This game was a long time coming. Way back in January I devised a new town and dungeon local to specifically to set up a “mudcore tier of play” for new players where they could play without being bothered by any “patron” tier characters from the broader campaign. The idea was that when they graduated to level 3 or 4 or so, they would have a chance to fight a cool miniatures battle and then begin to move about on the campaign map as they pleased once they were victorious. Limiting “bro” character autonomy in this way back then was very controversial and the players did not like it at all.
Here is the data for my original “one-page campaign setting”:
Urgrecht/Whocaresville — MU5 Elderbrecht, C3, C2, A4, C2, M3 Bechtylbrecht, M2, F4 Urglebrechtenburglebrechtenmecht, 80 Romans with Chainmail, Shield, Spear, and short sword.
Lothrivengrove — MU2, F3 Hanse, R4 Gooberthorn, F3, C2, D5 Kickatrix, 30 archers with longbow/leather/dagger, 30 light cavalry with short bow/leather/dagger.
The players wanted Steadington to be this city where they could sell magic-items and find training and run their game, but it turned out to be controlled by hill giants, trolls, and goblin wolf-riders. The latter turned out to be devastating to the players when they first encountered them. Goblin archers could not be wiped out with ranged weapons. And charging wargs was suicide. If you were on foot you could not get away. If the goblins were outmatched, they could escape. The perfect unit! It turned out that we didn’t need “big” monsters to keep the players in their play pen. Just a few mounted gobbos!
So, my idea was that the players would grow in power, form an alliance with these three cities and then somehow march on Steadington and liberate it. But this lead to the question of why Steadington didn’t just send some hill giants down to level these stupid small towns. The answer to that was… Doucheland. If the player area was blocked in by Steadington and impassable mountains, then Steadington was bottled up by the valiant forces of Doucheland!
Fast forward to last night where we were finally ready to set up a game for all of this. I added in new “faction” forces for everyone to play and nailed down everything that was still ambiguous:
Doucheland — 100 Heavy Cavalry (plate, heavy lance), 300 infantry (plate, pike), 50 Gross Nerds (darts, 2 magic missile spells)
Elderbrecht — Two adult dragons that may run amok at any moment
Billy — 3rd level fighter controlling a palisade with 30 refugees from Steadington forming a small army. (This is the only PC to directly play in the event.)
Kronen’s orcs — Steadington looked a little light on canon fodder, so 200 orcs armed with axes and heavy crossbows where whipped up as a wildcard faction and placed in the cave hex.
Belboz — One more “wild card” for the game. He did not emerge from the shadows as of yet so his details will remain secret. I placed his dungeon in the mountain hex in AG-40.
Chaz’s Hippogriff Squadron — Chaz gave me some orders and I intended to play him as an NPC as I had done with Foam the Gnome in the face-to-face game but I was so overwhelmed in the session this only came up as a minor factor. Things were so interesting on their own I did not feel the need to invoke Chaz as an instigating factor or as a garnish.
Everything was now set up for what I was calling a “Battle Braunstein”. My expectation going in was that everyone would try to gang up on Steadington, that a terrible plan would form to send all the pieces in motion, and that said plan would devolve into two or three battles in different places on the map. One awesome miniatures battle worth playing would have been a major victory for me– with maybe a couple of minor battles elsewhere on the map. Further, to integrate with continuing campaigns and the 1:1 time rules, I was hoping to get concrete dates for these events so that player characters could interact with them later at their own pace.
THIS DID NOT WORK AS I EXPECTED.
Session Braunsteins exist in a highly subjective sort of time. Orders are given and events happen, and players are cutting backroom-deals and you cannot possibly keep up with it all so there is no time to carefully track what day it is at any given point of the session. The best that I could manage and all I could do in the actual session was to declare that if something happened in the session then it happened when it happened, and no deal or negotiation made thirty minutes later could alter the circumstances which established that original event. If you run this stuff anything like I do, you will come away knowing the order in which several dramatic events have occurred. BUT YOU WILL NOT HAVE A PRECISE DATE YOU CAN ATTACH TO ANY OF THEM.
Therefore, a referee will have to use his judgement in order to integrate the events of a Session Braunstein back into a continuing campaign that is running under a very clear and (these days) intuitive 1:1 timekeeping system. In my opinion, you should err on the side of referee energy and player interest. In our case, we will not be meeting the following Thursday night due to Thanksgiving. We have a few loose ends to sort out. Declaring that all of these events took two weeks to transpire is reasonable and nothing needs be placed into “time jail” at all when we resume play the following Thursday. But you have to ask, “what did the PC’s do in response to these titanic events?” Don’t care! The new status quo we have produced in a single session is so exciting, it will be way more profitable to have the lower level PC’s react to it all after the fact than to try to integrate them into battles we have already resolved.
But anyway, the session ran for six hours. The first two were 1:1 player conferences where I personally nailed down each person’s faction and coached them on the overall strategic situation. This ran a little long in my opinion and it might have been shortened if I had been more prepared, but NOBODY knew what we were doing and all of their engagement with me before the game seemed to me to fail to anticipate what I actually needed and was going for. But that’s what blazing a trail is like!
