Dragonbane: Shadow Over Gloomshire 2: Halls of the Blood King

I had such a good time running Shadow Over Gloomshire for MK-RPG that I wasn't ready to let go of it, despite the party having completed the main adventure. I'd dropped enough hints about who was behind everything that went down in the graveyard that I was pretty sure I could continue the adventure for another 8 week block.

Which became a 7 week block when damn near everyone was ill on week 1, including me.

Mazikeen's player had to drop out, and so the mighty paladin was replaced by Luna Bane, wolfkin demon hunter and massive Viktor Drakos fangirl.

Week 1: Into The Mines

There were still a lot of ill people, but I was well enough to run and two players made it to the club so off we went. I decided that most of the party were incredibly hung over after celebrating their victory with Gloomshire ale, and only Kaine was well enough to get up and enjoy a breakfast of crow bacon. So he was the first person to get to meet Luna, and watch Viktor's desperate attempts to avoid her by hiding behind Maeve.

Then came the actual mission, based on one of the many handy hooks provided in the scenario - talk to the shopkeeper Greb and try to ease his troubles. Meaning Kaine and Luna got sent out to the silver mines to recover Greb's six dead friends and bring their bodies home for proper burial.

The two made good use of knowledge skills, meaning that they arrived in the mine covered in the entrails of the stygian wolves they'd killed on the way in, meaning the thralls merely shambled slowly towards them rather than immediately charging. By the end of the session they were back in Gloomshire with a cart full of dead dwarves.

Week 2: Rescue Mission

With most of the group now recovered, it was time for the main plot to start unfolding. Councilwoman Auda Voss, now convinced of the team's skills and courage, asked them for help recovering her son from the Van Walden mansion.

At this point I knew I was going to need a map. I'd previously asked around for suggestions for OSRish vampire mansion adventures, and Halls of the Blood King by Diogo Nogueira was the name that kept showing up. Reasonably priced at £5.95 and with cartography by the ever-reliable Glynn Seal I decided to give it a shot. While written for Old School Essentials, I was confident that I could swap out the monsters for Dragonbane creations. The plot would need a little tweaking to fit in with the scenario we were playing, but I knew what needed to change and how I was going to make it work.

The party arrived at the mansion and immediately ran into my absolute favourite NPC of the entire campaign: the gate. I absolutely loved playing that gate.

"I'm going to have to bite you now."
Luna jumps rapidly backwards, away from the gate.
"Curses! Foiled again."

Week 3: There might be a vampire

Auda Voss was delighted to have her son back and handed over the offered reward. But over a meal of turnips, he revealed that he thought there might be a vampire in the mansion. So Voss offered them another mission - dealing with the Van Waldens once and for all. This time the reward was a bit more concrete: if they could clear the mansion out, they could have it.

So back they went to the mansion, with a leg of pork for the gate, who chewed it up enthusiastically. This time rather than going straight to the basement they began a sweep of the ground floor, finding servants' quarters before unexpectedly running into some guests. Two vampires, an orc and a mallard, both looking for the dining room. It was becoming clear that there might be a few more vampires here than anticipated.

They next encountered Princess Cornelia, after some unexpectedly virtuoso piano playing from Grimduck opened the secret door to her room. A friendly chat revealed that she was also a vampire, and the guests were here to celebrate her being welcomed into the Van Walden family as a replacement for Konrad the disappointment. Except she was having second thoughts.

Week 4: The lay of the land

Luna's player was unavailable, so Luna remained deep in conversation with Princess Cornelia, while the others continued their search. Notable event included finding a very unpleasant chest of drawers lined with teeth, which they nevertheless made use of to make vampire disguises for the less toothy party members. They managed to unenthrall some of the guards and sent them home after getting a comprehensive list of the vampire guests present - besides those they'd already met there were a dwarf, a halfling, a human and a frog.

