The OSRchivist

Rediscovering the magic of old school roleplaying.

Session 3 Report Hole in the Oak

Previous session report can be found here. Next session report is here. First session report can be found here.

Overall

On Friday, I ran the third session of my Hole in the Oak game for OSE via FoundryVTT. In this session, the PCs finished buying equipment at the town, and returned back to the dungeon. They cautiously explored a couple of rooms ahead, correctly sensing danger at each crossroads. Finally, they chose to go down an early side-passage they’d skipped over, ending as they attracted the attention of some suspicious fauns.

What Went Well

New Desktop Setup

This was the first session I ran for this group using my new 34" ultrawide monitor, and it worked perfectly. I could easily fit both FoundryVTT as well as the Discord webcams on the same screen, and use my secondary monitor in portrait mode for reference.

Signalling Danger

In the previous session, the PCs had fled from a serious of ghouls with their lives intact. This time, they went exploring in the other direction with some trepidation. They had three options avaiable:

  1. A curious side-passage with hoof and bootprints leading in but only hoofprints back out; and
  2. A large cave opening up into darkness; and
  3. A stone passage leading to an archway with a skeleton lying in it.

For each I could hint at some danger. The hoof- and bootprints already signalled that people were brought in but not out. The PCs were immediately suspicious of the archway because of the skeleton. In trying to investigate the skeleton, they made a bunch of noise, so I had the dangerous bats in the cave start skittering about. The PCs chose to withdraw, rest, and then picked their best option. Following the discussion, I could see they were weighing up possible risks to each other, and I was happy to see I’d communicated those well enough.

Improvising Villager Knowledge

When the PCs were back at the town, they wanted to ask around to see if anybody knew anything about the dungeon area. I’d decided that it was a small village, and that the PCs were just about the only adventurers they knew of other than retainers passing through. I didn’t want to slam the door in the PCs’ faces, though. I ended up going to the rumor table and using that as villager knowledge. After all, if these are the rumors, it must be the villagers spreading them, right?

Lessons Learned

Downtime Activities

While in town, the bard decided he wanted to perform at the inn for some cash. This caught me off guard a little, simply because I hadn’t thought of it yet. I decided to just wing it, and say we could roll a d4 or d6 and that’s how much money he’d make. Initially, I said that number in GP, but the bard felt that seemed a little off, so we just settled on SP after I compared some prices of basic services. It felt like something I should have figured out in advance, though.

Afterwards, I went looking up what some common wisdom is on this. In On Downtime and Demesnes, I read:

Professional Income Characters can choose to practice a craft or a profession in a city. This negates their living expenses and earns them an appropriate salary in gold pieces per month. A bard or prostitute could make a lot of money or maybe none, whereas a scribe would earn less but have more assurance of getting paid a decent rate.

It’s not very specific, though it suggests to use downtime as a monthly activity. I also like the idea of variable money depending on the type of work done, but there’d still have to be some idea for a system. Judging by the idea that a bard would make a less consistent income than a scribe, I’d imagine that’d be expressed in different die types. Perhaps something like a bard earning a flat d12 but a scribe earning 4+1d4GP?

A quick browse on Reddit showed that other referees also wing it with some homebrew. Another posts focuses more on what the PCs can do in downtime. This makes sense to me, because any adventurer will soon find their income from adventuring vastly outstripping what they can make in standard jobs. Most advice I ended up finding was therefore focused on how to get PCs to spend money: strongholds, guilds, carousing, philanthropy, and so on.

I did see a nice recommendation in Downtime in Zyan. Most people recommended Downtime and Demesnes but Downtime in Zyan had an equal number of fans in the comments. That might be a fun pickup somewhere down the road.