The Lady and Tiger

My second playtest was ran with Knave 1e, by Ben Milton (of Questing Beast fame). Among other things, this playtest convinced me of the utility of the system for one-shots and playtests of OSR and OSR-adjacent content, as well as the effectiveness of it’s character creation content for helping players get into the mindset of vibe of playing a greedy fool willing to entertain the idea of grimy dungeon crawling. All in all, I think it was a huge success!

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I didn’t provide the party with the same hooks as the previous playtesters, instead giving them a (poorly delivered) backstory to the dungeon and the masked man who dwells within it. In addition, this group of players have generally more experience with TTRPGs than my previous group and tend to play D&D 5E, so I was a little worried about running a more traditional dungeon crawl with them. Luckily it all worked out and they were great sports about the whole exercise, and provided pretty solid feedback about their experiences during the session.

I presented the party with the option of doing their own mapping like the previous playtest or having a map presented to them. They expressed interest in mapping on their own so, after a series of short character introductions, we dove right in.

One of the biggest benefits of running these two playtests was realizing that, in addition to playtesting being necessary in general, you really should test a dungeon, adventure or module more than once. This group underwent a different route through the dungeon and took a different approach to their interactions with the NPCs within which provided me with a lot of great things to think about tinkering with in the final draft. They questioned the seneschal Piotr (formerly Peter) in much more depth than the previous party. I mentioned in the previous play report that I was unsure of having NPCs with so much knowledge and information present to be easily questioned by the PCs and seeing a group interrogate him at the beginning of the session confirmed some of my worries. It did slow down play a bit as they (wisely) tried to gather as much information about the environment as they could.

They also found the demon much less trustworthy than the prior group. This is probably in part due to their more questioning nature revealing his infernal roots (where the previous party didn’t get any outright confirmation of the demon’s nature). I also did try to present the demon as a coiled tube structure meant to resemble the protein structure of hemoglobin, like I decided after the last playtest. Regardless if the idea was good or not, my implementation left a lot to be desired and nobody seemed to be interested in it much once they received a basic description of its form. I also needed to draw a quick sketch to make it clear and I think some of the players checked out a bit when I wasted time describing the demon, so in the future I’ll try to identify these indulgent inclusions and edit them out more ruthlessly.

The party discovered roughly half of the dungeon, and found some of the secret doors but chose not to interact with them. This was helpful for a few reasons but primarily as an GM aspiring to improve at writing and running OSR content I want to better signpost interactivity for players, especially those who aren’t used to that kind of game. It’s something I’ve seen with the players in my current home game where they take really well to secrets and interactables but it’s still an area where I can improve.

They collected the treasure from the coffins in the north-eastern ossuary and acquired the Effluvium Brand before making a beeline for the entrance due to time concerns. One thing I was glad to see was the party realize that the balcony in (12) led further down into the dungeon and how that impacted their decision making – the realization that the dungeon was bigger than they first thought seemed to excite them despite their decision to cut their exploration short and really helped me to feel like the size I settled on was worthwhile.

The party deliberated for a while about how exactly to get pact Piotr and this made me think that the inclusion of the heirdom hook was probably worth keeping. With it, the dungeon has enough ways of getting past Piotr outside of combat, with the demon offering to get rid of the seneschal on his way out as well as aiding the last scion and earning his goodwill potentially enabling them to leave with their treasure, lives intact.

Eventually they decided to have a PC keep him busy while another attempting to bind him with manacles, and this worked well enough. When combat did eventually occur Piotr was effectively immobilized and the party was able to handle his the ghoul accompanying him while they fled. One PC did go down but lucked out – as per Knave rules, a PC at 0 is alive but unconscious as opposed to outright dead, and the party was able to collect him and flee thanks to one of their member having access to the Haste spell.

Takeaways

The playtest went well and helped to identify some of the other issues with the dungeon. Unfortunately neither group was able to really plumb its depths and much of the later half of the crypt remained untested. In the future I’ll try to test content more thoroughly and set up playtest early enough that I can schedule follow-ups before any due dates, like in this contest.

The players all seemed to have a good time and took really well to the classic mode of play. I’d like to think my GMing helped a bit with that and I want to try to improve at onboarding players into this style sine its my preferred way to play, and having the chance to do so with players accustomed to playing D&D 5e and a wide variety of other RPGs was invaluable.

Like I mentioned earlier, the change to the description of the demon was ultimately not a very good idea and definitely a situation where I need to learn to let go of concepts that are ultimately too “cute” and not functional enough. It didn’t impact the party too negatively but definitely slowed down the pace and introduced a moment for players to mentally check out, so its something on my radar for the future.

The treasure was also ultimately a little too easy to acquire and reiterated something I learned from the prior playtest, that the dungeon should feel more coherent in terms of how the players interact with it and a crypt said to be dangerous should be, at least to some degree, actually dangerous. Otherwise it ends up feeling like a (potentially boring) walk in the park at best, and a Monty Haul at worst.

Next up are the general takeaways I had from doing both playtests and what I would do differently or change for future material. Fair warning, I wrote the summaries of each of these posts roughly at the same time so some repetition is incoming!