The adventure includes a list of vampire guests. They don't all work exactly as written for Dragonbane, but after I'd rolled a random selection of them and assigned them all different kin based on names and descriptions, we had a great cast of weird vampires ready for future encounters.

Week 5: There really are a lot of vampires

The six golden bathtubs in the bathroom were really selling the otherwise rather unpleasant mansion, but it wasn't long before Dr Crumb had something new to occupy his enormous mind: the different death animations of different vampire kin. None of that was in the adventure, but when shortly afterwards they staked the halfling vampire and I described him deflating like a punctured balloon, which then got interpreted as him zooming around the room, this became a whole thing.

With most of the human staff either dead or rescued, it was time to brave the dining room. And there they found Liss Van Walden, in conversation with two guests - the human and the frog.

The vampires from Shadow Over Gloomshire are terrifying opponents, so I decided to use the frog kin from the bestiary for the frog vampire, and drop ferocity to 1 for the two humans. Even so it was a very close fight. I rolled for Liss's seduction attempt rather than having it auto succeed, which added some comedy when I rolled a demon and Liss was instead smitten by the intense fluffiness of Felis the cat person. Which didn't stop him almost getting bitten to death.

This did provide more data for Dr Crumb. Human vampires disintegrated into dust; frog vampires exploded, showering everyone in frog bits.

The party decided to rest after that, and having just discovered the games room (and given the games master free choice as to what she wanted to play with them), this took the form of an entire shift playing Twilight Imperium.

Week 6: Sexy people

After noping out of the library at the sight of the blood red spider webs, the party was ready to head upstairs. But not before the return of Luna, who was now convinced that Princess Cornelia was absolutely wonderful and they should do anything she wanted.

The upper floor soon brought them to a room full of very attractive people of various kin, lounging on cushions and inviting the party to join them. Fortunately some of the party passed their will rolls, found their way past the illusory wall, and dragged the others with them. So they'd done some comprehensive looting before Ernst Van Walden showed up.

Ernst was very rapidly taken down before he could bite anyone, and his guards ultimately proved more of a challenge. Once again they managed to unenthrall one of them, and then moved on to the final confrontation: Konrad Van Walden. Who turned out not to be a vampire at all, but a demon summoner, who'd summoned his own pet blood demon with the intention of demonstrating to his parents just how much of a disappointment he really was.

Which was all happening in a room full of fabulously valuable porcelain dolls, which Grimduck was frantically attempting to remove from the room before any potentially damaging fighting kicked off.

Week 7: Finale

Konrad's monologuing didn't go exactly as planned, and being a fairly weak human rather than a powerful vampire, he didn't last long. His demon proved rather tougher, but a phenomenal display of magical power from Halvelda finished it off.

Now there was just a bit of tidying to do. A planetary display turned out to have the lock fitting the key they'd found in the basement earlier, which turned off the house's evil decor, allowing them to use the stairs as normal. The orc vampire confided in them that he was working for Princess Cornelia. An earlier attempt at poisoning the blood soup with holy water had finally paid off, taking out the dwarf vampire. And the mallard was convinced to leave. But as he stepped outside, they saw the first rays of the rising sun, heard a shout of "Oh quack!", and were now in possession of a rather nice statue.

Princess Cornelia rewarded them for rescuing her beloved porcelain dolls and went on her way, reminding them about the spiders in the basement. And so they finally went back to the library, pushed the webs aside, and descended into the court of the blood spiders. The party immediately decided they didn't want to fight them, and attempted to persuade them to leave. It took a few attempts, but they were eventually convinced to relocate to the old temple in the graveyard. So under cover of darkness and some very large skirts, the blood spiders were escorted to the graveyard to meet their new friend: Bones, the gravedigger and MVP of the previous adventure.

Finally the party were able to enjoy their new property. While now largely bare boards, they did still have the six gold bathtubs. And most importantly, the gate.

