The Dolmenwood RPG is essentially old school perfected
Gavin Norman explains exactly how he did this
Hey Gavin, thanks for doing this interview. How would you like to introduce yourself to a fine and discerning RPG-playing audience?
Hi Dave, thanks for the invitation. I'm the founder of Necrotic Gnome and creator of Old-School Essentials (OSE) and the upcoming Dolmenwood RPG.
I want to talk about Dolmenwood (here on Kickstarter), which is its own standalone game based on OSE rules, but I want to ask you about OSE first. What was the moment like when you decided that you were going to start that project? And for those who aren’t initiated, what is OSE?
So for the uninitiated: OSE is a clone of the much beloved 1981 D&D Basic/Expert sets (known as B/X). The idea behind it is to present a close rendition of the B/X rules — enabling people to use classic modules and supplements without conversion — but with a focus on usability and ease of reference. OSE also adds one extra rule that wasn't present in the original B/X: ascending Armour Class (i.e. AC 10 is unarmoured, better armour makes AC higher). So groups can choose to use old-school descending AC (with the attack matrix or THAC0) or modern ascending AC.
There were several factors that combined to inspire the creation of OSE:
I had (well, still have) a tendency to avoid using standard classes, spells, magic items, and monsters in my own games. I just love creating all of those things, dreaming up variants that enhance the flavour of whatever campaign world I'm running at the time. So there came a time where I noticed that I was carrying complete game rulebooks (including all the standard classes, spells, etc.) to my game sessions and then not actually referring to most of the material. I'd look things up in the core game rules, say, but most of the content was just dead weight that I was lugging around. So I got to thinking about a modular game, where the various sections were presented as separate books: a core rules book, a classes book, a spells book, and so forth. That way you'd be able to pick and choose which parts of the game to carry around.
While the organisation of the B/X rules is pretty good for the time the game was published (they're super streamlined compared with the sprawl of AD&D, say), I'd noticed that there was a tendency for rules on one topic to be scattered throughout the two books, leading to a lot of page flipping. For example, the rules pertaining to dwarves are scattered between (from memory) the character classes section, the dungeon exploration section, and the combat section. As I'd begun contemplating a modular reorganisation of the rules, I realised I could also improve organisation by collating everything around each topic in a single place. Indeed, the ideal would be for each rules topic to be completely covered on a single page or on a spread of two facing pages. (This approach is what Ben Milton would later dub a “control panel” layout.)
I'd also noticed that the way content is conventionally structured in RPG books (both old and new) isn't conducive to use as a quick reference during play. Long-winded, conversational writing leads to expansive paragraphs and walls of text. Rules are often mixed in with prose or flavour text. While some people seem to be fine with referencing games written in that way, I personally find that those kinds of stylistic conventions make it difficult to quickly look anything up during the heat of play. So I started experimenting with presenting rules in a much terser, more structured style, focused on ease of reference.
All of those insights combined at around the same time, and I felt I was onto something. I started sharing bits and pieces online and soon garnered enough interest from others to make me feel that it'd be a worthwhile project to develop seriously. Thus was born OSE — a modular game with old-school rules and modern, usability focused structure and layout. I later decided to publish the game in two formats: as a box set of modular books and also as a compiled tome with everything in one book. I found that there was about a 50/50 split between people who love the modular concept (or just love box sets) and those who prefer everything in one book. So OSE is available in both formats.
It’s one thing to decide to clean up and reorganize some old RPG rulebooks. Certainly that’s been attempted before. But I think I speak for a lot of folks who found your actual layouts to be almost intoxicatingly appealing. The visual crispness and readability is a factor that makes OSE a foundational product in both the OSR and in RPGs generally in my opinion. Where did you learn your layout skills and sensibilities?
Oh wow, thank you so much! I'm completely self-taught. I don't have any background in design or layout (I was a software engineer in my former life), so just picked it up over the last decade-odd of using InDesign. Each project I do, I learn some new tricks and refine things a bit.
