Bloodfall in Review

Towards the end of February 2025, I began the Bloodfall campaign for the members of The Living Urf Gaming Club. The intent of the game was to train myself to DM AD&D, train newer players to play AD&D, and to experiment with interparty PVP among different groups of players within the same campaign world. I will lay out the things that I learned about myself, the players, and the game and allow you to take away any value that you may find.

What Worked (in no particular order)

A player endeavored early to lead a group of men at arms. It has been suggested that part of the fighter’s starting gold can and should be spent on just such an operation. There is in practice a bit of friction with this, owing primarily to how closely the DM should adhere to the upkeep rules for men at arms. Specialists are required to support men at arms and mercs will demand hazard pay for hazardous work. These things are expensive in both gold and real estate.

I believed it best to demonstrate through play why supporting men at arms in the early game is a monumental task due to the starving nature of AD&D’s economy and the psychology of a standard issue mercenary, that is to say the resistance to delving dungeons in place of true adventurers instead of standing a post, guarding horses, or locking shields in open battle. In hindsight, I would have drawn a clearer line to save everyone the headache. While the operation itself was not a success, I place this in the What Worked section because we better defined what the expectations for mercenaries are.

I have DM’d quite a bit over the years, but no AD&D until Bloodfall. The experience was similar in pacing and the expectations of both players and DM to my previous games, but differed a bit in rules. I can say confidently that everyone involved in the game learned a lot about the mechanics and is better prepared to play AD&D in the future.

Strict records of time must be kept for a real campaign. 1:1 time led to the necessity of tracking the behaviors of NPCs, particularly antagonists, during the time when sessions were not being played. I used a simple 2d6 scale to determine if the happenings were good or bad, impactful or not, instead of recruiting and managing a group of Patron players. I did not want to commit to such a scale as I have done before.

I had most recently DM’d on the zero-prep side of things, using random encounters, player action, and the actions of Patrons to develop the campaign world and all of its required conflict. In Bloodfall I prepared more, sketched out dungeons and developed NPCs, particularly the protagonists. I developed regions and seeded adventure hooks to be discovered. I have come to believe that some preparation for the game is essential for the coherence of the campaign. I have also realized that years of avoiding prep has atrophied that skill and I kinda suck at it. Still, this counts as Worked as a revelation to better gaming for me. 

AD&D is a Christian game. The Paladin is a Christian crusader. Injecting the Paladin into a Norse milieu opened the door to some interesting conversations on alignment vs morality and how to translate those things more broadly. An Urfling broke it down, and I’m paraphrasing, that Law is selfless, Chaos is selfish, Good is nice, Evil is mean. It’s a very simple way to look at it but it works broadly.

Our Paladin player was a good sport as we worked through it. We established baselines on honor, betrayal, and intent and I think it helped everyone to better understand alignment as a function of the game, even if we overthought it and beat it to death in the Discord.

I prefer dungeons and wilderness to urban adventures, but some of the most entertaining sessions in Bloodfall were the B team side quest city shenanigans that the players got up to. The gravity of marauding dragons, invading humanoids, and captured gods was a heavy weight to bear for the A team of heroes. Sometimes the break for some levity and risk that only scoundrels bring to the table can give the players a chance to shed that burden, at least for a while. It allowed me to hone some rusty NPC skills and reveal things that were happening through other facets of the game, too.

Early on I ran a Battle Braunstein, really a mini-wargame, to resolve growing tensions among humanoids and Bloodfall’s fractious NPCs. While it wasn’t truly a braunstein, it got the job done and I was assured that everyone had fun. It concluded with the town under siege by the Gnoll King and pressure on the players to do something about it.

What Didn’t (in no particular order)

It is no secret that I view RPGs as team sports and to that end I was interested in exploring what the game could become if multiple parties of independent players were acting at cross purposes within the same campaign world. I had experienced this to some degree in the Sojenka campaign the year before but each faction had a different perception of the type of game they were playing. It’s hard to review the details of a battle when only one side knows they’re fighting. I had hoped to explore how the interplay of parties would open the door to clever use of diplomacy, treachery, and all the other soft conflict that isn’t defeating your enemy in combat.