Conclusions

Translating an adventure from OSE to Dragonbane had its challenges, and took more effort than running the original Shadow Over Gloomshire adventure as I had to make a number of changes to fit in with the ongoing story. That said, it's a really solidly written location with a great map, meaning I only had to worry about details like the location of the major NPCs rather than everything about the story.

If, like me, you don't care for most OSR systems but would like to try some of the adventures, give them a shot with Dragonbane. This one in particular is well worth the effort. Levels aren't much of a concern as you'll be swapping out the monsters for similar creatures from the Dragonbane Bestiary. The one important thing to change is treasure - the gold amounts in Halls of the Blood King are wildly over the top for Dragonbane so I replaced them with random draws from the treasure deck, specific treasure deck items, and rolls on the Shadow Over Gloomshire treasure table.

I'm wrapping up the campaign for now, as we've managed to tie off all the loose ends from the previous block and I'm keen to run some Pathfinder 2, but I'm not ruling out a return to Gloomshire some day. The adventure includes enough hooks to potentially introduce more adventures. I've also spotted that  Robin Fjärem has published another adventure and that looks perfect for a short block. The campaign might be over, but I'm far from done with Dragonbane.

Dragonbane: Shadow Over Gloomshire

I pitched Shadow Over Gloomshire for a long block at MK-RPG and immediately saw an issue. This adventure supposedly lasts 3-4 sessions, and I'd pitched it for an 8 week long block. What was I going to do in the other four weeks?

As it turned out, that wasn't an issue. I'd booked a holiday for week 8, and week 3 was so incredible hot that half the group were too ill to play and we cancelled. Allowing one week for character creation, I'd only need one extra session of material.

Week 1: Character Creation

Character creation for Dragonbane isn't exactly complicated, but it does take a while. I gave people the standard kin options, plus cat people because I like them, and the standard profession options, plus paladin and demon hunter from the adventure. I suggested Mariner might not be the ideal profession here, given how little water was involved.

Rather than how it's described in the book, I had each player roll a set of stats, and then gave them the option to use any of the rolled sets of stats. This is because my husband has a tendency to roll unusually good stats. I've done this before with Pathfinder 1 games, to prevent the party from ending up as Husband and his Puny Minions. As predicted, he rolled some good stats, and while not everyone chose to use them, the party were fairly well balanced at the end.

The final party was:

• Dr Hovis Crumb, mallard scholar
• Grimduck McQuack, mallard hunter
• Lady Mazikeen (Maze), halfing paladin
• Felis Nightstabber, cat person thief
• Kaine Wolfram, wolfkin fighter
• Halvelda Greycape, human animist mage

Now I had to work out hooks. I decided the paladin could have an invitation from Minerva, and the scholar suggested a research trip. I still had to nail down some details, but I decided to go ahead with everyone meeting in a bar, with the other characters largely going along for mercenary reasons.

In keeping with the tropes of horror I decided to have a harbinger - a strange old man in the coaching inn who talked about how great Gloomshire ale was, but also how Gloomshire was a terrible place and nobody should ever go to Gloomshire. Naturally they began asking questions about exactly which coach they should not get on in order to not go to Gloomshire, and this might have continued for a while, but at this point the fire alarm went off and we had to evacuate.

Week 2: The Coach Trip

By now I'd managed to sort out a few details. Mazikeen got a handout in the shape of a letter from Minerva asking her to come to Gloomshire to help with the problem. Dr Crumb got a document from the University of Pondsburg, in which Professor Hugh Quackman was requesting research into the history of Gloomshire. With both saying not to travel alone, it made sense that they had a hunter, thief and fighter along with them, while Halvelda was there to learn about the unusual flora and fauna of the area.

We picked up at breakfast time in the smoking ruins of the coaching inn, where people were largely sitting exactly where they had been the night before. After a bit of chatter the coach arrived and they all climbed aboard.

The journey went smoothly until they had to stop due to a blockage in the road, in the form of a wrecked cart and a sobbing forest giant. Bertha the giant proved not to be hostile. She was crying because a group of harpies had stolen her pet pig, Sir Piglington.

