Dolmenwood Campaign Analysis

In a previous post, I summarized the Dolmenwood campaign I refereed from May 2019 to May 2020. Out of all the campaigns I’ve refereed in my decade-long career of fantasy tabletop RPGs, Dolmenwood ranks among my favorites (though choosing a single favorite campaign would be like trying to choose a favorite child).

Considering that I enjoyed it so much, I will now dismember our Dolmenwood campaign the same way I dismember other things I like. In this post I’ll dissect and analyze our game in an effort to understand why I liked it.

Artwork by Anxious P. in Wormskin Zine 2

First, we’ll state the obvious: I think a key reason our group enjoyed the Dolmenwood game was because of the setting’s originality and the quality of the Wormskin zines. Though Dolmenwood feels very “classic” in the sense that it deals with well-worn themes and tropes of folk and fairy tales, it has its own character that sets it apart from other settings that simply makes it fun.

Dolmenwood is just a cool place to explore, and I wholeheartedly recommend the Wormskin zines to anyone interested in playing a fantasy tabletop RPG set in an enchanted forest. Dolmenwood’s familiar-but-strange qualities (such as animated gingerbread men made from bachelors who were baked alive) lent a great deal to my own enjoyment and that of my players.

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For all its quality writing, Dolmenwood is also an incomplete setting. The Wormskin zines detail parts of the Wood, but not its entirety. The rest will come from the guide Gavin Norman will fund on Kickstarter sometime soon.

Oddly enough, this “incompleteness” became a feature of the setting, rather than a drawback. While refereeing the game, I was able to supplement the setting with other quality published products (such as Tomb of the Serpent King, Barrowmaze, and Kidnap the Archpriest).

I also created some parts wholecloth, especially parts later in the campaign. The Hall of Sleep (based on Caerlaverock Castle) and Gheillough’s lair (and the accompanying encounter with Big Chook, his dream worm) were all elements I developed by expanding bits of text from the zines.

As a referee, I found working with Wormskin to inhabit a “sweet spot” in my preferences. It gave me enough creative spark to get me started but left me enough blank space make the setting my own. It required more work on my end than a fully-finished product would have, but it was work I enjoyed.

And even after a year of playing, there’s still a lot of content in Dolmenwood my players have yet to interact with. They’ve expressed an interest in returning one day, which excites me 😊

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Another element I want to recognize is how little I had planned when we began our campaign. When we logged on for our first session in May 2019, I had

1. Read and taken notes on all the Wormskin zines, and

2. Prepped Tomb of the Serpent King for the players to explore (but changed it to the Tomb of the Goat Lord)

Compare this to my previous experience running adventure paths (such as our previous Curse of the Crimson Throne game), where the course of the campaign is largely dictated by a series of pre-planned events.

That is not to say that I’d never run a “free-wheeling” campaign before. I’d never even read a published module in high school or college, so the campaigns I ran then were certainly amorphous (which incurred its own problems).

But when we began playing, I largely intended Dolmenwood as a sandbox with which to test different rules. This meant that the rules changed almost from session to session, and the only thing holding the sessions together was the narrative “glue” of the in-game fiction.

Dolmenwood comes with no planned sequence of events. The Wormskin zines merely provide a “steady state” world for the players to explore. I had not yet read Justin Alexander’s work on campaign status documents, so really I was just going from session-to-session and adjusting the campaign world based on actions the players had taken.

I would end each session by asking the players what they planned to do next. They would tell me, then I would prepare that thing for the next session. And so we went, from session to session, with the players and their characters sitting in the driver’s seat.

This is quite different from my other experiences with this same gaming group, where “what the players do next” isn’t really a question. Generally speaking, adventure paths provide only a single logical “next step” for the players to take. While characters might be able to make micro-level choices (ex. which rooms of a dungeon to explore, and in which order), characters in an adventure path rarely get to make macro-level decisions with significant consequences.

