Preface: I’ve decided to document the ongoing D&D campaign of my group on this blog. It’s going to be a non-regular series, filtered by the Dolmenwood hashtag, and interlinked with the next and previous session, so eventually it will be easy to pick up for anyone who wants to read along. To not just narrate the events and absurd decisions of my playgroup I will interject from time to time some reasoning for why I have presented my players with certain choices or why I might have nudged them into a certain direction - it might be interesting for those who think of running Dolmenwood or any Old-School D&D game themselves. For players intending to play it - beware of spoilers and read at your own risk. For posterity, we are running Dolmenwood with the official Dolmenwood rule set, which is a slight adaptation of the Old-School Essentials ruleset, both published by Gavin Norman. I hope you enjoy.

It is Frisk, the 19th of Haelhold in the year 1090, when we meet our 4 friends in a Tavern (how else could it be) in the old town of Prigwort. How they became friends does not matter to this story, and given their very different personas it is definitely a miracle that they found each other in this life.

Let’s take a moment to meet them:

Boon Oakenshade – he is a Thief first and foremost, and a Breggle by birth. The youngblood of the party, naive in many ways, but full of dreams - and his is the dream that gets the adventure started.

Knorrbald Rinderschuppe – He is through and through a Fighter, and Mossling by birth. Short, sturdy, grounded. Living in self-imposed exile for reasons we will find out.

Nigel Deadsmell – You wouldn’t believe it, but he is a Friar, and the one person of human ancestry in this group. He announces himself with a faintly acidic smell, due to very questionable hygiene decisions. Where he got those Friar robes is unclear. Also, why?

Olpipes Shunderborg – Every party needs a Bard, especially if it’s a Woodgrue. The party animal, and comic relief. The agent of chaos every adventure needs.

The reason for their meeting has been a persistent and recurring dream of Boon, in which a fair elf princess begs him to return a ring, on a skeleton’s finger, buried in a tomb, back to her, promising her undying love to him. We all see, why a youngblood like Boon would fall for that, but the party is understanding and for some magical reason he knows exactly where in Dolmenwood he needs to go.

But with which money? With which supplies? For what is presumably at least a 3-day trip into the depths of Dolmenwood forest.

It does not help that Austache, the xenophobic son of the barkeeper, interrupts our friends and starts cussing the goat, telling them that folks like “‘im arnt welcom ere!” Only his old man Bingo Jongle stepping in and de-escalating the tension is bringing calm to it - and free beer for the rest of the night.

This little episode should introduce the party straight away to the concept of factions, and make Dolmenwood a living and breathing thing. Full of people, some of them favourable, some not, towards our party. Such events will only escalate in scope, the more our party grows in experience.

What gives this evening a completely different turn is the yellow cat on the window sill. It has jumped up there, unnoticed by our friends. You do notice however when all of a sudden the legs straighten out, and grow, and grow and grow, and the snout forms slightly differently, and the paws grow to fingers with claws and within seconds a shapeshifted Grimalkin sits on the window sill, with piercing, yellow eyes, looking at our 4 friends.

He introduces himself as Merigall Mousetrap, but Merigall will suffice, and apologises for overhearing our friends’ conversation. For that ring desired by the dream-princess, Merigall would be willing to sponsor our group’s trip and to reward them with 1,000 gold pieces (gp) once they return the treasure to him.

Merigall Mousetrap is the “glue-NPC” I talked about in a previous blog post , one of the key NPCs that will return regularly to give the otherwise aim-less or purely rumour-driven hexcrawl a unifying, narrative arc. The players can’t know yet, but one thing is certain: Merigall has some deep and rich history that might play a big part in the events to come.

What do they say? The vote goes out 3-1, all against Boon, who is not convinced that returning the treasure for gold to the Grimalkin is the right play, with the love of the princess basically in reach. The group decides to leave with the Grimalkin’s down payment to buy their equipment, and then leave by the morrow.

The road does toss them a couple of things worth slowing down for. First, Mother’s Bakery, a cottage in the woods where a broad, flour-dusted woman bakes alongside her twelve daughters, and where, out back, a troop of animated gingerbread men stir an enormous pot of dough without anyone seeing fit to comment. She gives our travellers two cinnamon baguettes each and mentions that should they ever pass through the High Wold she’ll pay a tidy 200 gp for twelve portions of a rare mushroom she needs – for the wedding cake of the Earl of Yellow (none of the party have a clue who that might be). This is me, the GM, thinking about a potential future pay-off. Players take note, and will remember collecting mushrooms for a cake.

A little further on, the path skirts a patch of bog-land, and there, hovering a foot above the muck, stands a twenty-foot pillar of …stone? This is one of Dolmenwood’s vorpal monoliths, the mysterious things that trace a fifth, emergent ley line through the wood; for most of the year it is a mere shimmering figment, but it is high summer, and in summer the monolith turns semi-corporeal. Boon, being Boon, cannot leave it alone. He gives it a good long look. By the time he steps away he is serenely, unshakeably convinced that he is a holy saint of the Pluritine Church. You could also call it a curse. As a GM, I do enjoy an early curse. And my player was really asking for it and failed the save.

Then the wind shifts, and they smell it long before they reach it: a colossal mound of Woodgrue shit. Steaming mountain of shit at the side of the trail, which doubles as a beloved social spot, where Woodgrues travel from miles around to relieve themselves, enjoy community and party hard. Olpipes is delighted, shits onto the pile with great enthusiasm, and chatting with a fellow Woodgrue learns the rest of the way to the barrow. My players must have laughed a solid 15 minutes about this scene. Dolmenwood is fucking awesome.

And so, our friends arrive at the place from Boon’s dream. It announces itself through an irregular clanking drifting through the trees, which turns out to be a dozen-odd crude iron owls up in the branches. This is me as a GM planting seeds about the Drune as a mysterious faction in Dolmenwood.

Beyond the owls lies a glade that feels too quiet, too still, surrounded by seven standing stones, and right in its middle a stag skeleton twitching in a haze of glowing green slime. Scraping the moss off the stones reveals eldritch runes, and beneath them carvings of icy fey figures. None of which our friends can read and all of which they decide not to think too hard about.

The artificial hill at the back of the glade is the obvious prize, and finally they shift the granite slab sealing it and descend twenty feet into the dark, into an entrance hall where four mouldering relics stand on plinths in the corners and a dust-caked mosaic sprawls across the floor: a knight on a white charger driving his spear through the heart of a frost elf, ringed by an inscription they can only half make out: “Here lies noble Sir Chyde, slayer of Frost, defender of the King.”

What a fairy princess could possibly want with the tomb of a long-dead human war-hero, nobody has the faintest idea. Yet.

Image credits: the character tokens and the dung-heap illustration are official Dolmenwood artwork, © Necrotic Gnome . Merigall’s token is by the talented Frank Scacalossi, whose collection you can find at youseethis.blog/tokens .