By These Wolves, or: How I'm Awesome and It's Everyone Else's Fault
Campaign Retrospective of My Campaign 26 clusterfuck and how I hate myself.
I fucked up this year.
I decided to run a "spinoff" of Wolves upon the Coast called BY THESE WOLVES I RULE, which is funny because the setting had no wolves.
Thats right, I decided to slap chop up a weird bronze-iron age setting up entirely, like an idiot, from scratch. I even hacked up rules for it all from scratch with a thousand variations and bad ideas.
This is not gonna be a normal campaign reflection. I should've just ran B2.
TIMING
The game occurred from 5-8pm EST. I was also quite an idiot and decided to invite a european friend.
This was a bad idea.
I couldn't get everyone together and about half the roster had to be hacked off before like, session 3 or so leaving us with a tangible group of 3-4 players at any given moment. The worst part is that I said it was gonna be "open table" and then made it sharp and closed, I expected to much.
MISMATCHED DESIRES
Some of my players wanted to quest out. Some of my players decided to stay and attempt settlement building from scratch. A majority just followed whoever was most charismatic at the time.
In hindsight I should've just done what Ollie did in Dogs upon the Isle: shot a quick DM saying "hey, you're kinda dragging the game out, could you tighten up a bit?" to my "problem players".
I feel though saying the players were the problem is deflection. It was a group of people who weren't familiar with OSR dropping directly into the deep end of the pool.
IN OVER MY HEAD
I stocked too much, around 1/3 of the total area of Dragon Pass in glorantha, although to be honesty only 20 hexes were filled in.
I set in too many procedures, too many veriscimilitudes. I had 800 things to keep track of whilst playing the game: encounter checks mid conversation, weather rolls each day, travel mishap checks, rolls for amounts of entities, so on and so on and so on.
I went too far. I keep falling into this trap whenever I try to run games. I set up too many jenga blocks and all the pieces crush me. I think it's a good time to mention I'm a bad GM. Every NPC is an Asshole, I stutter mid-speech, I either describe to much or too little and everything feels like a mess.
#The Bright Light a the End of the Tunnel
I got experience. I ran 13-odd complete sessions for the first time instead of my 0-1 session average. I feel proud that I could at least run through something instead of puddling about and having nothing happen at all.
#Closing Remarks
I will not be writing more session reports.
The rules I used will be available here
The notes I had will be available here
Heres the map the players made
I don't think I'm going to run anything anytime soon, maybe mage the ascension. That will be for another day.
I'm gonna find something to occupy myself.