Hmm, maybe it’s the software background that gave you the meticulous attention to detail and orderliness. With regard to the actual B/X rules, they have been often recapitulated and in a sense placed on a sort of golden pedestal at this point. But there was a recent interview with some of the original creators where they admitted that they didn’t really have much experience with game design at the time and to some degree didn’t know what they were doing. Do the B/X rules deserve the adoration and almost worship that they now receive? If they do, why do you think so?
Yeah, my background in software engineering definitely has a strong influence on my RPGs and my focus on information design.
About B/X, my feeling is that the reason the game is so beloved is that, while the rules are certainly not “perfect”, it encapsulates the iconic D&D experience in a perfectly formed package. In just 128 pages you get the foundational D&D content, enough for years of play with no further books: the classic 4 core classes and races; a great selection of the most iconic 100+ spells, 200+ monsters, and 150+ magic items; rules for dungeoneering, wilderness exploration, sea travel, stronghold construction. And what's more, everything is presented in a pretty clean and coherent way, quite unlike the baroque style and organisation of AD&D. (Though for raw D&D flavour, for me AD&D is the pinnacle.)
Another aspect to the popularity of B/X is its hackability. For people (like myself) who love to hack the game with new classes, spells, etc, B/X is a perfect foundation to work from. I think that's why it became so popular in the OSR scene, as that scene is teeming with folks who love taking classic D&D in different directions. With more elaborate game systems (e.g. AD&D, or any WOTC edition of the game), hacking becomes more onerous, as the number of interlocking systems increases.
A third area where B/X shines is its focus on laying out really clear, step by step game procedures. For example, the procedures for wilderness exploration and combat (links to the equivalent procedures in OSE). I mean, they’re pretty simple procedures, but presenting them as step by step lists makes the game much easier to learn and reference. Presenting the core game procedures in this way was a real innovation of B/X, and as far as I understand it's sadly not something that was carried forward into newer editions.
By the way, I just wanted to add a note on my use of scare quotes around the word “perfect” above, in relation to the B/X rules. I don't really believe that any RPG's rules can be perfect, just due to the open, freeform nature of RPGs themselves. The point for me is more whether rules are easy to explain and use, cover the core situations of gameplay, and create an engaging play experience. I'd say that most of the rules in B/X succeed on those counts, but there are definitely outliers. One personal bugbear is the old-school D&D treasure types system. It's easy enough to explain and certainly produces interesting play experiences, but it's a mysterious black box without any apparent pattern. This becomes inconvenient when designing new monsters. The list of treasure types is ordered seemingly at random, so there's no easy way to decide which type suits your monster. You either have to consult the listings of similar monsters and see what treasure type those were assigned, or you have to look through the randomly ordered list of treasure types until you find one that seems about right. It's a system that could certainly be improved.
I ended up getting the OSE Advanced Fantasy books, which are the OSE books consolidated into two books and include the AD&D options (please tell me if that’s correct. I am slightly befuddled by the product options). Thanks for making it two books. I personally find the multiple smaller books make it hard to conduct quick references. I know you mentioned that having separate, smaller books was an original motivation for creating OSE. Do you actually use the multiple smaller books at the table?
Yep, that's right. OSE Advanced Fantasy is everything from B/X plus lots of extra classes, races, spells, monsters, magic items, and optional rules from AD&D. And yes, the downside of offering the game in several variants catering to different tastes (Classic / Advanced Fantasy, box sets / tomes) is definitely that it can lead to confusion. Honestly, if I were to start again I'd probably drop one of the variants just to simplify things. It'd probably be the box sets, much as I love them. Over time, I've noticed that slightly more people say they prefer the tomes over the box sets, or use the tomes for play and just keep the box sets as collector items.
