Kelpsprot Session 1

Castle Kelpsprot is my Dungeon25-ish project: a science-fantasy capsule game megadungeon designed for HUDless play. For background, see my first post on the project.

Kelpsprot is an open-table campaign, and I can accommodate another 3–4 players for now. Message me on Discord at dododecahedron or email me at thedododecahedron [at] gmail.com if you’re interested in joining! Players will schedule some sessions West Marches style, so don’t worry if you’re in a different time zone or have an unusual work schedule.

At A Glance

Morning of the 3rd day of spring, year 4201

Castaways:
Daeren of Grigiamba, Mesa-born Colonist
Lady Harlowe, Hapless Heir
Sir Imago, Remarkably Errant Knight

	This session	All time
Real world time played	1 hour 40 minutes	1 hour 40 minutes
In-game time elapsed	1 hour 20 minutes	1 hour 20 minutes
Rooms discovered	9	9
Denizens met	6	6
Castaways slain	0	0

Highlights

• The party conversed with two gull folk, Crabtrapper and Weatherall, and gathered a great deal of information. A huge winged beast had been barricaded inside an old feasting hall, cutting off a small group of gulls from their home in the Central Court and trapping a larger group of gulls in the Ship Hall without access to food and water. The winged beast was in pursuit of Waldren, Sir Wendolyn’s twin brother.
• The party solved a puzzle that involved shining a lantern into a hollow at the back of a statue’s head and through a spyglass pressed to the statue’s eye, illuminating a specific stone block. Pressing the stone block opened a secret passage.
• The party met two stewards, Ardent and Felicity. The stewards spoke simply and clumsily, pausing now and then to dunk their hats and heads in troughs of saltwater. The party convinced the stewards to fetch Crabapple, who also struggled to speak clearly, a sopping wet chef’s hat upon his head. A gull-person and a third steward accompanied him, both wearing soggy hats.
• To mask the operation of the secret door, Lady Harlowe pretended to cast a spell while Daeren obscured the mechanism with his shield.
• The party returned to Crabtrapper and Weatherall and confirmed that the third gull they’d met was Eelcatcher, an excellent hunter and forager who’d gone missing along with two companions. The party inspected the doors leading to the feast hall (barred with an anchor), learned of another route to the feast hall, and briefly investigated the second-floor balcony.

Reflections

We took twenty minutes at the start to make introductions, gather rumors, wrangle equipment, and address a few miscellaneous questions. Not bad for a first session, though I hope to begin the session proper sooner during subsequent sessions.

One of my goals with this campaign is to maintain a strong pace. I think we got off to a decent start, discovering nine rooms and engaging in several prolonged conversations in under two hours. I think I struck a decent balance between in-character speech and reported speech, but I could probably have relied more on the latter after estalishing the respective characters.

So far, the HUDless, rules-light system has stayed out of the way as intended, offering me just enough procedure and structure to stay grounded. The players did not make a single die roll during the session, and I almost exlusively made encounter checks and reaction rolls.

I hadn’t run an online session in quite a while, and juggling fog of war in the VTT, my own version of the map, Discord, and my expansive Obsidian folder of notes took up most of my attention. I dropped the ball a bit on spotlight management and making space for the player characters to breathe, but I expect that’ll become easier as I settle into the campaign.

High Prep Play

A lot of prep went into Kelpsprot, and it’s mostly enabling my refereeing and not getting in the way. My descriptions likely verge on too long, and I expect I’ll benefit from focusing more on the players during future sessions, leaving more space for them to ask questions when they want greater detail.

I intend Castle Kelpsprot to be more social and character-focused than a typical “door D&D” style megadungeon. To that end, I focused on the dungeons inhabitants in my prep, and that’s paid off so far. At minimum, every sentient being in the castle has a name and desire. Most denizen entries consist of the following:

• Name
• Default conversational mode and quirks of speech
• Sample dialogue
• Physical description
• Characterizations
• Desires
• Opinions & knowledge
• Affiliations

That’s way more information than is reasonable to convey in a single session, but as the players revisit characters and establish relationships with them, this prep will help me portray the characters with greater and greater depth and specificity.

Despite the thoroughness of my prep, I still felt anxious during the weeks leading up to the first session. The layout of the castle allows players easy access to hundreds of rooms, and some sections of the castle are better prepared than others. I could have easily spent another six months preping this campaign, but that’s why I set myself a deadline in the first place. At a certain point, you just have to begin, and now that I have, I’m feeling confident in my prep and the campaign’s potential!

Last but not least, the players deserve a lot of credit for how the first session went. They were decisive, engaged, and goal-oriented, which made my role as referee easy! Hopefully you’ll hear more about the adventures of Daeren, Lady Harlowe, and Sir Imago.

That’s All For Now

I had a blast running the first session of Castle Kelpsprot! This campaign is months in the making, and it felt a bit surreal to finally kick things off. I don’t expect to write a report of every session, but I’ll post updates as often as I’m able.