Actually managing to play tabletop roleplaying games is tough. A lot of factors put people off of trying it for the first time or continuing it week to week. So last summer I started prepping a campaign for my group of friends to enjoy in our distant and uncertain futures. And as un-luck would have it, a global pandemic and quarantine warped that distant future into a sudden present.
Dolmendays is built out of many OSR adventure resources stitched together, founded on the Dolmenwood campaign setting described in the weird and whimsical Wormskin zines. Since the full campaign book for Dolmenwood has a fair chunk of time left in Gavin Norman's brain-oven, I pulled in loads of tonally consistent adventures to fill out the empty swathes of the map. And when the campaign book eventually does descend from the Kickstarter heavens to our bookshelves and PDF readers, my plan is to overlap its material with what has already been prepared, replacing and ret-conning old stand-in material as little as possible. (Six-mile chunks of terrain can each hold plenty of locales, after all.)
Here’s our current modified map. Most human settlements have fewer that 60 people.
| Made with the free version of Inkarnate |
As for how to organize the game with the intent of actually playing it, here’s what I prioritized:
Online compatibility. People move, get sick, go to college, have back pains - sometimes all at once. Getting everyone together physically is wonderful, but would be unrealistic long-term. So everything has to be prepared with the Internet in mind.
Simple access. No paid services or virtual tabletops; just Discord voice chat, and the occasional Google Drawing for exploring complicated architecture. Rely on theater of the mind as much as possible. Miniatures and tactical grid-based combat systems are abandoned. Video calling is iffy for slow/unreliable internet connections (like mine), so relying on voice alone is a must; this also lets people connect to the game through their phones. (One player has even walked their dog during a session. Neat!)
Minimal physical media. A pencil, a character sheet, and some 6-sided dice are all that a player needs to have on hand physically, and all of these can be digitized. Making the system rely solely on the d6 makes things easier even when using virtual dice. I couldn’t find a dice-rolling site or plugin that allowed people to share dice results without it being incredibly fiddly to use, so instead the game relies on the good ol’ honor system. Players roll their own dice, announce the results, and everyone trusts each other. Speedy.
Short session length. We usually keep the weekly sessions to 2-½ hours or less. 5 hours of DM-ing fries my brain, especially in a sandbox campaign based entirely on content written by other people. Restricting sessions to the length of a feature film makes it much more reasonable, and much less daunting, for people to keep the game in their regular schedule. It does leave me chomping at the bit to see what happens next, but it’s worth it for the session quality vs session quantity trade.
Open table with an ever-changing cast. Even with all these considerations, you can’t expect everyone to show up to every session. And with short session times, it’s also not possible to pursue the ideal of resolving an adventure or expedition at the end of each session. So characters are going to be coming and going in the middle of adventures. Luckily, Dolmenwood is a bit of a fairy-tale madhouse, and strange events can be creatively leveraged to explain away the lack of party cohesion. No one should feel obligated to show up, and everyone should feel welcome to drop in.
I'm looking at incorporating more of Dolmenwood in my home campaign too. Really enjoying your write-ups, and thanks too for the recommendations of other resources.
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