Stonehell Dungeon April 23 Session Report: "CC's Character Got Blood in His Hair"

Do you, my dear readers and fellow game masters, suffer from anxiety before running a session? Do you cram in the preceding hours and minutes and yet still feel as if you're ill prepared at the start of the game?

From what I've gathered in my 25+ years as a GM, that's fairly common. It might even be the norm. Pre-session jitters come with the territory.

For the first time since I was a sadistic child Dungeon Master in the early 1990s, I didn't really have any butterflies in my stomach before my impulsive April 23 session running Stonehell Dungeon using Old-School Essentials, a reprinting of B/X, the 1981 edition of Dungeons & Dragons.

That's pretty amazing considering it's the first time I've ran a game in more than a year and I had no previous experience with any four of my players!

There are a few reasons I was so calm. First, I ran the game totally as an impulse. Less than four hours between "Anyone want to play some OSR D&D?" and "Stonehell Dungeon at 6:30!" I was cramming the whole time, copying the dungeon maps from the book (using Sumatra), editing them with GIMP, uploading them to Roll20.net, and setting up the dynamic lighting. My mind was occupied; I didn't have time to worry!

Another reason is that I felt at home as a player in Stonehell, at least on the first level. Of course, it's a lot different on the other side of the table, but it really helped that I had wandered the halls as a player.

Lastly, Stonehell is really easy to run. Michael Curtis's style and format is fantastic for use at the table. You don't have to remember a single thing. You don't have to read ahead. Hell, you don't have to read anything at all before playing! Room entries are a line or two at most.

We had a great time. All four players were totally cool. Erika—with whom I was passingly familiar from the OSR Discord Server—was our caller. She did a wonderful job. I could immediately tell she had plenty of OSR dungeon crawl experience. She, like her three comrades—CC, Jacob and Minalt—were all chill, relaxed, friendly, attentive, conversational, and talented players. Bravo, guys! Thank you for playing and thank you for not making my job a chore. I had fun! Zero stress.

As a DM, I was absolutely perfect and never made a single mistake. Well, maybe not perfect and maybe not "sober" by the end of the session, but pretty close. Somewhat close. Okay, I was soused by 10 p.m., but I still remember the end of the session! Mainly. I remember most of the end of the session.

There were orcs and CC's character got blood in his hair.

. . . Yes, that's my whole 3.5-hour session recap.

Oh! Speaking of CC's character—how about this, BoT readers: that son of a gun rolled an 11, 14, 15, 16, 17, and an eight-freaking-teen during character creation! Okay, so it was AD&D's default method: 4d6, drop lowest, arrange, but still! He put the 18 in CON and the 17 in STR and played a Fighter. WIS was his "dump stat," if you can call an 11 that.

Oh again! Minalt was our mapper. Check out this sweet action:

Hell yeah! No grid lines, even!

Thanks for reading!

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