Last weekend I ran Winter's Daughter by Gavin Norman at home for some friends, using my rules. A lot went great and the things that didn't go as well exposed what I ought to work on, both on my running skills and on my rule set.

This is a session report of sorts, not of the adventure itself, but where I will go over a few details of how I prepped, what I changed, how I ran, and some insights on what went well or not. This will contain spoilers for the adventure, so be warned. As a note, I ran the pre-Dolmenwood version from March, 2021.

Prepping the Game

I read the adventure completely, writing index cards for each room as I went. This quickly became a chore, and as I finished the dungeon per se and got to Fairy, I just gave up on writing the index cards. This was both good and bad: I felt a little less prepared for that part (but that might be because of fatigue), but my players barely interacted with the inside of the tower. While I wrote the cards, I made some changes to the adventure (more on that later).

I then revised some of my rules that I'm working on, as well as some of the rules for dungeon exploration in OSE if I needed to default to during the game. I haven't yet settled on how I want to run those, and this game was partly an experiment to help me understand what I like and dislike about them.

Aside from that, I gathered the materials I wanted we all to have available during the game: a few small notebooks, pencils, pens, and kraft paper to cover the table with to draw maps and such on. I printed pages with multiples of my 3d6 Saving Throws to hand players and my one-page chargen to use at the start of the game as well as to hand to a player if they died mid-session and had to create a new character.

Last but not least, I wrote a roadmap of what I needed to do and say after we started the session but before the adventure itself started.

What I changed

While I think the adventure is a strong one, there's a few things I dislike about it, mostly related to unmarked dangers.

EDIT: Vivanter correctly pointed out on Phlox's GLOG Server that there was no way of fully understanding my changes from my post alone. So I added some edits in this session describing the relevant parts of each room. Hopefully they give enough context to the changes.

For starters, the very first room of the tomb (room 5 going by the numberings in the adventure) is not really a good one. While it makes sense lore-wise that it's there, the way it's written punishes characters without warning, and what's worse, for choices made outside the game proper. Besides, I don't play with alignments. I also dislike how the mirror in room 7 has few clues pointing towards it.

EDIT: Room 5 has four religious relics stading on plinths. When a non-Lawful character enters the room, they starting floating around and attack.

What I did was put the relics in room 6 and change their activation to making too much noise or taking them. This has the added benefit of the relics being just before the chapel in room 9.

EDIT: Room 7 has a magic mirror that freezes those who pass in front of it. Unfreeze with holy water, cure light wounds or sunlight. A few markings on the ground from room 7 to the entrance of the tomb indicate someone dragged someone else's paralysed body to the outside of the tomb, but this is the kind of clue one can only interpret after someone has already been paralysed.

Meanwhile, in room 7, a mist emerges from the bottom of the mirror, and room is colder than any other in the tomb. This clearly indicates it is magic, even if the party lacks someone to detect it.

EDIT: Room 6 has a statue of a maiden beseeching silence, with a black cloth blindfold over her eyes. I'm not sure why she's posed like that.

The statue of the fair maiden, formerly in room 6, was moved to the entrance (room 5), nested between the double doors and the corridor to room 7. Instead of blindfolded and beseeching silence, the statue is covering its eyes with one hand. Alongside it, a statue of Sir Chyde himself is beseeching silence, nested between the double doors and the corridor that goes to the relics in room 6. Each of statues clues into the room closest to it: Sir Chyde, the religious man, tells players to be silent before the relics; the frost elf maiden lets them know the freezing mirror should not be trusted. Perceptive players might fall into one of the traps, but will hardly be unprepared for another.

EDIT: Room 12 has two stone dogs chained to double doors that lead into the burial chamber of Sir Chyde, the knight. On top of the door the inscryption "Call to the Companions". If someone touches the doors without saying the dogs' names, the dogs animate and attack.

Another change I made was having the remains of a dead tomb robber in front of the leading from room 12 "The Hall of Hounds" to room 13 "The Knight's Tomb", with its skull close to one of the hounds. This was supposed to highlight the danger in the room, as well as give further evidence that someone had been here before. However, in the fray of things I forgot this change (in part thanks to the issues with the index cards, see bellow).

The other thing I did was have all encounters of the adventure in a list, going 1 to 12, to roll a d20 every 10 minutes (in-game time), or whenever they made too much sound, instead of rolling a d6 and then a d4. I planned on having the encounters happen wherever made sense. For example, if the players left the tomb open, there's no reason the wind outside wouldn't catch them inside the tomb.

What worked

Everyone involved had fun, so the session itself was a success. It was also a great stress test to my "open table" initiative: I was supposed to run to five people, but one player got ill, the other was their partner (and was not going to leave them ill at home to play games) and another had to cancel for other reasons. So I was left with two players, who were wondering if they should come at all, but I told them to come and that we would play some boardgames if they weren't into rpgs when they got here. Happily they were.

The adventure itself was great, and my friends were constantly on edge and suspicious of anything mildly spooky. The chilly wind random encounter happened just as they were about to enter the tomb, almost making their torch extinguish, which was a great moment. My changes to the rooms felt strong during the game, even though I'm sad I forgot one of them.

The index cards helped me memorize the dungeon, and as I had drawn little maps of the rooms on them, helped me give my players information on what the rooms looked like.

Both the rules for The Combatant and The Sorceror did as well as I could hope for. The sorceror was great at improvising uses for his "Lock" spell, including "unlocking" a petrified comrade (even though he forgot to lock the one door that mattered), and the Combatants really abused their combat advantage against the dogs (I decided it made sense for the dogs to actually die once they impaled them with lances, and I stand by it). Combat was fun and strategic, but also incredibly dangerous for non-Combatants. At one point during the fight, I thought the Sorceror was about to die, but he managed to pull it off.

What didn't

While the index cards helped me the adventure in my head, they were terrible to use as aids during the game: they had too much information and because of that were hard to read. They were also too many and hard to handle and find the right one. For next time, I intend on doing one card only with a list of the rooms and the most important features of each.

Also, while combat was fun, it was hard for me. I took too much time to adjudicate some of the plays. We also had some trouble to meld my player's trad background with my freeform wishes for combat. So I'm thinking of ways to bridge the gap, but I'm not sure which way to go yet.

Another thing I disliked was how the Plunderer (my thief analogue) explored most rooms alone, but that was also on me: because I had no rules and procedures for dungeon exploration set down (I wanted to try it very freeform) we didn't use any and someone exploring alone had few clear drawbacks. One of the combatants even had rolled a plunderer follower, but they did mostly nothing during the game. I'm now in the middle of finishing my rules on dungeon exploration and the passing of time, and might change from judge-facing random encounter rolls to player-facing Underclock-like rules, as I was also a little dissatisfied with how they went (they mostly didn't happen, which robbed the session of even more tension).

Conclusion

The session was both fun and an opportunity to shine a light upon what I need to do to better my game. The parts of my game I thought were most strong did in fact shine and I satisfied with. The changes I did to the adventure felt good during the game. It was a great experience overall and just now I'm feelig the high of having run a game coming to an end.