Caverns of Thracia (2023-2024, Brooklyn NY) - A Post-Mortem

From October 2023 through August 2024, I ran Jennell Jaquays's Caverns of Thracia for my D&D group here in Brooklyn, New York using the Old School Essentials rulebook. Early in 2023 I set the goal of playing some Old School D&D in person, started a Discord, and recruited from every online and offline space I could find. The result was a server that had around 40 members at the start of the campaign, about 20 of whom have shown up to a game at some point. If you're trying to start your own group, my advice is simple: stop being afraid of annoying people! If they're annoyed by you inviting them to play games after willingly joining your “play games with me” discord, you don't need them in your life!

After a while of playing one- and two-session adventures, I wanted to try running something big-- a megadungeon or something close to it. So I listened to every episode of the Megadungeon podcast, read every Gus L. blog post, and printed a copy of The Caverns of Thracia at FedEx.

After all the research I'd done, I went into this project with a very specific set of goals. Ultimately, we had a ton of fun, and I learned a lot about DMing, but I did not carry out my plans for the game. I'm not ready to say my expectations were wrong, or conclude "we didn't need all those old school shibboleths to have fun," because many of these things fell by the wayside practically from session one-- I never really tested them out because I got too overwhelmed by running my first real campaign. Despite how fun it was, I’m curious to look back at my expectations about what it meant to run a “real megadungeon campaign” and where the experience didn’t match up. My conclusion is I’m not ready to write off these priorities, and want to work on implementing them in future dungeon delves.

I'd also be remiss if I didn't share this set of notes for running the adventure, which helped a lot.

I actually did find one player via leaving these stickers around.

My goals, and how they played out:

 

1. Make resource management and random encounters a meaningful part of the game.

 

I let this go almost from the very beginning. I was overwhelmed enough by running a large, roughly formatted dungeon for the first time that I only occasionally tracked turns, usually by marking a bunch in a row after realizing I had forgotten for an hour of play time. (update/clarification: I don't think this would be this difficult for everyone, I have ADD and I think social collaboration, shuffling lots of printer paper looking for things, and narrating at the same time is my perfect storm for getting tunnel vision and forgetting stuff). As a result I almost never rolled for random encounters, although there was one perfectly timed one: the group were surprised by a randomly rolled funeral procession right as they were trying to flee a tomb full of rotting bodies coming back to life.

The group never ran out of torches even once, and I never checked on their encumbrance, which I assume they ignored. I really wish I had been able to keep up with resource tracking, but between flipping through the book looking for things, describing the map, and answering player questions, it slipped my mind consistently.

2. Soften some of the most brutal traps and combat encounters, without making it a cakewalk. I wanted to remove instant-kill traps while keeping things pretty deadly.

The very first session, we lost half the party to a single trap. I gasped, surprised, and offered that they could roll to see if they landed safely in the water below. "No," they refused, "let us die!" They then went on to use that same hazard to take out a group of enemies chasing them later that session. I was amazed and they were so proud-- which I should have taken as a sign not to go too easy on them.

From then on, I tended to make things too easy. My biggest mistake here was letting each player run two characters-- I was concerned about sessions where only a few players showed up, but I should have set a maximum party size. I already tend to run softball combat encounters, but due to the size of the party, especially once some NPCs joined, nothing ever really threatened them. Several encounters that I expected to be somewhat deadly ended instantly with Sleep spells. I also struggled to hint at traps without making the solutions too obvious. I don't recall any traps that really held them up, and I think I should have left some of the “unfair” traps as written to create attrition.

 

My players' map of a small sub-level

 

3. Make the players map things as they go.

This went well, and it was very fun! I now have a stack of cool maps my players drew, I'd really like to get them framed someday.

My players enjoyed the mapping and bickered entertainingly about their drawing abilities. In one early session there were no players from the previous week, so I got to watch the new group trying to decipher the previous session's map and making surprising decisions based on their interpretation. I did have a hard time knowing how to concisely explain the shapes of rooms. This was frustrating at times, as this meant corridors didn’t match up. This difficulty was increased by the fact that the original maps are drawn on grid paper, but even straight lines often don’t match up with the grid.

A portion of one of the original maps

Next time I'm tempted to describe rooms almost like Turtle: "Start drawing a line facing North. Forward 3 squares. Door 1 square wide. Forward 2 squares. Turn clockwise. Forward 12 squares. Turn clockwise... etc."

For the winding cavernous sections, I printed out the map and cut the shapes out to tape onto the player-drawn maps as they were discovered.

4. Let the players explore and make their own story!

This was fantastic. I'm really glad I didn't try to force any narrative, although I did set up a follow-up adventure using a "portal to another dimension" that Jennell hid in the caverns. My players did not take the bait, they were too busy making their own fun!

5. Use the factions (lizard men, gnolls, a few individual unaligned NPCs, and death cultists) to add intrigue and tension.

I tried to do this at points but didn't get anywhere. I think leaning on the factions would have made the dungeon feel a lot more lively. As it was, at the start of most sessions they simply declared they were traveling back to where they ended the previous session and I marked off some turns. I occasionally rolled up some new groups of enemies or announced that they noticed battle lines had moved, but never followed through. Early on the group was having to negotiate with factions to use the various entrances to the caverns, but it felt like a waste of time to make it difficult to enter the actual adventure every week, so this is another thing that I stopped doing pretty quickly.

So what?

I learned a lot running this adventure. I was amazed by my players, and it was really satisfying to run something they enjoyed (and to discover they had fun even though I wasn't implementing every post I ever read about dungeons). We had multiple players who had never played an Old School Tabletop RPG (and some who had never played a tabletop RPG at all), and they had fun and wanted to play again!

I think my biggest takeaway is that I need to use a more structured system that prompts me to do things ("each player has taken an action, so it's time to roll a dungeon event") rather than relying on my judgment of time passing while trying to juggle other things. I recently got to play the second edition of Cairn, which has dungeon crawling rules that seem like exactly what I needed.

As fun as this was, I can only imagine it would have been cooler with some more gory deaths, amazing treasures too heavy to carry, nasty traps, and so forth. On to the next game!