Session 1 Report: Hole in the Oak

The next session report is here.

Two weeks ago, I mentioned I would be running Hole in the Oak for the first time that Friday. Unfortunately, due to some scheduling issues, we’ve had to reschudle. Fortunately, yesterday, the session worked out and I ran Hole in the Oak for three friends.

This was the third time I’ve run an OSE thing on Foundry, and the second start of a real adventure. In this post, I want to describe how I’ve prepped for this session, what I’ve learned, and what was really fun to do. I specifically want to focus on two of the major aspects, using FoundryVTT as my virtual tabletop and working with the Hole in the Oak PDF file.

FoundryVTT

I’d bought the OSE: Advanced Fantasy Module along with the OSE: Hole in the Oak Module, which integrated perfectly in FoundryVTT. The Advanced Fantasy Module gave me all the rules to display to players, and ease drag-and-drop abilities and autorolling. The Hole in the Oak Module came with a preconfigured map, some light sources, and monster tokens listed. Character creation went fairly easily, with an automated 3d6 down-the-line roll that filled out most statistics for the players. Getting equipment was a drag-and-drop affair as well, though they players had to manually adjust their gold.

While playing, I thought there were no map notes, so I was referencing the PDF on the side constantly, which was annoying. However, as it turns out, there are map notes but I had to turn those on with a button on the left side of my map. Similarly, I’d made the players some retainers beforehand, but had to find a little checkbox in a settings page on their character sheet to set them up correctly. The same went for spellcasters, which also needed a little checkmark. In short: I’d recommend browsing through all settings pages just to check.

Hole in the Oak PDF

As I wrote above, I had the PDF file open on my monitor on the side in portrait mode, because I didn’t realize that there were actually map notes. As tricky as it was cross-referencing back and forth, the PDF itself as actually really helpfully laid out. There’s usually only two rooms per page, and each spread of pages has a little mini-map to help you reference things. Important things to note are bolded with more detailed information right after, so I got into a groove of describing a room through the bolded text and answering the players’ questions with the other text.

The only thing that was a little tricky every now and then was when the players went through the map via the left tunnels, because they would ask me what they heard and smelled down corridors and I’d had to flip forward through the PDF a little. From the way it’s set up, I would imagine that would have been easier with a physical book, but even now it wasn’t that tricky.

What Went Well

I really enjoyed how easy it was to adjudicate actions. Because there were so few rules or complex systems, it did just come down to what made sense at the virtual table. The players were also really cool about trying the system: their character stats weren’t super great but they were all in on just trying it. When two of the players only rolled 1HP for starting health, we did just reroll everybody for a little survivability.

I was super happy that I made some retainers for them, because in the very first room one of them failed a roll and died from falling already! It was quite a signal that OSE can be quite dangerous at early levels but it didn’t cost the players one of their characters, so that was good.

The players were also really good about exploring and asking questions. That really helped me get into a question-response groove, and it felt like we were collaborating on creating an adventure together. I really enjoyed a moment where one of the characters discovered a room which tiny people in jars, and the players started speculating about what could have happened. Of course, that’s when one of the players accidentally got themselves shrunk down to 6" size, which was hilarious.

What I Can Do Better

Now that I know there are journal notes on the map, I will definitely be using those next time. Flicking back and forth to the PDF did frazzle me a little bit, though it wasn’t too bad.

I also was a little hesitant about how to use the retainers. In this session, the players were controlling their movement but they were engaging them in conversation as though they were relevant NPCs rather than, well, cannon fodder.

As we were trying to get going, I was a little off-balance in trying to get everything working. Though I had originally planned to have the players map, I realized I didn´t have DungeonDraw installed. When I looked at the map, and the starting tunnels, I also wasn´t too sure how to start describing them. So, I defaulted to just using the map set up in the module instead. I’d like to practice describing rooms more, though, to get player mapping going.