And “significant consequences” derived from the actions of the players were the source of “driving action” for much of our Dolmenwood campaign. For example: the players let their retainers die, so they were arrested. Their subsequent release incurred a debt to a Brewmaster that compelled them to visit the Barrow Mounds and recover a lost chalice.

Similarly, player character actions (and the ensuing domino effect) proved to be the “spark in the keg” for the primary conflict of the game. After killing Farthigny, the PCs inadvertently set in motion a series of events that led to Atanuwe’s invasion of Dolmenwood. I had none of this planned when we began the campaign. Rather, while planning, I would review actions the players made and ask, “Who cares about this, and how do they react?”

I think this emergent gameplay was something the players really enjoyed about the game. They could tell their choices had consequences and would alter the course of the campaign, so they took those choices seriously and enjoyed making them. As the referee, I also enjoyed getting to “see what happened” as the players responded to different elements in the game world.

Although I thoroughly enjoyed our Dolmenwood game, there are some things I would go back and change if I could – primarily my own actions as a referee.

In particular, I think I might have put too much “pressure” on the player characters and made the consequences for their actions too high-stakes. In retrospect, the negative consequences for their actions – such as Mother sending gingerbread hit-men after them, or law enforcement in Prigwort arresting them – may have “backed them into a corner” with few other options. I think I may have been too heavy-handed in responding to the actions of the player characters.

To be fair, the player characters made some risky choices that had significant consequences like that. You don’t just go into the woods with seven people, come back with four, and get away without folks asking questions.

I didn’t force the players into anything, and I certainly didn’t have grand designs for a plot I was trying to railroad them into (as I was planning events from session-to-session). However, I wish I had allowed the players a bit more freedom to simply wander around and get into mischief. Instead, the consequences of their choices constantly held a hot poker to their backs.

This feeling became especially prominent after Atanuwe’s invasion began. The threat of Atanuwe subsumed all other ventures the players might have pursued, such as finishing the goat dungeon.

Granted, I was deliberately looking for a way to bring the campaign to a close after February.  I told the players I was ready to move on after finally finishing the homebrew ruleset we were playtesting. So out-of-game concerns also influenced the in-game fiction, as confronting Atanuwe provided a suitable climax that naturally stemmed from developments in the campaign thus far.

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Overall, the course of the campaign reminded me of a ball in a pachinko machine. The beginning was relatively free-form, with the players bouncing around to each place that took their fancy. Hell, their visit to the Bakery (where they met Mother and set all the other major events in motion) only arose due to a random roll for rumors in the Prigwort Oast House.

As the campaign progressed, the pachinko ball of the player characters settled into a narrow course. As the stakes escalated and the problems grew more dire, a central conflict emerged, caused by the tit-for-tat responses of the player characters and NPCs. This central conflict was “organic” in terms of the in-game fiction, not forced or contrived by a plot I had planned in advance. But this conflict also “took over” the campaign and left the player characters with loose ends left untied.

This worry about corralling my players with dire threats has me wondering what high-level play looks like in sandbox campaigns. Dolmenwood was the only sandbox-style game I’ve participated in that reached something like high-level play. I know there are some possibilities for player characters to occupy strongholds and gain followers, though the opportunity never really arose in our Dolmenwood game before its close.

I’m wondering exactly how “free” those stronghold-having characters are at high levels? It makes sense for low-level characters to wander around a region from job to job, as they have few responsibilities or obligations. But as the saying goes, “With great power comes great responsibility.” As the player characters gain more power, they should have more responsibilities to take care of – and those responsibilities likely involve dealing with greater threats.

It seems a bit overdone to have several high-level threats all transpiring at once – for example, if I were to have Atanuwe’s invasion coupled with a meteor plunging towards the earth, so the players have to choose between dealing with Atanuwe or the meteor. Perhaps all sandbox games progress in this same way, where the many possible paths eventually coalesce into one final resolution?

I don’t know. But I look forward to whatever our future games bring, and I hope I can capture some of the spirit from this one in those other games.