around REDUX, and a few wacky towns.
Later in the campaign I worked out a more complex set of faction relationships & a more detailed notion of the Concavity's economy, which mainly revolves around exporting canned escargot to the wider world.
Castle Mordengard
The basic pitch is that Castle Mordengard was the mountaintop home of the Concavity's ruling dynasy, House Sternenhoech,1 until the sudden disappearance of King Archibald the Grim twenty years ago. Ever since, his castle has been infested by monsters & the land consumed by infighting, yadda yadda.
King Archibald was working on completing the system of Transcendental Idealism in his spare time, & his notes are supposedly somewhere in his personal wunderkammer, deep underground.
The dungeon has been opened up for looting by the Proboscidean Princes, who are hoping that allowing adventurers to ransack it will de-mystify the Sternenhoech dynasty & prevent the return of a centralized human-led government.
Proboscideans
A long time ago, I read this post on Deviantart of all places & ever since have loved the idea of sentient elephants. In the Concavity, I implied that they led the settlement of the land, ruling until the rise of the Sternenhoech dynasty, after which political equality was instated but the Proboscideans kept much of their wealth. With Archibald's disappearance, they have begun taking a more active role in government.
In practice, I treated Proboscideans like high-level NPCs, & used silly Carcosa titles for their names. I never quite worked this out in detail, however, so their relationship to high-level human NPCs is unclear.
Bandit factions
Bandits in the Concavity belong to one of five political parties:
- Concavitan Coalition for Progress (centrists)
- Concavitan Conservative Party (conservative)
- Concavitan Communal Plenary (anarchist)
- Concavitan Communist Party (vanguardist)
- Conclave for Concavitan Purity (theocratic)
The train of thought here was something like: Alignment is a vestigial wargame faction system, so what if the bandits are revolutionaries & the alignments were between anarchists (chaos) & vanguardists (law)? But then (for reasons I don't quite remember) I expanded it out with centrists, theocrats, & conservatives. In any case, I spun it as a reaction to the interregnum following Archibald's disappearance, with human factions squabbling over how to govern while the Proboscidean Princes quietly reasserted their authority.
In an effort to keep things light, I tried to spin each faction as an absurdly face-value version of each ideology. So the centrists mail out monthly surveys & do complex vector algebra to calculate the exact centroid of public opinion space. The conservatives are opposed to any type of change (rather than an idealized past), etc.
Because the players ended up joining the Concavitan Coalition for Progress, the bandits became a much bigger part of the campaign than I ever intended.
Ruleset
I primarily used White Box OD&D. I compiled The Littlest Brown Book mostly out of obsessive hyper-fixation but also partly in order to organize the rules in a way that was easier for me to consult at the table.
I used a slightly modified version of the "New Revised Alternate Combat Sequence" developed by Scribble M. Horror for the REDUX campaign. This system simplifies attacks to a single d6 roll per HD, and compares the roll to a matrix, with columns determined by the best AC in the defending ranks. Instead of HP, each hit inflicts 1 HD of damage. In practice it's a bit like a hybrid of Chainmail's 20:1 combat & the side-based clashes in Tunnels & Trolls.
I also tried bringing out the spellbook Grimoires I had compiled, but switched back to the standard spell list after a few sessions.
I compiled a snazzy little player's guide from bits of the LstBB, which I printed & hand-bound.
Campaign Logs
Logs of each session can be read below. My favorite sessions were 5, 7, & 8.
What did we learn?
In brief: the overland & dungeon maps, the use of white box OD&D with modified combat, and the weird, gonzo setting worked well, and the meta-level scheduling structure, haphazard dungeon stocking, and incorporation of pseudo-political bandits could be improved.
Milieu
The originality of Scribbles' REDUX milieu was a difficult act to follow2 -- I probably over-reached when trying to make CM comparably weird. CM would have been much easier to run if I had kept more of OD&D's bones in place, particularly w/r/t the dungeon & overland encounter tables.
- With that said, I really like running OD&D as an anachronistic setting with weird mish-mashes of modernity & pseudo-medievalism.3
- Presenting the scenario through a fake travel brochure worked really well.
- The political bandit factions were a mixed bag. On the one hand, I had fun running them & imagining how they dressed & behaved & related to each other. On the other hand, anything politics-related is tough to handle sensitively, particularly now.
- As players engaged with different parts of the setting, I felt more and more like I was able to imagine complex relationships between its different factions. This was exciting, as I've struggled in the past with making factions work.
- CM was useful for getting some of the wackier ideas out of my system. For Antarctica Jam, I've kept things more grounded while incorporating the parts of CM that worked well.
Scheduling
There are closed tables (where you have a committed group), open tables (where you indefatigably run a game at a regular time & place for whoever shows up), & there are tables where once every month or so you muster the energy to text your groupchat of 13 friends/acquaintances & try to get a game on the calendar. This third type is not at all sustainable, especially for a GM with a proclivity toward procrastination & social anxiety. If there's one key takeaway to all this it's that every house rule, clever setting idea, custom bestiary, & theoretical insight about OSR games is worthless if you can't nail down the basic infrastructure of scheduling one session after another.