While some of the party staged a rescue mission, others tracked down the cart driver, who was very scared and relieved to have company. He got in the coach. Meanwhile, the harpies were defeated and Sir Piglington returned to Bertha's arms. She thrust her hand in her pocket and handed over the first thing she found as a reward, which turned out to be a fabulously valuable gold bangle, and got to work clearing the road so they could continue.

They stopped off for the night at an inn, run by a halfling woman called Violeta. Maze, who despite calling herself a mightly paladin was only just old enough to be adventuring, got extremely drunk and passed out on the hearthrug. Everyone else did make it as far as the bedrooms.

They were awoken in the night by strange noises, and looked out to see a huge hairy creature standing over Mazikeen. Kaine, being something of an expert on large hairy wolf creatures, identified it straight away as a werewolf.

They elected to incapacitate the werewolf rather than killing it, realising that it was probably the landlady and that she likely had no idea that she was doing this. In the morning, once she'd changed back, Halvelda and Grimduck went out to find wolfsbane to make a cure for her, and the party continued on their way, arriving in Gloomshire that evening.

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None of this is in the adventure itself. These two encounters were inspired by entries in the Dragonbane bestiary. I used a battle map book from Tom Cartos that supplied the blocked road map and the inn map. This made for a simple, fairly linear session for the players to get to know their characters and the system before moving onto Gloomshire proper.

Week 3: Welcome to Gloomshire

Half the group were still unwell from heat, but we did pick up an extra person from another game that wasn't running at the club that night. They asked to observe, but I suggested they could play an NPC if they'd like to try it out properly, and brought along Victor Drakos, mallard demon hunter.

The present party members chatted with Victor, and with Maeve, a young human paladin who'd also had a letter from Minerva. She was quite relieved to meet Maze, as she'd been worried about whether she was really experienced enough for this job, but it was clearly just a mix up over their very similar names.

They headed off to visit Minerva, with Victor in tow, where they learned about the something nasty in the temple in the graveyard, but were interrupted by a dwarf running in carrying an injured elf. I'd described the travelling carnival setting up outside the gates with guards telling them not to as the party arrived, so this wasn't hugely surprising. Minerva offered to look after the two of them while the party went out to help fend off the horde of stygian wolves attacking outside.

With those dealt with, they went back to the tavern, where they learned that the missing party members had been helping out there due to the cook having turned into an undead monstrosity. The next morning they got up early and headed to the graveyard, having decided that going during the day was far more sensible than at night.

They took a cautious route around the inside edge, avoiding some of the more significant pitfalls along the way. They ran into Bones, who they took a bit of a liking to, despite his determination to sell them eyeballs. Maze bought a skeleton hand. Then on to the temple itself.

Week 4: The Temple

With Victor's player back with their regular group, and Maze's player also unavailable, I decided that the two of them were outside fighting a winged horror while the other two got inside, and then cut back to the other three party members waking up in the inn to discover that the others had gone on an adventure without them.

They had a less eventful trip through the graveyard (it was almost like four adventurers had recently passed that way and already had the encounters!) but still ran into Bones. They weren't quite as taken with him as the previous group, and also declined to buy any eyeballs.

With most of the team back together, they explored the temple. Kaine made sure to smash up all the skeletons before they could do anything annoying like come to life. They still had to fight one when it popped out of the font. A friendly chat with the one entirely non-hostile inhabitant netted them some extremely useful books which would certainly please Professor Quackman as well as providing valuable information for their search. They wanted to know why the ghostly priest's skeleton was chained to the bed, and he explained just how humiliating it was to see your own remains walking around without you. They sympathised, and agreed to his request to have his bones moved into a proper crypt - for which kindness he gave them the key they needed.

