Attronarch was selling off some adventures and I seized the opportunity - got a bunch of the OSE classic and thought I would run them against my Friday night open tables on the 'off weeks' of my dual mode game. This was an experiment on how old school adventures survive contact with 5e players - I also had Waking of Willoughby Hall on my shelves so threw that in too.
The three adventures run through so far are:
Waking of Willoughby Hall (for Knave)
Winters Daughter (for OSE)
The Hole in the Oak (for OSE)
Overall, all of these were pretty easy to use at table and supported a good session.
So what do you actually get in these?
Waking of Willoughby Hall is an interesting haunted house - flagged as your better replacement for Out of the Abyss in Dwiz's "Enough Dweeb Adventures" - it comes as a 30 page zine with generic stats. The set up is good - with an enraged giant seeking back his stolen goose from the thieves who took refuge in a haunted manor. The giants flailing of the hall with a stolen holy bell gradually wakes the weird haunts of the hall.
The zine gives you maps, encounter tables for sleeping, restless and awake status for the haunted hall, and ~ 33 locations within it. The dice-driven motion of the giant about the outside of the hall, peering in and snatching at folk is designed to keep things moving. The gradually awakening hall and the goose thieves within it provide interesting encounters even while avoiding the giant.
I got good use out of this one; the 'clock' of the giants motion and flailing at the hall with the bell is driven by d6 encounter rolls with a standard encounter on a 1, the giant moving on a 2 - we had a relatively slow progression of the hall state; my table rolled everything except 2s throughout the night and I missed/forgot the line where the giants instinct on seeing anyone is to stave in the windows with the bell then go for them - extra bell strikes, more seals broken, and a more awakened hall
I found going through the rooms easy - there are many maps to easily locate them and punchy descriptions with the referral sections (NPCs, encounters) sensibly grouped. I ran it from the book the first time and it worked well for a good session even if I probably throttled it back by forgetting to have those additional bell strikes in.
Winters Daughter - flagged as your better replacement for Rise of the Dragon Queen in Dwiz's "Enough Dweeb Adventures" - this comes as a 24 page hardback. Six pages are background for DM, players and the world, a page at the back are the magic items found and the rest is the adventure. Within there are four section/locations - the exterior of the tomb, the tomb, the exterior of the tower and within the tower.
Tons of great stuff in here - the main encounter outside the tomb, the wierd old stuff within, some rooms with nothing but creepy stuff, others with active threats. Lots to interact with, poke at, and sometimes be dangerously emperilled by. There are a couple of ways through it all and many ways in which parts may never be interacted with.
The maps are on the inside covers for all the four locations and relatively easily referenced with a finger bookmark. There are lots of evocative touches in the room descriptions, some treasures and secrets easily missed unless people really pry and poke at the edges.
I found this ran well and was a great old school dungeon with things to poke at, secrets to find but not one single rail-road through the whole thing. I ran it as a pretty juicy one-shot, with players going in focussed on recovering a single thing but then getting side tracked into the strangeness within. They liked the NPC connections and bought into making their wishes happen for the happy ending.
The Hole in the Oak - an old school style dungeon with odd, unsettling things abounding and plenty of factions around. This is a 32 page zine with art more towards the 'grim things happen to adventurers' style of early D&D. The map is huge with ~ six main sections with lots of empty spaces. The dungeon is well Jayqauysed with many ways to loop around - when I ran it the players noped out of dealing with an obvious trapped arch that they could not figure out and decided to loop around and then later loop around again. The inhabitants all knowing that there were multiple ways to get anywhere also made conversations about directions entertaining.
The chunky encounter table is more likely to be the place where players run into the inhabitants unless they really poke around in the depths. There are a handful of factions within and lots and lots of hidden bits and bobs. The size of this dungeon and the skips in numbering can make this a little more of a flip-around than smaller sites like Winters Daughter but it was workable.
Hazard level throughout is the old school range of 'not so bad' up to 'run away'. That range and the empty rooms plus the multiple corpses of unluckier previous adventurers made this all nice and tense and helped drive a respect for the hazards of the dungeon that sometimes is lacking in more modern more linear adventures. The old school approach of 'here is a thing, sticking your hand in is entirely up to you - and entirely optional' is well on display.
Overall this was too large a site for the four hour one shot I used it for, the players did a scouting run, declared they knew enough and left. I think there is meat on this bone for at least one more session, possibly even two - plenty of adventuring in here.
All of these I ran as single sessions at my Friday night open tables; the first two (Waking and Daughter) ran the full five hours and got through the whole thing, the last (Oak) still had a lot left undiscovered but ended at a logical place after a solid initial scouting run. All of them were great adventure-per-weight for gaming away from home - slim zines, densely packed, lots of directly adventurable content.

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