Wolves Upon the Coast, Campaign Start
My friends and I began playing Wolves Upon the Coast in the Rainbow-OSR server. This session report will focus less on game events and more on my thoughts.
Players:
Jenx - Thorgo
Mr. Mann - Gladwyn, Son of Ethelbert
Ags - Stigandyr
Kirko - Tom Stefan
Havoc - Albinus
We began play stranded aboard a ship, south of Faroe. Below are some notes:
April 2: Stranded, the party sails southwest and finds an island. They investigate and find a cliffside cave. They could sail in at high tide.
April 3: They head west and find Trecht, a coastal fort. The party parleys with Princess Sophia of Rhus and are welcomed to help fight Merfolk who ravage the island.
April 4: A storm begins and the two parties strike a deal: if they can sail and get reinforcements to fight the Merfolk, Sophia will marry one of the party's number. Stigandyr boasts he will do just that.
April 5: Storm continues. Party heads north and finds a Rhus search party looking for a survivor named Aevar, from a clash with the merfolk. They find the body of Aevar dead, next to two merfolk. Gladwyn boasts he'll avange Aevar by slaying 2 merfolk in return. They reach the village of Rohel and rest for a night.
April 6: Party investigates a rumor of singing merfolk and find 12, who have imprisoned 5 Rhusfolk. The party successfully defeated 5 in an ambush. Albinus almost die, and Gladwyn fulfilled his boast. On their return to Rohel, they are ambushed by 3 sword wielding merfolk.
CONDUCTING THE GAME:
Character creation took about 40 minutes. The players did a great job communicating and helping each other out. Mr.Mann built a spreadsheet which allows for easy tracking of party resources, and he also helped find a hex overlay for tldraw to make mapping easy.
The player characters ended up being straightforward; players used a combination of attributes and equipment to make decisions about their characters. Jenx's character, Thorgo, had high attributes but low HP, so Jenx decided that he has been worked to the bone as a slave and is weakened because of it. Havoc's character Albinus had lots of starting money and many languages, so he interpreted him as more educated than his companions, and made him a Christian who could read and speak Latin. Mr. Mann's Gladwyn has a bow, so he's a skilled hunter. These sorts of distinctions are helpful in organizing the party and situating the players in the world. As we played, more character traits began to emerge. This type of campaign privileges a slow-burn type of character development. I'm excited to see where these characters go!
I started the party in a random water hex. I would recommend any Wolves ref do this. Because I put them in a random hex, I couldn't really do any reading ahead of time, as I had no clue where they would go. The Wolves hexes are written to work well in isolation, so this caused no problems. Now that the session is done, Rhus has come alive and I have a pretty strong grasp of the situation there.
For sea travel, I rolled wind conditions ahead of time. Once on the island, I rolled a few days weather at a time but just rolled encounters as we went. All the weather conditions were recorded on my calendar. Because Wolves overworld encounters are often bound by location, it's futile to roll them ahead of time so I just did those as we went.
Combat went well, and the players made a good team. The game uses split initiative. It works well mechanically, but would be easier on a physical table. That'd make it a lot easier to track who has and who hasn't acted. I'm hoping to improve speed: using side based initiative I am able to get through 5+ combats of the size we went through today in a single session. I think it took around half an hour to resolve a 5 vs. 5. That's fine, but more speed will help. Especially when we get to larger battles.
Already the players are committed to a pretty big mission. They are supposed to sail away from the island, penetrate the merfolk blockade, and receive support from Faroe or other allied kingdoms! Exciting stuff. While that's Stigandyr's boast, Albinus hopes to find out why the merfolk are attacking in the first place and stop the conflict.
For this game, I've created a shared document with any house rules. This will be updated as we go so that we can all be on the same page. Instead of thinking of them as rules, I think of them more as precedent. I also plan to record edge case rulings here so that we can refer to them in the future if there's a need to adjudicate a similar situation. This is probably the best way to create a body of rules; it's more about having a consistent world than having completely comprehensive rules to model the world.
This session was one of the most fun I've had in a long time. I like running pure dungeon crawls, like I have been, but its really nice to have the extra context of the hexcrawl while running. I'm already looking forward to next Sunday!
I'll continue recording some of my thoughts as I run.