They opened up the door to the catacombs, and were immediately set upon by a skeletal snake, where they discovered that being eaten by a skeletal snake isn't exactly dangerous like being eaten by a live snake would be, but is nevertheless rather inconvenient. At some point in all this, Halvelda got a demon on a spellcasting roll, and unexpectedly aged significantly.

Week 5: Deeper Underground

With the whole party back together and not inside a skeletal snake, they descended into the catacombs. A quick stop off in the embalming room let them restock on bandages, and not long after that Halvelda spotted a concealed door. From then they explored the catacomb very much in reverse order, finding many doors that would have been locked if they'd come to them from the other side. Maze touched an obilisk and also unexpectedly aged significantly.

Some fighting later, they located Fiona, and decided to have a rest. This holy site kept the bad things out, so they could recover somewhat. Fiona also cleansed Halvelda and Maze of their unnatural aging, while apologising to Dr Crumb for not being able to reverse his entirely natural aging.

Week 6: Finale

It was time to take on the demon - after getting out of the catacombs, of course. More encountering of doors from the wrong side happened, and Dr Crumb finally found a use for the stone crow he'd been carrying around for several hours.

Suitably armed with Fiona's sword and a lot of other weaponry they'd picked up along the way, they prepared to face the demon. And face it they did! The demon was killed, the two blades were reunited, and the shadow over Gloomshire was lifted...

...For now.

Conclusions

This is an excellent adventure, with interesting new monsters, fun NPCs, a solid main quest and enough hooks that you could easily build a longer campaign around Gloomshire. The only caveat is that I had some trouble getting my head around the main plot - the big bad is encountered fairly early on in affairs, as is the demon blade, and it took me a lot of scrambling through the adventure to figure out that they couldn't just take the blade because the demon was still there. I found it in an introductory section.

I also had a bit of a struggle with the maps. This would be no issue on a VTT, but on a real table, the catacomb map is, shall we say, a little prone to colouring outside the lines? Copying the damn thing onto my Chessex Megamat was something of a challenge. And you do need a Chessex Megamat. The catacomb is huge, and filled the entire mat. The temple map is an easier draw, being largely along the grid lines. I drew that on my Ergon silicone mat, as I rapidly realised I was going to need to be swapping between maps pretty quickly.

But that aside, I had an absolute blast running this. And I realised that I'd dropped enough hints about a certain NPC's involvement in events that I could very easily run a second long block game as a sequel to this. So assuming players sign up, in a few weeks time they'll be heading off to the Van Walden mansion to find out what's really been going on in Gloomshire...

Team building with RPGs

My manager asked me to run an RPG as an activity for our team building day. Here's how it went down.

Before The Game

Venues

With our team being rather geographically diverse (several of us are home workers) the first challenge was picking a location where the travel wasn't too awful for anyone, and the manager picked Oxford. He found an escape room for our first activity, but it was down to me to find somewhere suitable for the game.

While you can run an RPG in a pub, you need to really know the pub to be sure there isn't going to be loud music/sport/crowds, and that wasn't something I could figure out that far from home. Fortunately, as a board gamer I was aware of Oxford's board games cafe, Thirsty Meeples, even though I'd never been there before. I was confident they could offer a reasonably quiet space with clean tables, and on further investigation learned they also had the other thing that my team seem to consider indispensible: beer.

Choosing a game

When previously considering games for beginners I was pretty sure that Dragonbane would be a good choice, especially when I realised that the game was going to be quite popular and with the event taking place on a week day it was unlikely I'd be able to recruit a second GM. 4-5 is my normal sweet spot for player numbers but this time I was absolutely going to have to accomodate 6. That's a lot easier with something with a board and miniatures and skill rolls and hit points than something that's largely narrative based.

Another reason to go for a game like this is that with one exception, all the players were absolute beginners. And my team aren't all former theatre kids, who seem to take to the improv aspect of RPGs very easily. We're a tech team. Most of them are database administrators and similar. People who can easily get into dice rolling and movement rates and weapon ranges but might take a bit longer to get into character motivations.

