The Evils of Illmire: Post-mortem
Spoilers for The Evils of Illmire ahead.
Four weeks ago, I ran the final session of my Evils of Illmire home campaign. It ran for 22 sessions over 26 weeks, and I consider the campaign a success, not the least due to the large amount of positive feedback received from the players after the finale. Perhaps more importantly though, big developments were made by both myself and the players, especially the two new to old-school RPGs.
I learned a lot about social group management from the campaign, especially given all of the previous games I'd run had been with a the same tight-knit group of friends. This campaign saw the removal of one player at roughly the two-thirds point, and although I regret it took so long for the social tension to be addressed properly, this event led me to realise that the referee's role should be to support their players in resolving disputes rather than trying to wade into the weeds themselves. In future, I hope to head off problematic play and inter-player tension before they take root by enabling players to reflect on their experiences at the table and discuss issues with each other more directly.
The module itself has some design choices that over the course of the campaign I realised I don't necessarily agree with: save or die effects (eg. the Banshee's "Death Wail" ability) do not sit well with me; the town itself, although relatively interesting, felt both under-described and over-described; and the pace of a 6-mile hex crawl felt in tension with the powderkeg nature of the setting - once events started unfolding, I felt as if the PCs barely had time to form a coherent response to them before the next occurred. For the next piece of pre-written content I run, I intend to more thoroughly audit the content before I begin so that I can smooth over personal sticking points such as these.
A high point of the campaign for both me and the players was the successful use of Arnold K's Underclock to adjudicate semi-random events happening between hexploration and downtime timescales. The players felt that when the right amount of clocks (not too many) were active, it helped the world feel alive independent of their actions. Given this was exactly what I had hoped the inclusion of this mechanic would do, I intend to use it again in future.
By the end of the campaign, I had come to the conclusion that I am not a fan of Whitehack - the combat system felt simultaneously too freeform and too bound by its traditional structure. I'd much rather be running an odd-like for combat at least, and I intend to use a lightly house-ruled version of campaign for my next home game. Furthermore, I found that the PCs' groups got tiring to litigate the applicability of by the end of the campaign, leading to some very generous interpretations of validity. For example, one player's vocation group of "teenager" wound up being very effective.
I was glad to see the players making prodigious use of hirelings after they first saw the benefits, with the campaign culminating in a siege of the titular town by the nightmare cult. The players spent many in-game days building up defences in anticipation of this, and ended up trapping a huge amount of the surrounding hex, reinforcing the town walls, and constructing a pallisade at the over-glorified gap in the wall that counted as a gate for the town. This sort of strategic thinking and investment in the setting was tricky to referee at times, but is truly the exact sort of play I was hoping to encourage at my table.
All in all, I consider the campaign a solid success despite the above gripes, and I am glad to have some solid lessons to take into my next season of play.