10 Sessions of Highfell
This post is spoiler-free.
Since the 19th of August, I have been running an online game of Highfell using OSE Classic Fantasy with minimal modifications. 10 sessions have been run so far, comprising of 8 regular Monday sessions, and two "bonus" Saturday sessions. The player count has averaged at just under 3 players per session, which is a number I'm fairly happy with.
The Vision
The inspiration for this campaign was my discovery of "Chesterton's Fence", a principle put forth by G. K. Chesterton which outlines that reforms to a situation should not be made until the existing state of affairs is fully understood. In a moment of blinding clarity fuelled by my concerns about the compatibility of open table gaming with the Cairn-ish system I had been blindly writing for use in my Caverns of Thracia campaign, I realised that I did not understand the thought processes of the giants upon whose shoulders I stood.
So it was that I set out to unpick and understand the choices made in the development of classic D&D, with the hope of better illuminating to myself its true strengths and weaknesses. To this end, I chose the most vanilla system and setting I knew of, with the intent of discovering for myself what I wanted from such things.
The Format
I originally envisioned the campaign as running in an open-table format, but I only recruited a starting player pool of 4 people. Since then, however, I have discovered that the vibe of the current group is excellent, and I have greatly enjoyed running the campaign for just the four of them. As one player is unavailable at the weekly session time due to study commitments and my availability for Saturday sessions may soon become spotty, I am considering inviting a fifth player to the group to ensure sessions continue firing on schedule.
Timekeeping was an aspect of refereeing I was keen to experiment with, and I chose to run this campaign on 1:1 time, i.e. each in-game day corresponds to a real-world day. This has worked well so far, with the only bit of oddness being a situation where one session's adventure lasted long enough to "lock" a section of the dungeon against being used in the next session to secure the consistency of the events. I can envision more situations where players are restricted in the choice of where to adventure because of the actions of players in previous sessions, but this is not something I see as a flaw.
The Author
Greg Gillespie is an anti-woke cultural reactionary, and though I would love to separate the art from the author, Gillespie's cultural prejudices tend to seep into his text. For example, the uninspired if not sexist treatment of female characters in his works is exemplified by his naming of taverns with the infamous "Harlot Encounter Table" from AD&D 1e.
The System
B/X (and hence OSE: CF) is an odd beast - it sits on an offshoot branch of D&D's development history, yet has been seized by the OSR as a lingua franca. I have found that not only does the system require a lot of adjudication, as I expected, but also that some elements are largely incoherent. To name but a few examples: the enormous weight of coins, the heavily abstracted adventuring gear weight, the odd wilderness adventure procedures, the harsh (and non-diegetic) limitations on spellbooks, the whacko weapon balance if using variable damage dice, the lack of guidance for hiring retainers, and the absurdly divergent costs for the funding of mercenary groups.
The complaints above, amongst others, have pushed me to delve into the rabbit hole of heartbreaker writing. My current work is enmeshed tightly with my nascent conception of a mid-13th century medieval fantasy setting, and it aims to rationalise and/or simplify all of the elements that I have found problematic whilst running Highfell.
The Module
Highfell: The Drifting Dungeon is a fairly dry classic fantasy module concerning the exploration of a ruined wizards' school. In practice, I have found there to be a few design choices that I disagree with. The first of these is the presence of "gotcha" design - traps often seem designed to kill PCs in unpreventable ways that I feel ruins the feeling of legitimate challenge that I like to try and curate in my games. When refereeing, I would like my players to look back on two things most prominently: missteps they made and then learned from, or canny plays with which they overcame adversity. Adversarial traps don't allow players to learn anything if they are just "rocks fall, you die" moments.
The second stylistic issue I have with Highfell is the severe emptiness of the wilderness. Whilst I do not expect every hex to have a written feature, the near-total absence of fleshed-out content for the wilderness of The Principality of Brine is a glaring issue for the campaign. This is compounded by the fact that the floating island megadungeon itself can be inaccessible at times, forcing players to send their characters out into the wilderness to make the most of their time.
As a final critique, I find both the NPCs in Thatchum and the random encounter tables to be rather dry - encounters lack "stickiness" to make them interesting to the characters, whilst NPCs and factions lack any motivation to drive player interaction. This is made worse by the wilderness and dungeon random encounter tables being stratified by level; for a sense of verisimilitude, I feel that if a creature is wandering in the dungeon, it should be possible to encounter it regardless of level.
The Conclusion
To bring my thoughts to a close, I would only recommend Highfell to somebody looking for a floating wizard school ruin that they could drop into a properly fleshed-out overworld of their own. In any other case, I'm fairly sure there are better modules out there to use.
I may well write more on Highfell in the future, hopefully more focused on the campaign and less on the module. Until then, keep your lanterns full and your stakes sharp.
o7