And finally, this was a team building event, with a side goal of promoting DEI. Dragonbane is a game that absolutely promotes teamwork, as a successful dungeon crawl often hinges on people working together to defeat the monsters, and also promotes diversity, where you can clearly see the benefits of a diverse team all bringing different skills to the table.

Preparation

By the time it was confirmed that I'd be running an RPG for this event, I'd bought a copy of Dragonbane and run the quickstart adventure The Riddermound multiple times. This seemed like a solid choice. Nice simple motivation for the characters. Get in, find treasure, get out. And I knew it well enough that I wouldn't have to do too much thinking about the adventure itself and could focus on the players.

I decided to use the cardboard standees that come in the core set for the player characters, and regular miniatures for the monsters. This meant there was a clear visual difference between PCs and monsters on the board. Using the standees also meant I wasn't having to explain that I didn't have any duck miniatures so please pretend that this tengu is actually a duck. They could just find the mini that matched the art on their character sheet. Meanwhile our miniature collection does include reasonable minis for the monsters encountered in this adventure.

Naturally I used the pre-gens from the quickstart, although I did also need to add in a sixth character. I created a dwarf bard, Urd Gildenclef, and while the back page of his character sheet didn't exactly match the others (I didn't have the right fonts, and also couldn't quite cut out the art from the book as neatly as I'd like to paste into the sheet) it was near enough that it still looked good and had a matching standee.

What else did I need? Dice, of course. I do have enough dice to loan six people enough dice to play Dragonbane. But, I found myself asking, did I want to? Of course not. Those are my dice, and every one of them has a story. A gift, a prize, a special purchase. I didn't want to lend them out.

Fortunately dice aren't too expensive if you're buying in bulk and don't much care about colours and stuff. I ordered a pack of six dice sets with drawstring dice bags on Amazon for about £10, and then shortly afterwards ordered another six when I realised numbers were about to get complicated. I figured people could keep them if they liked them, and if not I now had a decent set of loaners should I find myself introducing more beginners to gaming.

Then something struck me. Battle boards.

Like all good gamers, I have a Chessex Megamat at home. But the trouble with the Megamat, as the name implies, is that it's big. Really big. Rolled up it's 34"/86cm long, which is not the easiest thing to take with you on the Park and Ride or to carry across Oxford city centre.

By contrast, the battle board provided with the Dragonbane core set fits very neatly into the box. But it's small. Significantly smaller than the Riddermound map. I love that it's included in the set, but it wasn't going to work here.

So began my hunt for a battle map that would easily fit in the backpack with the rest of the gear, which will probably become a blog post by itself, but which ended with me buying an Ergon Games battle map from Amazon, which allowed me to draw the map in advance and then fold it up and put it in the bag.

On The Day

While I'd set a limit of 6 players for the game, I actually ended up with 8 people sitting at the table with me. One was my manager who'd organised the day, and who I knew would be an extra person well in advance. He suggested that he could be an observer, but I had another idea to give him more engagement. He could play the monsters. Easy enough in Dragonbane. I gave him the bag of monster minis and the rule book, and he rolled the dice, read out the attack descriptions, and rolled the damage dice.

I didn't have anything for the eighth person (a much more last minute addition) but there was a suggestion that two people could share a character, and I couldn't see any reason why not. Two guys decided to share, and picked Archmaster Aodhan, which worked out well for table space as I also had his spells printed out. One person had to leave early, so when he did, one of the sharing players took over his character.

I began by putting a couple of x cards on the table, explaining them as being like the emergency exit button on the escape room we'd just been to. I doubted we'd need them, and didn't make a big deal out of it, but I figure it doesn't hurt to explicitly state that it's OK to say no to things.

When giving my introduction to the rules I forgot to explain Boon and Bane, although I should have done given that some of the special abilities involve it. It did get used however, with me telling players when they were allowed to roll the dice twice and why. I could have handled it a little better, but it did go OK in the end. I did remember to explain resting, which as usual proved entirely necessary.