At 8PM I began pulling people into one-on-one conferences again after a brief speech to everyone when I tried to get things rolling. But things did not get rolling! Players were confused!! So maybe around 8:30PM I popped back into the main room and told them that they didn’t need to worry about being in the same location in order to negotiate with everyone else in the game. THIS WAS AN ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL CALL BECAUSE IT IS WHAT ALLOWS PEOPLE TO PLAY A BRAUNSTEIN AT ALL. A consequence of this decision is that we lose strict timekeeping and enter the weird subjective time world of a highly fluid and chaotic Braunstein scenario. (Note: if you don’t like this you should stay with the “always on” approach which we developed previously and which we ran into the ground during 2022.)
At this point things took off and things happened so quickly I could barely keep up. Very early on there was a minor engagement between some goblin scouts and some Lothrivengrove archers. This was on the periphery, and I could tell that this by itself was not going to trigger a “convergence” of many varied interests operating under a fog of war. I told the players I was tabling this because it just wasn’t compelling enough to soak up referee time when I hadn’t even checked in with everyone yet.
The next thing to happen was that Billy got sent with a dragon to scout out the cave hex at J-28. This is where I had placed the orcs! I needed the orc to tell me now how many of his guys would be outside the cave and/or on patrol or guard duty. There was no way to do this fairly in the moment, but the guy running the orcs was chill and just said it was 50. This was such a cool encounter and I needed an event to allow Steadington to understand that hostilities were officially underway so I went ahead and ground through the AD&D combat rules for this situation. For an encounter at distance, I ruled that the dragon fear-effect did not go off if the dragons elected to hang back at range and use breath weapons. The fear effect would only occur if they charged or if they flew overhead. Well, many dice were thrown and it shook out that 20 orcs were killed and the dragon was unharmed and even Billy that was riding on the dragon could not be harmed thanks to his AC adjustment and DEX bonus.
Me having two people in conference for a long while created a lot of excitement. When I came back up for air I noticed that people that weren’t supposed to be allied together had formed their own breakout groups. Weird things were happening. The game was much less of a wargame like the “always on” strict timekeeping July 2021 Mega-Braunstein event. It was more like a turn or two of a Diplomacy game… or maybe… about a week’s worth of activity from a “continuous” Braunstein.
So anyway, the orcs, Steadington, and Doucheland were setting up a “Kegger” at the party tree in hex N-17. Doucheland was sending 100 Heavy Cavalry, 25 Nerds, and 50 pikemen. The orcs were sending 45 orcs– and the dude intended 25 but did not correct me when I heard 45 as the number. Steadington smelled a rat and only sent 5 hill giants and 5 warg riders. This was an utterly ridiculous and almost LARPy situation, but I could tell that this was the entire point of the event was going to be. Any situation involving 5+ factions at this scale is just automatically going to be really exciting and way better than anything a referee could devise.
Now, a couple of things. Some players had come to me with a bunch of world-building type stuff which I really didn’t care about. All I cared about was the wargame scenario and the encounters that developed as things were set in motion. However, away from the referee and in the presence of players negotiating with each other directly, all of this “blah blah” stuff because primary and real and persuasive. Defying all logic, the idea that Steadington could buy off Doucheland by hooking up some frat boys with attractive women became plausible without me around to poop the party. (Shades of Dave Arneson posing as a CIA agent!)
And it was a party. Many of us keep saying “D&D is a wargame.” And it’s true. However, a “Battle Braunstein” is more of a party and people can come into it to play it in a variety of ways. This was another objective of the event that turned out to be a success– I wanted more people and more types of players filling out the rolls at the faction scale and giving it their full attention for as long as there was still “game” left in a particular scenario. And we got it. It was also loose and fun and– because it replaced a regular session night instead of dragging out for months or years in multiple discord channels– it was not going to burn out a referee like the the Mega-Braunsteins did.
There were some minor events that just weren’t going to gell into anything big, so I called everyone back into the main discussion area and informed them that we had one battle that we were going to go ahead and resolve in-session rather than waiting for later. Further… there was one small thing after that that we would resolve that would be the icing on the cake.
So, we resolved the big battle which was now being called “The Red Keggar”. I am told this is a reference to Game of Thrones and it fit because everybody was going to betray each other at this ridiculous social event that was obviously a ploy. Anyway, the dragons crashed the party and came in with an audible glamor spell blaring out Flight of the Valkyries. The monster factions were dismayed when the spell-casting dragon followed this with mirror image.
The orcs turned out to not be completely useless. Their impotent crossbow bolts managed to eliminate two of the mirror images. Rocks hurled by giants very nearly killed the dragon that did not have spellcasting ability. But adjudicating this in the main room was nearly disastrous. Everybody had something to say and the resident rules-braniac second guessed all of my calls and bogged me down by reminding of rules I had forgotten. (Ie, attacks versus ariel targets are shifted one range band. Didn’t know that one!) Also, there were difficult callings to work out due to the theater of the mind type stuff and the freeform play being so indistinct.