My personal preference is for the box sets over the tomes. Physically they're just beautiful items. The boxes are super luxurious, and the slim hardcover books are a delight to hold and read. (If you've got any of the OSE adventures you'll know what I mean.) In terms of quick referencing, it does of course mean that you have multiple books around, but it's usually pretty obvious which one you need. Looking up a spell? Grab the Magic book. Looking up a monster? Grab the Monsters book. And so on.
I've not run an in-person game for ages (I just have the Rules Tome PDF open when running online games), but I found the box sets great for sharing around the table. I kind of beta tested them with my own group. The modular concept works really well — one player can be looking up a spell, while another is checking something about their character class, while another is clarifying a combat rule.
So it's certainly a matter of taste which format each individual prefers. They each have their pros and cons really. Hence the (perhaps unusual) decision to make both available.
Have any of the scandals from Wizards of the Coast in the past 8 months had any positive effect on OSE sales?
Yes, we definitely noticed the “people fleeing 5e” effect. There was a huge surge of PDF sales during the OGL debacle in January, and physical stock of most products ran out far faster than we'd usually expect. Unfortunately it's difficult to handle surges in demand for print products, as the stock in the warehouse is obviously finite and it takes 4–5 months to get new stock in from the printer. Some OSE items are still sold out right now. We're expecting new stock to arrive some time in August. I believe a lot of publishers experienced something similar in the aftermath of January.
Okay, Dolmenwood. What was it up until now, and what is it about to be?
To start off I'll quote a little piece of official blurb: “Dolmenwood is a fantasy adventure game set in a lavishly detailed world inspired by the fairy tales and eerie folklore of the British Isles. Like traditional fairy tales, Dolmenwood blends the dark and whimsical, the wondrous and weird.”
Dolmenwood was conceived in the summer of 2013, so around 10 years ago. The original idea was to publish a hex crawl “mini setting” in the form of a trio of hardcover books: a player's book with new classes, magic, equipment, and setting lore, a campaign book with DM lore and hex descriptions, and a monster book with a bunch of new monsters for the setting.
After a year or so of gradual work on the setting, it had become clear that this was not a “mini setting” and that it might be better to publish the setting in small chunks, in the form of a print-on-demand zine. We published the first issue of the zine (named Wormskin) in the autumn of 2015, followed by 7 further issues over the next couple of years.
The zine was a lot of fun to write and was well-received, but the scope of Dolmenwood kept growing and growing. At one point I remember compiling a list of all the material that would be needed to complete the setting as envisaged and realising that it'd fill about 40-50 more issues of the zine. The result would sadly have been an unusable mess of piecemeal content. It was at that point that I decided to return to the original vision of publishing the complete setting in three hardcover books. This was early 2019 I believe.
Now, after a few more years of work (alongside everything that's happened with OSE since 2019), the books are finally nearing completion and I couldn't be more proud of what I've created. It'd be an exaggeration to call Dolmenwood my life's work, but it's certainly by far the largest project I've ever undertaken and has been ever-present in my imagination over the last decade.
We'll be launching a Kickstarter for Dolmenwood on August 9th, releasing the fabled Dolmenwood hardcover books at long last. The three books form a complete game and a richly detailed campaign setting, with enough content for years of play. As with OSE, there is of course a strong focus on making the reams of content usable in play, with control panel layouts for everything from classes to spells to factions to hex descriptions to monsters and magic items. It's not the kind of setting where the DM is expected to read and memorise hundreds of pages of lore before play can begin.
Along with the core books, we'll be producing a range of delicious extras: adventure modules, a gorgeous DM screen, a set of 11 player minis, cloth maps of Dolmenwood, a set of fungal dice, and even a Dolmenwood soundtrack album on vinyl and digital. It's going to be an amazing package for people to dive deep into the brambly, fungus-riddled flavour of Dolmenwood.
There's loads more info at dolmenwood.com, including a link to a free 76 page preview of material from the three core books.
Congrats on this culmination of years of hard work! Dolmenwood will use OSE rules that are “expanded.” What does that entail exactly? And why did you feel the need to modify the rules?
