What it was:
* "Welcome wagon" for friday night open table D&D - catch the newbies with a T1 table.
* Opportunity to bring books I had kickstarted to table - I backed the second one and got the books from the first as add-on
Stats for 27/30 games are here - a year of open table gaming - the last three games did not change the stats - average remained similar at 5.4 players for 4.6 hours on a Friday night. Final total was 77 individual players for 161 slots.
The roster of adventures was 19 games from the Brancalonia books (8 games out of Jinx's Almanac, 6 out of the Macaronicon, 5 out of the Brancalonia core book), 6 from my 'adventure generator' tests, 2 OSR zines (Het Thamsya, Goblin Mail), 2 adventures from Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel and a Dungeon23 snippet (Apocalypse Archive).
In order those sessions were:
1 Rugantino - tracking down a runaway puppet to a bandit camp
2 Treasure of the Bigat - start of a long running theme of 'dead' dragons being very much alive
3 See Acquaviva and Die! - a mad duke and a venture into the actual afterlife
4 Big Trouble in Borgoratto - tone shift to grim horror, got away with it
5 Bride of the Bigat - another 'dead' dragons being very much alive
6 The Good, The Bag and the Marionette - slogging around a swamp, staging a rescue for one who was meh about being rescued
7 Penumbria Jeez Festival - got a solid session from just part of this one (skipped the siege)
8 Forest of the Howling Boars - diplomacy to awakened boars hit different in menagerie world
9 Red Carnival - great fun running around in a fog rescuing a prisoner
10 The Divine Sow (pt 1) - got halfway done - rescued the damsel but not yet cured
11 The Divine Sow (pt 2) - recycled the skilled Penumbrian siege, revisited a known location, completed the adventure
12 Fistful of Hops - giant quest, multiple locations, unexpectedly huge adventure
13 The Spinsterite Nunnery - massive table - 10 man - lead to scooby-doo like running around with ghouls
14 Battle of the Be(ast)damns - heist fails but some epic carousing happened
15 Pesto Alla Lungarvese - feel good mission to find a cure
16 Pickled Rich - The Gangover - flashback/amnesia - well received
17 The Ancient Urn - standard quest + employer doublecross
18 Stirring the Hornets Nest at Het Thamsya (OSR) - fluffed rescue followed by burn-down
19 Petchin Heist/Hot Cross Buns - epic masquerade/heist/slow, slow getaway
20 Black Rose Rising - creepy alternate history mansion loot
21 Tomb of the Screaming Skull (Oldskull generator) - giant sidebar barfight then quest
22 Sharks & Maidens (OftheHills generator) - island rescue + puzzle tower
23 Necropolis of the Enchanted Depths (Shadowdark generator) - dungeon dive and trap-setting
24 Ironoak Run (Borderlands Journey Generator generator) - river chase
25 Apocalypse Annex (OSR) - tomb dive finds dread horror and supresses it
26 Temple of the Iron Quill (Scarlet Heroes generator) - tracking down a vengeful noble in a dread (friendly?) temple
27 Cat Castle Masquerade (Donjon generator) - crashing a wedding masquerade to prempt a brides vengeance
28 Written in Blood - a message delivery turns into a rescue and horror slaying
29 Wages of Vice - a possessing horror is defeated at a grand festival
30 Goblin Mail (OSR) - recovering a package from the goblin postal service
What worked:
* Brancalonia coupled with menagerie world animal-folk was the perfect 'welcome wagon' game - perfect for low-stakes shenanigans and the ambient aesthetic tolerated all sorts of randomness - from mysterious elven nobles to loxodon librarians and killer geese.
* Conservation of NPCs and returning to places and people started to get fun from about session ten - people knew to look for 'adventurers' at a particular inn but not necessarily who would be there any given day (session) - which worked well with the drop-in/drop-out setup
* Running 5e with gritty realism. It pushed folk to think and try other solutions because the super-heroic powers of a 5e character felt a bit more scarce and precious
* Brawl mechanics paired well with gritty realism to give a more freeform, 'Wrestlemania' approach to fights; lower stakes, less butchery more comedic fisticuffs
* As the 'welcome wagon' for anyone who turns up for D&D the first time it was more hijinks and raucous than 'classic serious d&d' but that seemed to fit the vibe of Brancalonia and the general expectations of the folk who sat to table
* Post session write ups - first on the 'session thread' with forum IDs and treasure/XP, then later as pure lore (character names only) on the campaign thread proved to be useful for me keeping track of things months later
* Creating extra trinkets for the 'random loot list'
* Frequent returning players where they have other options suggests I was broadly getting it right
* The few OSR 'locations' - Apocalypse Archive, Het Thamsya and the goblin post office - worked really well.
What didn't:
* Because I tolerated all sorts of weird homebrew, it caused grief for other DM's when players went 'well I was allowed at Brancalonia' which was a real pain in the ass.
* In-world intro was down but 'pre-brief' and expectation setting was not. I needed to reach for my old Viking DM hat to deal with some of the newcomers who have rocked up - vast majority have been lovely, constructive players - some a little rough around the edges but got with the program of the whole table having fun with a little nudge - some need to be told no, firmly. Showed the need for a clearer code of conduct for the wider group.
* Keeping things to the 'welcome wagon' T1 limit interacted poorly with the +1 level per session of Adventurers League with people getting four sessions out of a character before they needed to either forgo leveling or ditch out seeking T2 games.
* Figuring out adequate, Tier legal, treasure for adventures I was writing myself was a pain in the bits.
* Brancalonia is less tolerant of murder-hoboism and real lone-wolf 'kill 'em all' types.
* Multiple brawls in a session got tricky to keep interesting - they tended to be quite time-intensive.
Lessons learned:
* It sharpened up my DM'ing - through specialised in this particular genre and at this power level.
* I got a better sense of how to prep a written adventure for table, what notes I need to take and how to adapt on the fly.
* Drawing on just one book for adventures for any given session - either only the Brancalonia core book or Jinx's Almanac, etc. Bringing the PHB was not necessary, people had D&D Beyond on their phones for rules queries or I would just make a ruling.
* I got stronger at estimating how long things take - particularly combat - and at sticking to the end of the timeslot.
* Towards the end I layered in a safety briefing - more just expectation setting - that we had lines and veils, that folk could X-card or stick their hand up to pause or alter play if they wanted to.
* Different adventure generators work for me - coupled with conservation of NPCs meant that there was a happy medium of structure and inspiration that I could then slot into the existing world of NPCs and locations. Too over-engineered an adventure and there were too many elements to deal with, too few and it left me adrift.
* When doing brawls, lean into the 'effects' with flying bottles and other effects applying attritional damage to players otherwise they were way to hard to knock down and there was no sense of tension
* Writing this I realise the lesson I should have learned was that the old school 'just give them a location' approach should have registered with me as something that works really well. I should lean into this more.
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