Somehow we got through. It became clear that if Steadington had sent ten hill giants instead of five then one or both dragons would have been eliminated from play. (Yes, the dragons loomed large in our imaginations, but they were not the strategic “I win” button that we had presumed they would be.) The orcs were whittled down from 45 to 40 to 25 to 13 and a very canny player insisted that they take a morale check. I ruled that the orcs were so dumb that they thought they had killed adult dragons when they blinked out the mirror image spell. Further, the morale rules in AD&D are rigged for bodies of troops facing off, not for large groups fighting “boss” monsters.
The goblins had fled just as hostilities began. The gross nerds turned out to be second level magic-users with two magic missile spells apiece. Everybody else realized there was no way they could escape from being picked off by the dragons were they to try to flee. The sequence of play and the initiative results came down to the remaining hill giant having ONE LAST CHANCE to take out the wounded dragon, but I continued using random targets and the final hit landed on the one that had not taken as much damage.
So, this battle was not the cleanest one that I have run, but in my defense, we had never run anything like this before. The most important thing at this point was to get through it and we did. The final exchange for the battle ended up being 8 Gross Nerds for 45 orcs and 5 hill giants. The orcs had already lost 20 dudes earlier. And in a battle which we have not played out, Steadington will probably lose some goblins. Maybe not the most tremendous result from a strategic standpoint, nevertheless “the charge of the douche brigade” was definitely going to go down in history as one of the great moments of gaming. One hundred drunk guys wearing three popped collars and charging without their plate mail on was pretty danged cool even if some of my rulings were questionable.
As I had rushed everyone through this ridiculous affair I kept alluding to the fact that time was especially short because it was late and we had to also resolve “the icing on the cake” before we could adjourn. So, I have to tell you, the Steadington player had gone into shock when he saw that Chris (ie Macho Mandalf’s player) had taken the role of Elderbrecht. This was really, really intimidating. However, no amount of player skill could overcome the reality of the actual strategic situation.
But yeah, with the dust settling from the big battle of the night– which of course looked to be entirely favorable to “the good guys” which were being run by our most expert player– it was at this moment that Chris pipes up and asks, “what was the icing on the cake?”
So, I finally revealed that there was an agreement between Steadington and Burkleburg to have Elderbrecht assassinated. The assassin player had– as far as I could tell– pretty well hung back and quietly observed the proceedings unfold with very little fanfare. You wouldn’t even have known he was there, really, going by how often he’d spoken up! In our dice rolling channel he rolled percentile dice for the assassination attempt. I think Chris was too overwhelmed with things going on to bother me with an instruction to have his character dropped off in the weird “tine” hex or whatever. Just this once he had made a mistake and elected to stay behind in Whocaresville where his enemies would be lying in wait for him.
The percentile die roll came up as a one. MEGA-SUCCESS!!! And the guy that had won so many Braunstein games died ignominiously on the spot. And wow, the ridiculous kegger event which looked an obvious trap for the dumb monsters to walk into was now transformed! THE KEGGAR WAS A DISTRACTION WHICH SOAKED UP ALL THE ATTENTION IN THE GAME SO THAT THE REAL BETRAYAL COULD BE CARRIED OFF WITHOUT A HITCH!
Unlike some of the weird battle setups, there was no argument at all that this was completely fair. And holy moly! Just this once actual diplomacy turned out to trump system mastery! What a twist ending! This was just the sort of brilliant stroke that would never occur between NPC’s in a genius clockworker-god type DM’s game. And once again, BrOSR gameplay produced a better story than anything the storygamers do. Even better, this relatively dead gameplay area was revitalized. People were thinking about what to do next. Play more Braunstein style? Check back in on the players? What to do!
If we did pick this back up again, we could run another “Battle Braunstein” and continue to explore what was happening at this level of the game and in this particular hex. But this is very crucial: we are not dependent on all of the same players showing up on the same night. We are just not at the mercy of scheduling issues the way that conventional players are. These factions were freely given to the players for the night. The factions could be returned to the toy chest if we had gotten all the play that was to be had from this again. And if we did another Braunstein session… factions could be reassigned to new players as needed and the campaign would not miss a beat.
Meanwhile, the ultimate outcome is not at all good for people that depended on Whocaresville remaining the center of the game universe. With the primary owner/trainer of the dragons removed from the game, I can’t help but assume that the dragons will now go completely rogue. Yeah, they will be out of play for a while licking their wounds. But when they come back, there is no telling who’s side they will be on!
So, there you go. You can have a good chunk of the “patron game experience” as long as you can fill your table with people that are ready dive into it for an evening. It doesn’t cost you a whole lot of spare time to prep or manage it in comparsion with the way we used to do this so you can tackle “elite level” gameplay without giving up your social life. The only hitch is that integrating things back into an actual campaign is going to require some judgement calls by the referee.
Is it worth the tradeoff? I think it is. Either way, I think we have a new option for how we can play out higher level conflicts in the overworlds of your original campaign milieux.
Jeffro's Space Gaming Blog 
Recent Comments