Thanks! It's been a pretty epic undertaking, so it's amazing to finally see the light at the end of the tunnel.
So yeah, Dolmenwood uses the core OSE rules with some light customisations to enhance the flavour of the setting and to make the game more accessible. There are three main areas of differences versus OSE:
Streamlining of certain rules systems to make them smoother and easier to learn. My aim is for Dolmenwood to be a fantastic introduction to old-school adventure gaming, and to be accessible to all kinds of players, from people who have never played an RPG before, to people coming in from D&D 5e, to die-hard old-schoolers. A good example of a tweak of this kind is that Dolmenwood only uses modern-style ascending AC (where better AC is higher), rather than the somewhat esoteric looking dual AC format used in OSE. There are a bunch of similar tweaks throughout the rules to smooth over some of the crustier aspects of the old B/X rules. (And yes, I have reworked the treasure types system that I complained about above.)
Adding introductory material to help new players learn the game and understand the old-school play style. The absence of this kind of material in OSE is one of the most common criticisms of the game. I wanted to make Dolmenwood as accessible as possible, rather than relying on assumed player experience, so I'm including loads of introductory material, examples of play, and advice for players and referees.
Expanding the rules in areas which are lacking in OSE or which are especially important for Dolmenwood. For example, extra guidelines around common hazards and challenges (cold, darkness, foraging, starvation, stealth, swimming, etc.), a brand new travel system to greatly simplify hex crawling, rules for camping, procedures for settlement exploration, fully developed procedures for hiring retainers, and so forth.
This is all obviously in addition to the huge volume of brand new mechanical content specifically designed for Dolmenwood (new classes, magic, equipment, monsters, etc.). Not to mention the setting lore, factions, settlements, and 200 hex descriptions. The new content makes up the vast bulk of the core books.
9. So I noticed in the quickstart specifically that you replaced the old school saving throws with some of your own. Specifically, the saving throws (where players roll to avoid the full effects of certain attacks) in BX/OSE were: Death or Poison; Wands; Paralysis or Petrification; Breath Attacks; and Spells, Rods or Staves. In the Dolmenwood RPG they are Doom, Ray, Hold, Blast and Spell. I have three things to say about your saving throws and one question: 1) I didn’t have to use semicolons to list your saving throws. 2) Thank you, and 3) Not kidding, this is about 80% of the reason I’m going to back Dolmenwood. And my question is, could you describe the journey in arriving at these five saving throws?
Right, this is another good example of streamlining a quirky element of B/X to improve the game's accessibility. Really glad to hear that you dig it!
The old-school D&D saving throws are super idiosyncratic. I personally have a lot of nostalgia for those quirky categories, but I know that many players coming from newer editions find them kind of baffling. The main issue is how to handle saves versus effects that don't obviously fit in one of the five very specifically named categories.
So I knew that I wanted to make saving throws easier to understand and work with. I did initially consider ditching the categories altogether and going with a “single save” approach similar to Swords & Wizardry. (Characters have a single save value that improves with level. Classes grant save bonuses versus certain effects.) But I also didn't want Dolmenwood to diverge too far from core OSE. So I came up with the idea of keeping the five trad save categories but framing them in a more generic way. Here's how they're described in Dolmenwood:
Doom: Effects that instantly kill or inflict ongoing physical malignities — for example, poison, disease, death magic. Doom also serves as a general category for avoiding unfortunate fates that do not fall under any other Save Category.
Ray: Rapidly moving, directional effects that can be dodged — for example, energy rays, magic wands.
Hold: Effects that hinder or prevent movement — for example, paralysis, petrification, falling rocks that may crush or pin characters.
Blast: Lethal energy effects that fill a wide area — for example, wyrm breath, explosions.
Spell: Potent, directly targeted effects — for example, arcane or holy spells, fairy glamours, magic staves.