- 8 sessions really is not that many, and I feel somewhat embarrassed that most of my OD&D experience is still from the player's side of the table. It feels hardly worth all this spilled ink, but I kept writing this post in my head so figured I might as well synthesize what I can from the campaign's brief run.4
- The not-really-open table aspect contributed to a tendency of the campaign to turn "trad", insofar as the players tended to rove around the map pursuing specific threads rather than going on episodic dungeon expeditions.
- The return of REDUX has implemented some really useful procedural tools to keep an episodic expedition-based structure. There's a more rigorous downtime system, including rules that characters must rest for a week between expeditions. There's also a system of "leads" (player-set objectives) that helps players think in terms of goal-driven expeditions.
The Dungeon
I think the dungeon maps were pretty solid -- people seemed to enjoy mapping & navigating them. However, no sessions ever got past the first level, so it's hard to judge how it would have played out long term. Keying the dungeon was more of a mixed bag -- I would have had an easier time sticking closer to the standard OD&D wandering monster lists.
- One of my biggest mistakes was not using the OD&D treasure stocking procedure as written. The amount of treasure in Castle Mordengard was haphazard & generally too low. If/when I resurrect it, I will be re-writing the key with much more loot.
- I got some player feedback that the rooms were generally more empty than expected, and that the dungeon felt 'busy' thanks to the frequency of encounters with bandit factions (and -- I'm inferring here -- because I usually wrote the key to detail particular actions for any non-wandering monsters).
The Overworld
The overland map is one of my favorite aspects of the campaign. Having high-resolution pseudo-realistic terrain is really helpful for narrating overland travel -- the landscapes felt 'real', & players were using gullies & streams to navigate.
- The keying density of the map was extremely sparse by what most seem to regard as the typical hexcrawl standard, but it was not at all a problem! Thanks to random encounters & getting lost, the process of looking for a POI among a set of empty hexes is sufficiently engaging.5
- A specific thing I love about the map is how deep blue the ocean is. Something about it puts me in the right headspace for imagining a fantasy world.
The Ruleset
The New Revised Alternate Combat Sequence (NRACS) developed by Scribbles was a big success.
- In general, I'm finding that the process of exploration (c.f. the mapping game) is more interesting than combat, & NRACS was perfect for resolving combat quickly.
- The NRACS is highly abstracted, but it produces outcomes that feel fair. Success in combat primarily relies on having an effective marching order (with spears in the second rank) & being well-equipped with armor & shields. - This post by Gorgon Bones does a good job articulating why this kind of simplified combat can still be fun in the right context.
- Shields are a bit OP, but it was never a huge problem. Technically there are some edge cases where having shields block one hit produces stalemates, but it's fairly rare in practice.
- The real brilliance of NRACs is that it reduces combat to a single roll of one or more d6s, which is simpler (for players) than even Into The Odd.
- It also aligns nicely with the use of player-facing d6 rolls for opening & listening at doors.
Things to change for next time
- Worth adding a downtime system. I've been loving the way REDUX tracks what each character is doing week-to-week, and would like to
shamelessly copy itassemble something similar. - Run the game at a regular time, weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly. No scheduling texts, only reminder texts.
- I'd keep most of the dungeon key intact, but I'd re-roll treasure using the standard OD&D tables and worry less about trying to make each cache unique.
- I think (out of a sense of fidelity to my own mistakes) I would keep the bandits as-is, but I'd love to develop an even more obnoxiously convoluted set of factional relationships.
- In that vein, it would be fun to fully map out the cities, possibly using random generators to make CSoTIO-style resident lists.6
- I ought to write up rules & stats for Proboscideans, particularly when they appear as leveled NPCs.
- I'd use color-coded magic
Borrowed from a Ladislav Klima novel.↩
This is a campaign that has "can of worms (closed)", "Colt .45" & "Ibuprofen" on the expanded equipment list, and spells like "Create Milk" & "Engineer Political Catastrophe". Very gonzo, but in (imo) an elevated way.↩
Mandog does this in an extremely cool way, albeit much darker. If I resurrect CM I may find a way to slot it in to the campaign world.↩
Upon reflection, this passage comes across as much more negative than is warranted. I do feel some frustration insofar as some of my own negative traits impeded my ambition to run a longer campaign. However, at the end of the day, I am extremely lucky that my friends were willing to play a hacked-together OD&D game at all, and that while it's on hiatus I still get to play OD&D as a player. Above all, I don't meant to imply that I see short campaigns as inherently worse, or a failure -- just that in this case I was hoping for more, and will be taking these lessons to heart as I run future campaigns.↩
C.f. Bateman against hexcrawls, or my musings on hex size. You don't need some optimal density, you just need interesting places to go.↩
I like the idea of continuing to develop this as a small-scale setting where I can get really fine-grained, in contrast to the necessity of zooming way out for Antarctica.↩