Session 9 Report Hole in the Oak
Previous session report can be found here. First session report can be found here.
Overall
On Friday, December 19th, I ran the ninth session of my Hole in the Oak game for OSE via FoundryVTT. In this post I’ll recap what happened, and note down my lessons learned.
This whole session was focused around the heretic gnomes in the southeastern portion of the map. The players had started the session right outside their dungeon area, and were just about to enter when we ended last time. They spent a little time trying to spy ahead to see what was going on, which offered some good opportunities to use items creatively. After using a handmirror to glance underneath the door, the PCs figured to
When they entered, I had the three gnomes on guard be more busy with watching out for lizards than dealing with the PCs. I think that became a fun little vignette that showed that there’s more to the world than just the PCs. What was also good was that it gave me the opportunity to portray the gnomes as more indifferent to them, rather than openly antagonistic.
They spent some careful time talking with those gnomes before they started asking more pointed questions, such as how many of them there were. I took the opportunity to have the gnomes themselves become a bit wary of these intruders, and they were led deeper into the area, so that they could meet the leaders.
The PCs started asking them about the rest of the dungeon, and I thought that was such a good idea I just gave them broad descriptions of areas, so they know what to expect and how to plan next. As they kept asking more, they also veered into what the gnomes actually do here, which led to their worship of the stump god. I took that perfect opportunity to start making the gnomes a little too eager to have them learn about the god, and started moving more and more gnomes into the areas around them for added creepiness.
All this had the exact effect that I was hoping for: the PCs got more and more weirded out and figured to get out of there quickly before it would turn all Wicker Man. I figured it’d be interesting to just have them leave, because that way the PCs have a lot more information about the dungeon and can now start making more informed choices.
What Went Well
Playing Monsters as Neutral/Friendly
When the PCs met the gnomes, I remembered to roll a reaction roll for them. The outcome was neutral/indifferent, which was an interesting approach. I also run a game of Abomination Vaults in PF2e, and almost every encounter there has descriptions like “cannot be reasoned with” or “will fight until destroyed”, and so on. The contrast to this OSE module is huge, as just having these gnomes—who do have the goal of sacrificing people to the stump—also just be normal people is really entertaining. I felt it gave me more opportunities than with the Abomination Vaults to actually show something of the gnomes and what they want, which is more interesting.
Signposting to the PCs
I thoroughly enjoyed how the PCs were picking up on the small, creepy hints of cult activity in their interactions with the gnomes. As they started becoming more suspicious, I started moving gnome tokens around to surround them every so often. Coupled with the lead gnomes asking if they wanted to stay over or rest just a little too eagerly, the effect was quite nice. I was quite happy to have that encounter but also to ensure that it didn’t just end in battle. Now, they know how this faction is, that they’re not fully okay, and that will probably be a lot more interesting down the line.
Lessons Learned
Using FoundryVTT’s Built-in A/V
I wanted to try out using Foundry’s built-in audio/video solution, since I finally got my SSL set up correctly (which is a requirement). Fortunately, the players were willing to test it out as an alternative to Discord. Unfortunately, however, it ended up costing us almost 40 minutes of fiddling around with it. While it worked okay for most of the time, one of the players got weird issues that ended up muting her microphone. Another issue ended up being that one of the players took notes in a Word document, but since FoundryVTT only uses keyboard keybindings, they couldn’t use push-to-talk unless they were fully tabbed back into the game. With Discord, they were able to have Discord and their notes on one screen, and the game on another. So, all in all, it turns out not to have been an ideal solution for my group.
Remembering Infravision
As the PCs were exploring the first guard room, and using a hand mirror underneat the door to do so, I forgot that they were fully in the dark, so they couldn’t see that the gnomes’ felt hats were red. It should have been all shades of grey. Overall, infravision keeps messing me up. Particularly since, as I understand it, it should mainly be useful for navigation, but to actually see detail you’d need light. It’s a small thing, and we just retconned it when one of the players reminded me of it, but it’s still tricky to remember!