So you can see that they still cover the same five types of hazards that are common in a fantasy adventure game, but are broader and more generic. This makes it easier to pick a category.
I spent a lot of time mulling over the names of the categories. I wanted to keep the initials the same as far as possible (e.g. Death to Doom, Breath to Blast). I found that this wasn't always possible though. I couldn't think of a word for Ray that begins with W, for example. I also wanted to keep the names short and snappy (as you noted). I'm really pleased that they all ended up at 3–5 letters. (This is great for layout too, where long names can sometimes be awkward to fit in.)
10. From the way you put it, and from what I’ve read in the free 76-page quickstarter, it sounds like a home run for anyone who’s into OSE in the first place (you live in the States now, so get used to baseball analogies). Do you have any plans to expand on domain play, where PCs who have accumulated enough money and power can manage a castle or a region?
Domain play is an interesting topic. B/X has a basic structure for it, but doesn't really elaborate enough for it to form a major part of the game. In Dolmenwood, I decided to strip this down further, with the idea of doing a future supplement to properly detail domain play in Dolmenwood. I could see this being a really fun thing to develop, with rules, procedures, domain event tables, and so on tailored to the setting. Including some kind of warfare combat system would be really interesting as well, perhaps along with rules for starting play at higher levels, allowing players to jump right into domain play. Lots of possibilities.
I took the same approach with magic item creation. B/X gives super broad guidelines for creating magic items, but not enough to make it an easy and fun aspect of the game. I decided to not include this in Dolmenwood, in favour of a potential supplement with a nicely detailed, setting-specific system. There are a lot of fun possibilities in Dolmenwood, like infusing magic items in the energies of ley lines, requiring various rare fungal / herbal ingredients, and so on. That kind of detail is beyond the scope of the core game, though. (The core books are long enough and detailed enough already. I’ve had to draw the line several times and decide to save fun ideas for potential future supplements.)
11. The playable races/ancestries, or “kindred,” of the Dolmenwood setting listed in the preview are breggle, elf, grimalkin, human, mossling, woodgrue. Can you describe each of them briefly?
Sure thing! As a bit of preamble, kindreds in Dolmenwood as classified into three types: mortals, fairies, and demi-fey. Mortals are beings whose origins are within the confines of the mortal world. Fairies are immortal beings that originate in the parallel realm of Fairy, a timeless world beyond the ken of mortal folk. And demi-fey are the descendents of fairies who have taken up permanent residence in the mortal world, retaining some of their innate fairy magic but ageing and dying as mortals do.
Breggles, humans, and mosslings are mortal kindreds. Woodgrues are demi-fey. Elves and grimalkins are fairies.
Breggles: Proud and stubborn goat-headed folk who have inhabited the High Wold region of Dolmenwood since antiquity. As an individual grows in power (i.e. gains XP and levels), their horns get longer, indicating their improved social standing. The ancient breggle noble houses now rule alongside humans, swearing fealty to the Dukes of Brackenwold. In the larger towns of the High Wold, breggles live side by side with humans.
Elves: Ageless fairies who have crossed into the mortal world for reasons they seldom reveal. As humans do in the mortal world, elves forge great kingdoms in Fairy, subjugating others under their rule. In ancient times, Dolmenwood was ruled by an elf lord known as the Cold Prince — one of the setting's major antagonists. Folktales speak fearfully of his desire to return to reclaim his former kingdom.
Grimalkins: Mercurial feline fairies who shift between three different forms: a humanoid cat form wearing clothing and speaking, a fat moggy form, and a primal fey predatory form. Grimalkins are hunters, epicureans, and thrill-seekers.
Humans: The everyday folk of Dolmenwood, in all the variety we know.
Mosslings: Gnarled, woody humanoids whose moist flesh is riddled with fungi, moulds, and plants (of course including moss). Mosslings live in isolated communities in the deepest, darkest, dankest parts of Dolmenwood, favouring the swathes of fungal forest in the region known as Mulchgrove. Their affinity for fungi makes them master brewers and cheesemakers.