The game itself went as smoothly as can be expected. I was constantly having to remind people which dice to roll, but that was nothing I didn't expect, and the novelty of the polyhedral dice definitely caught people's attention. I made some minor alterations, such as reducing the falling damage for the initial descent into the mound to 1d6, as having characters risk death on the very first dice roll seemed un-fun. (I then rolled 5 and 6 for the damage on the two characters who failed the roll, so they still got the feel of this being dangerous.)

While on previous occasions I've run this game, I've always used the optional pushing rule, this time I didn't. Mostly I've played this with people with at least some familiarity with Free League games (or Call of Cthulhu) who were on board with the idea of getting a reroll in exchange for some kind of risk or penalty, but for complete beginners I decided it would be just one more thing to explain, and ditched it entirely. It's fun to include for more experienced players but the game runs fine without it.

There was only one moment where a character risked death, when the big bad rolled his biggest attack - 4d8 damage. Makander was standing right in front of him at the time, so I suggested that he should be the target, with his armour rating 6 plate armour and 16 hit points giving him a reasonable shot at survival. Only the manager playing the monster rolled 22 damage, taking him down to 0 points. Fortunately his next con roll was a critical, and while it took pretty much the entire party having a go at healing for someone to succeed, he was stabilised. On 1 hit point. Which almost resulted in him getting knocked out again at the end when I called for Acrobatics rolls to get back out of the Riddermound, but fortunately the final player to roll (Urd Gildenclef, as it happened) got a critical, so I told him he was able to bring the duck out with him.

Urd Gildenclef proved to be a very useful party member in the end, providing backup to Aodhan on knowledge skills, keeping the party well informed with beast lore, and of course giving boons in combat with his musical talents. If you're running with the pre-gens and need a 6th character, I thoroughly recommend including him.

You grew up in your family’s underground halls, dreaming of one day becoming a mighty warrior like your father. Until the day when you were first invited to blow the hunting horn that called everyone to dinner, and a new passion awoke. Instead of just listening to the chroniclers tell stories and sing songs of your ancestors, you began learning those stories yourself, and your skill at playing the horn won you many complements. Now you’re out in the Misty Vale, seeking out new stories to some day bring back home.

We ended up wrapping up in 2.5 hours, faster than I anticipated. I soon realised why. Experienced players talk a lot in character. These beginners didn't. So things moved along a little faster than I expected. Since we only had the table for 3 hours, that was fine - realising I was going to wrap things up well in time made things less stressful for me.

After The Game

With about half an hour left before we had to leave, some of the players decided to make use of the cafe's board game library and had a game of Uno. I didn't join in. I had plenty to do packing my gear away, and was happy just to watch.

Then it was back onto the Park and Ride, and an hour's drive home, and I could finally relax. I was exhausted. I felt like I'd just come back from a LARP, and while there had been some walking across Oxford and a bit of activity in the escape room, it wasn't enough to induce that kind of tiredness. Running for beginners comes with a lot more mental load that my normal games. So does running with eight other people at the table instead of the usual four or five. So does running for people who aren't just friends or acquaintences, but co-workers and the manager who asked me to do this. Hardly surprising I was wiped out by it.

That said, I would absolutely recommend this as a team building activity. It ticks the boxes on actually promoting teamwork in a way most of the nonsense you end up doing while team building doesn't, and I think people did find it reasonably enjoyable. Dragonbane is absolutely a solid choice for this situation and the core set is useful for providing the standees to match the character sheets.

If you do try this, and end up with eight prospective players, get a second GM if you can. Big tables are a challenge by themselves, and they're a bigger challenge when everybody is completely new to the game. But if you can't, bringing in the manager as the monster wrangler actually worked pretty well.

Whether I'll get any new gamers out of this, I'm not sure, but I'll certainly be offering to talk to anyone who's interested in learning more when we're back at work.