Last night I played Dolmenwood with an in-person group. We created characters, approached a keep, and skirmished out front. In other words, the preliminary experiences. Dolmenwood does something similar to Shadowdark. Both are OSR-style games making overtures to “trad gaming”.

My initial assumption was Dolmenwood is OSE with a distinct setting. Broadly correct, but its an assumption that won’t prepare you for the system changes you’re familiar with. Some are cosmetic: the saving throw names are renamed, but equivalent. The skill checks are reworked, inverting the x-in-6 chance to giving a x target number you roll on a d6 to succeed. For every roll now a high number is good, and a low roll is bad. This is good design just like switching to ascending AC math, but it messes with years of brain muscle memory.

Character creation took much longer compared to typical OSR character creation processes. Character sheets have extensive details to include. The process involved flipping around all over the player book trying to find the relevant tables and bits of information needed. While the OSE books read like a better organized B/X, there was little of that clarity of information design here. The character creation flow in Dolmenwood involved rolling up stats, deciding your kindred, but oh wait, I should check to see what class to take because its the kind of game where you want to pick a class that matches your best stats, now I need to check back to the kindred section to see what class restrictions they have, and are there any alignment restrictions, where do I find that? And also what is a Moon Sign, and where do I find my XP modifier, are affiliations a thing etc. This was much more effort than I’m used to.

On the other hand, the random tables of flavor for establishing your weird little guy are excellent. That’s right, time for a mini-random table review! The stats I rolled led me to create an elf hunter. Sounds cliche and dull right? But the elf names echo the elf names from Spire, and you get names like Spring-Noon’s-Arrogance or Youth-Turned-Curdle. Great stuff. The tables for physical traits trend more towards weirdo David Bowie style elves and less of your generic Tolkien elves. The other party members were similarly strange and evocative.

Open questions about Dolmenwood at this point:

  • It sticks with alignment, will it do anything with it, or will it continue to be a weird vestigial part of the game?
  • Will skill checks actually be useful and/or feel cool?
  • How annoying will it be to roll up a new character assuming we are playing with standard levels of OSR lethality?