Woodgrues: Capricious bat-faced goblins known for their love of music, revelry, and arson. Woodgrues wander throughout Dolmenwood, camping in the wilds, and cavorting in the moonlight. They practice secret woodwind songs that can enchant others, usually for comical effect.
12. How deep does the lore go in terms of explaining how these kindred have all coexisted amongst each other in a shared realm?
There's an outline of the periods of history when elves, breggles, and humans variously arrived in or left Dolmenwood. There are lots of fun conflicts, rivalries, and vendettas, but I won't go into detail here as there are some big spoilers involved. The other three kindreds (grimalkins, mosslings, and woodgrues) don't play much of a role in the wider sweep of history in Dolmenwood, so are more on the periphery. The description of each kindred includes some notes on how they get along with folk of other kindreds, and especially how they're perceived in the human settlements that make up most of civilisation in Dolmenwood in the modern age.
13. The Duchy of Brackenwold is detailed in the preview, along with a really great map of the area. How much of the domain of Dolmenwood at large (beyond this duchy) has been mapped or conceived at this point? How big is Dolmenwood and the lands around it?
Right, so the forest of Dolmenwood is contained within the Duchy of Brackenwold. The campaign map shows Dolmenwood in its entirety and most of the duchy, covering 200 hexes — an area about 110 miles east-west by 70 miles north-south. So it's not a vast area, but it is highly detailed. The Campaign Book has a page of locations, encounters, and mysteries for each hex. So that's 200 pages right away. Then there’s 60 pages detailing the twelve main settlements in Dolmenwood (4–8 pages per settlement). There’s enough material for years of play, really delving deeply into the intrigues and mysteries of Dolmenwood.
The core Dolmenwood books consciously focus purely on this region, with only very scant mentions of anything beyond. The reason for this is to give referees the option of slotting Dolmenwood into a pre-existing campaign world or of expanding the world beyond Dolmenwood's borders as they wish. An official expansion detailing the regions around Dolmenwood — possibly up to say the scale of a continent — is something I'm considering as a future supplement. It will depend how the setting is received and what people are interested in hearing more about.
14. The Necrotic Gnome website is an ultra-clean, comprehensive model website for any RPG. One of its most notable features is that it contains all the rules from Old School Essentials in a neatly organized SRD web format. Do you have any intention of offering the rules from Dolmenwood like this one day? And for that matter, has there been any thought of releasing a third party creator’s license for Dolmenwood?
Yes, we are planning to have some kind of online rules reference for Dolmenwood, along similar lines to the OSE SRD. Exactly what it will contain is still being decided. We also plan to have some online tools to accompany the game, for example a character creation tool. And once the game is finished I'll hand it over to the developers who did the Fantasy Grounds and Foundry implementations of OSE, so VTT support should be coming later on. (A few people have asked about VTT support being part of the Kickstarter. We decided not to include that as it would add another level of complexity to an already complex project. It's important to know where to draw the line.)
A third-party license and logo for Dolmenwood are also planned, enabling people to publish supplements and adventures set in Dolmenwood. I expect it'll be released to coincide with the game hitting retail. I'm really excited to see what other creators will come up with!
It's also worth noting (and this circles back to earlier in the interview) that Dolmenwood will not be released under the OGL. I feel that the risk of WOTC trying to undermine the OGL again is pretty low in the medium term, but in the longer term who knows what future corporate strategies or management changes might bring. I'm happy to leave OSE as it is, published under the OGL, with a wait and see / it'll probably be fine attitude. But for Dolmenwood, as a new game, I want to start from a position of zero risk.
15. As with a lot of well-produced Kickstarter projects like this one, the list of selling points is long and exhaustive. And you have enumerated all of them here already. But what part of the Dolmenwood RPG really excites YOU personally? What is an aspect of the game, either in its development or in the course of play, that has made your heart skip a beat or kept you up at night with excitement?