Unfortunately, we were unable to capture that lightning in this bottle. There were a few causes like schedules and cross pollination of players, but the primary reason was everything was too separate. Each sub-campaign of the larger whole was being run as a distinct entity and it kept everyone isolated. The drawing board is being scribbled on to resolve this issue.

Downtime is still a mystery to most players. It’s hard to know what to do with the time between sessions and it’s best to discuss with your DM what the expectation is. If there’s time and opportunity to have full one on one sessions, ok that’s amazing but don’t count on it. You’re more likely to get a simple response to simple requests in my experience, and those requests should impact the game in some way. Farming resources without resistance isn’t the way and it is incumbent upon the DM to enforce that truth.

What Now?

Praise is a funny thing. It can be condescending, or goofy, or overly sentimental, but I sincerely thank the players of the club who participated in Bloodfall and made it what it was. It was through my friends' stellar roleplaying and willingness to learn the system that we were able to achieve what we did together. I regret only that I was unable to deliver a longer, more satisfying campaign for you but the purpose of the game had run its course. Rip the band-aid off and all that.

This coming season of the club is Urf of the New Sun where traditional methods of gaming, like DM-facing combat adjudication, considered development and curation of the setting and milieu, and alignment chart tracking, are brought to the fore. I do not have any plans to run a lengthy campaign but I won’t stay idle for long. Stay tuned and Merry Christmas!

The Moles We Whack Along the Way

The Jolly Rogers set off to explore "off map," beyond the borders of currently played territory. We had a displaced nobleman that we aimed to help regain his seat in far off Sunndi along for the ride with the understanding that we'd take whatever adventure cropped up during the journey. We almost made it out of the harbor at Gradsul before the first diversion hit.

Lord Willers was assembling and transporting a large body of troops south to some place called Dawn's Cove, apparently the holding of The Holy Rollers, and was hiring every ship he could find. Well, we had ships and he was paying well so sign us up. Two weeks later and a tall stack of gold richer, we'd delivered a frankly terrifying force to some tight assed paladin and continued on our way.

Smooth sailing (and motoring) to the east brought us to a farming town. We kept the fleet under The Shadow's veil of fog and I sailed my galley The Trident into port to get the local news, of which there was little. Back to the waves where we picked up a message in a bottle that spoke of an adventuring party marooned on a volcanic island to the south. We had a general idea of what island it spoke of but we were close to the next port along the coast so we'd stop in there first.

Gryrax of Ulek was a mixed dwarf and human town, administered by dwarves and bustling. We were able to locate a community map of sorts, a general posting at the dockmaster's office that confirmed our suspicions about the bottled message. No other rumors or hooks jumped out at us so we set out to rescue The Mintiest Juleps, or their treasure, or both.

We landed our two longships on the black sand beach of the island and probed the jungle ahead, turning up a Julep's corpse. We were then accosted by a demon of sorts, who had apparently killed the adventurers but then had a pang of conscience and let the last one wander the island, mad and wounded, until he starved to death. It had heard of Dr. Phil and wanted to make contact to talk through its feelings or something. It offered a big bag of loot, likely the Juleps' stuff, for transport to Phil's island. We happened to like loot and knew where Phil was so it was a win/win.

We dropped it off on Phil's island, got our payment, and sailed back to the volcanic island to search it over for anything else of note. We fought some beetles, avoided a gorgon and some spiders, and left with a little more loot. It was getting late in the session so we decided to dock at Gryrax and count money. Unfortunately we were hawked down by a ghost ship crewed by draugr. We were unable to outrun them so had to fight.

The Shadow engaged the other ship by ramming it amidship and Farland and I held the deck crossing against the wave of undead. Meanwhile, Morgan compelled the Shadow to strike at the enemy's commanders with its living rigging, removing the captain and navigator from play and allowing her to exert her will over the remaining leaderless undead. She took control of a large portion of the enemy and with their help we were able to capture the ghost ship. All of this was made possible by her weird connection to The Shadow.

We retained the ghost ship and crew as an ace in the hole, resolved to keep it veiled near The Shadow since the ship itself acted as a sinkhole of evil. Can't really pull up to the docks like that. We finally made it back to port and ended the session much richer than before.