Dwimmermount Session

I had the opportunity to playtest Dwimmermount with James M. last night. Needless to say I was excited. I neither like reading nor writing play reports as they usually are seen: careful blow by blows of what the characters did. These for me never capture the spirit of the game and are often tedious (to write and to read). Instead I will do what I usually do and ramble on aimlessly talking about this and that until I feel done.

Leaving Dwimmermount itself aside for a minute, last night's session was excellent - everything I want out of D&D. I got to play with an excellent DM and two wonderful players and we had a great time. This was the second time I have played over G+ (the first was with Il Male) and it has been a positive experience both times. While we do have to wrestle with technology a bit and it is not quite equivalent to the over-the-table experience there is no replacement for playing D&D with like-minded people. For those of us who do not live in big cities or are otherwise lucky, finding OSR players can be a real challenge.

On to the game itself. We were exploring the second level of Dwimmermount with second level characters rolled up on the spot. Character creation took maybe 10 minutes, I played a magic-user with a pretty miserable stat line, but I rolled pretty well for hit points and James let us take maximum for first level. James rolled random spells for me - something I always used to do, so that was nice. I ended up with read magic, light, charm person, and magic missile. I memorize charm person (because it is awesome) and magic missile just in case. The other players decided to play a dwarf and a fighter, and in we went.

Cool stuff that we found:

•  A circular room with unexplained hooks in the walls.
• Weird mosaics.
• A large table that we spent some time examining.
• Some sort of phosphorescent moss.
• A whole lot of orcs - some of which had suspiciously good equipment (that we relieved them of) and finely crafted amulets (which we also took).

Cool stuff that we did:

• Killed a bunch of orcs.
• Ambushed more orcs.
• Cast charm person on the orc chieftain and then killed him.
• Listened at a lot of doors.
• Examined stuff.
• Watched our backs.
• Explored and mapped.
• Proved that yes, the magic-user with a penalty in both dexterity and constitution should pull out his dagger and wade into melee because he is awesome like that.

Basically it was D&D at its best.

Final thought: it is hard to separate the experience of the dungeon from the DM, but Dwimmermount managed to feel both organic and mysterious - exactly what a good dungeon should be.