On a personal level, I'm experiencing massive excitement and nerd-joy that I'm going to publish a complete game and setting of my own creation. (I mean, I've published a complete game before in OSE, but Dolmenwood feels different, as there's so much of my own imagination and passion in it.) The mélange of influences in Dolmenwood is also really exciting to me — a blending of D&D style adventure, traditional fairy tales, 20th century fairy tales (primarily Lord Dunsany, Neil Gaiman, and Susanna Clarke), and surreal / out-there influences such as Twin Peaks, Lewis Carroll, and Weird Fiction.
16. There’s this centuries-long tradition in British literature of fantasy, including the Scottish author George MacDonald (1824-1905), and going back to well before him when considering the folk stories. As of today, British-borne fantasy could be divided into all kinds of subgenres. On one end of the spectrum, you have soaring, epic high fantasy like Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, then elsewhere on that spectrum you have worlds like that found in Dolmenwood. How would you describe your flavor of fantasy if you were to consider it an important installment in the long tradition?
Tolkien is an interesting case, in the context of Dolmenwood. Despite him being most famous for pretty much spawning high fantasy as a genre, there's also a very strong fairytale thread running through his writing. Stories like Smith of Wootton Major and his essay On Fairy-Stories were heavily influential on Dolmenwood. The first book of The Lord of the Rings, likewise, with the journeys of the hobbits across the Shire, into the Old Forest, to the house of Tom Bombadil, and across the Barrow Downs to Bree. So in terms of the focus on travel through wild lands and tangled woods, I'd say Dolmenwood owes a lot to Tolkien. Also the love of little, down-to-earth details of everyday life, like the lavish lists of tavern fare, local ales, and varieties of pipeleafs in the Dolmenwood Player's Book. (There are even a few nods to Tolkien in the names of the pipeleafs, in fact.)
So I'd say that Dolmenwood is part of the older tradition of fairytale fantasy that Tolkien also tapped into and then took in his own direction, tying it into an epic, mythological story.
In terms of a genre for Dolmenwood, I like the term Weird Fairytale. It brings together the long tradition of fairytales and folklore with the 20th century adventure fiction and Weird fiction genres (which of course were one of the major origins of D&D).
17. Ah, good point about Tolkien. You’re definitely in good company. I noticed that you’ll be offering an album to go with Dolmenwood by none other than Tales Under the Oak. I discovered them about a year ago when searching “dungeon synth” in Spotify and being just blown away by how perfect their songs and storytelling are. They just capture that foggy, sepia-toned nostalgia of dungeon delving in the 1980s in a way that few musicians in the genre are able to do. How did you discover them and what has the creative process been like working with them on the Dolmenwood album?
Oh yeah I'm super excited about the album. I've listened to some bits and pieces of dungeon synth, but it's never really struck a chord with me before. That is until I happened across Tales Under the Oak. (Via a recommendation on Discord, as far as I remember.) I'd not considered the possibility of a Dolmenwood album, but 2 tracks into Tales Under the Oak's album Swamp Kingdom I was like “holy crab, this is Dolmenwood!!!”. (Yes, there definitely were that many exclamation marks in my mind.) I contacted the band immediately and we started chatting about the idea of an official Dolmenwood soundtrack album. I sent them some PDFs to look at, and they were super into the vibe of the setting.
From there, we agreed on the basic tonal parameters of the album and picked out 8 of the most important factions / places / personages in Dolmenwood. There's one track based on each: the Wood Gods, the fungal forest of Mulchgrove, Lake Longmere, the brewing town of Prigwort, the Pluritine Church, the Cold Prince, the Nagwood and the Court of the Nag-Lord, and the Drune. The creative process was super smooth. They'd send over a rough track, I'd listen to it a few times, give any feedback (usually involving the words “awesome” and “mystical”), and we'd iterate from there.
I love the resulting album. Music is one of my big passions, aside from fantasy and D&D, so it's kind of mind blowing for me to listen to an album created specially for Dolmenwood. I can't wait to have that 12" in my collection!
18. Please don’t be the person responsible for finally getting me into vinyl. Damn it, Gavin. Alright, last question. You mentioned maybe doing an expansion of the world of Dolmenwood geographically, and maybe doing a supplement on domain play. What are all of the possible expansions and supplements that you have seriously thought about doing for the Dolmenwood RPG thus far, provided that this Kickstarter is a rousing success and all the stars swing into alignment?
Ha, all it takes is one must-have album that's only on vinyl. That's what got me started.
So yeah, I have lots of potential ideas for future Dolmenwood books. Of course all of this depends on how Dolmenwood is received and what people want more of. So no guarantees that all of the following will necessarily ever see the light of day.
Expanding the line of official Dolmenwood adventures is the most obvious thing. I'm really keen to do a revised version of the old adventure The Weird That Befell Drigbolton (published early 2017). It's a fantastic adventure with a lot of very fun weirdness in it (as the name implies), but isn't up to Necrotic Gnome's current standards of layout and usability. I'd love to modernise it and give it a proper hardcover publication.
Another obvious possibility would be to detail the areas around Dolmenwood. I could see this working in two ways. Firstly, as mentioned previously, I'd love to do a supplement describing the kingdoms beyond Dolmenwood, possibly up to the scale of a continent. This would obviously be at a broader level of detail than the Dolmenwood core books, describing just the main lore, factions, and locations, rather than having full descriptions for thousands of hexes extending for hundreds of miles in every direction.
The other possibility I've considered is describing smaller neighbouring regions at the same level of detail as the Dolmenwood core books. So, for example, there could be a supplement extending the campaign map with 50–100 new hexes to the south, describing the peoples, places, and monsters of the Low Wold (a currently hypothetical region that may lie south of Dolmenwood's High Wold). There are actually the seeds for a possible expansion of this kind already planted in the Dolmenwood Campaign Book. A few of the hexes in the haunted downs on Dolmenwood's northern border mention a certain being awakening from an ages long slumber. This is something that would be really fun to develop further, with an expansion of new hexes to the north and a new faction that would threaten to destabilise the established setup in Dolmenwood.
An expansion about journeys into Fairy would be another obvious possibility, with some kind of procedural exploration system for travelling the weird paths of that realm, more fairy monsters, details on the courts of the fairy nobles, more fairy runes, etc.
There's also the possible domain supplement mentioned earlier. I'd probably do that as a full high-level play supplement, including systems for domain play, magic item creation, and high-level character creation. Probably alongside more powerful spells, monsters, relics, and so on. I think there's a lot of potential fun stuff there, but it would require detailed development and play testing.
Lastly, I have considered launching a Dolmenwood zine. As we covered earlier, I think a zine is a bad way to publish a big, detailed campaign setting, but it's a great way to add smaller chunks of optional content. For example, I could maybe see a mix of articles with new game content (e.g. new classes, spells, magic items, monsters), world building articles (e.g. deep dives into history, languages, noble family trees, etc.), and short adventures or locations.
Oh and if the minis are popular, we'd love to do further sets, featuring some of the fantastic monsters and NPCs of Dolmenwood.
So there are lots of ideas and possibilities. I'm excited to see how things develop and what the future of Dolmenwood holds in store. But first, the Kickstarter! Live for 30 days from 10 AM EST August 9th. There will be special rewards for people who back in the first 48 hours...
Back Dolmenwood on Kickstarter:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/exaltedfuneral/dolmenwood-tabletop-rpg
This interview might be the de facto primer on Gavin's work and Dolmenwood! Nearly 30-minutes!
Thanks for this interview, great job! I was introduced to Dolmenwood in 2021 and played in a Play By Post campaign for a while (using Cairn for the rules). I absolutely loved the world, it really struck the right chords for me. I’ve been so excited for this KS campaign! :)