Stuffed Crocodile on Nostr: Cauldron 2024: Manor on the Borderlands …of Hessia and Thuringia that is. But that ...
Cauldron 2024: Manor on the Borderlands
…of Hessia and Thuringia that is. But that means in living memory the Iron Wall ran merely a few hundred meters away from the location.
And I swear I wanted to go there and make a proper picture but there was simply no time. I managed to play more during the last weekend than I did during some of the last few years.
So last weekend was Cauldron 2024, the “OSR-Euro-Con”, organized by the PESA Nexus.
I saw it happened last year and was miffed I completely missed it until pictures showed up online. So I made sure to plan for it early on this year.
The convention took place in a small manor house in eastern Hessia (Schloss Hohenroda), which makes for really central Germany. It ran from Thursday the 17th to Sunday the 20th.
I managed to get there by Thursday evening, much too late and tired to actually do much but talk a bit with people and watch them play a Braunstein game where I lacked context. This was an issue I will have to deal with next year when the convention is planned even further west: either I get someone else to drive with me, or I have to travel by other means. I am not used to driving this long alone.The town of Badwall under attack
The next few days were filled with lots of gaming, as games started right after breakfast and were only interrupted by meals (and sometimes ran into the mealtimes as well).
It was fun, it was nice having people around that actually were talking the same things I was interested in, and which understood what I was talking about. Even with other RPG conventions that’s not necessarily a given. It was also fun doing some really nice creative gaming that did not involve following some sort of railroad for the sake of it.
On the other hand it also showed the audience of the hobby definitely trending towards the bearded old guy demographic (and considering how early I went to bed I definitely feel like I’m part of it).Chainmail naval battle
Games I played
2 games in Wanderer Bill‘s Grenzland campaign (ODnD White Box+Chainmail). Different characters though, because the one from the first game was time-locked (and the one I played previously in his campaign safely back home…).
The campaign is running in real time, and when the game moves ahead the characters are out of commission for further games until it catches up. Which meant when we started venturing out in the second adventure the big fight of the first scenario still was in the future. In the goblin market, miniatures not to scale
Our first adventure we were supposed to explore south of the campaign base Blaufahr to find new people for the depopulated settlement. The last few months in the campaign seem to have been quite rough. So we were given money to find new people and opportunities.
Instead we decided to go to the dungeon to loot. We rescued a few goblins from bandits and tried to establish friendly relations with the goblin king. Unfortunately the goblins at the local goblin settlement were wary of us, and when one of our MUs decided to steal an ancestral artifact the whole situation went sideways. Our fighters heroically managed to behead the goblin king and show off his head to his people. Then they were slaughtered by his enraged citizens.
(There was in fact a chance they’d crown one of them the new king)
We spellcasters instead headed to the exit when it started to go wrong and managed to survive largely unscathed.
The second adventure was a scouting mission northwards, to figure out where a group of orcs that had attacked recently had their settlement. Through some smart play and good die rolls we befriended some scouting elves, hitched a ride on their ship, found the settlement, mowed down a patrol, then took their leader prisoner. All without casualties.
Then a random encounter with cockatrices hit us hard and turned the adventure into fantasy-vietnam, as our decimated party tried to hurry through unknown territory, getting the prisoner back to Blaufahr.
The four petrified elvish men-at-arms we left behind are now a permanent fixture in the ongoing campaign, at least until someone with a stone-to-flesh scroll comes by…
And that’s all exactly the weird off the wall gaming experience I love when playing ODnD.
baexta had a session of Albie Fiore’s The Lichway (from White Dwarf #9) on offer, run in ADnD/OSRIC, and I decided to take part. Especially as I realized I had forgotten everything about the scenario from running it… 12 years ago? Well, not everything. I remembered the central conceit. But the GM telegraphed that early on and the others figured it out and I didn’t have to feel bad about it. He also offered The Halls of Tizun Thane, and while I would have loved that one as well I just prepped that recently.
This was also the first time I actually properly played ADnD 1st ed. by the book, and I realized my view of it was correct: it’s a good resource to take parts from, but I do not care about the complexity itself. And ADnD is not actually all that complex, just more so than I like for this kind of game. I think there’s other games that do the complexity better.
It also was the first time I played Old School Essentials proper, as in another game we went down to The Jeweler’s Sanctum from the OSE Adventure Anthology I. Despite OSE being basically just a restatement of B/X with clearer design it also oozes some dark fairy tale vibe that seems quite different from standard B/X DnD. The game bore that out, even though it was quite the standard dungeon crawl: we were to explore an improbably large dungeon under a jeweler’s workshop. The scenario whittled away our resources with smaller encounters (giant centipedes and rats) before hitting us with a near TPK in the form of grey oozes. Our GM daeman managed to present this all quite well (he has a knack for using minis and terrain… and printing them out), but I can’t help but think that the scenario itself has issues. On the other hand we clearly didn’t figure out some of the stuff in the dungeon, so I might just be missing the point.
The last one I took part in was The Veiled Vaults of the Onyx Queen, a DCC funnel presented by le moule intello as a basic DnD scenario. It seems he wanted to run it as a DCC scenario as well but received some negative feedback about that before, so decided to switch it to DnD on the fly. Which… I don’t know. I signed up for the game when it was advertised as a DCC game, and so did daeman (see above), and I think we both wouldn’t have minded to play DCC instead. And I think it would have worked oh so slightly better because the magic system of DCC seems more geared towards this. That said, it still worked the way he ran it.
A funnel is a scenario concept where you start with multiple 0-level characters and develop them during the game for use in a later campaign, or you lose and replace them. Your characters might come out with some useful skills or magic items, and a proper backstory.
That said this scenario was more linear and basic than I might have liked, and seemed very specifically intended to introduce people to the hobby. And for that it might be very useful. It just also drops the players into a very specific Heavy Metal-style setting where nobody questions a queen living for 300 years and regularly sacrificing her least liked subjects to some eldritch being from beyond.
Other things…
Blackrazor wrote a tournament module for the convention (“Children of the Sea”), and I originally wanted to GM it, but didn’t find the time to look into it before. And when I signed up for it I either mistook the time slot or the game disappeared, so in the end I didn’t even play in it. It seems to have been quite fun though.
There was unlimited coffee. Unlimited coffee!
Also a free candy bar for brain food.
I received a Nibelung Saga game and the new issue of Grenzland on the Convention, but I will have a look at those in separate posts
Some other people’s posts about it:
Ghoultunnel: Cauldron 2024 – The OSR Euro Con
Die Ogerhöhle: Rückblick Cauldron Con 24 (in German)
Vorpal Mace: Cauldron Con, Thursday and Friday
Zpátky do dungeonu: Do ciziny, a přece domů – reportáž z Cauldron Conu 2024 (Czech)
Bestia Ex Machina: Another blog entry about Cauldron 2024!
GoldDiggers’ Adventures: Days I, II, III+IV
Ahriman‘s Chainmail Battle Report (German)Rate this:
https://gmkeros.wordpress.com/2024/10/28/cauldron-2024-manor-on-the-borderlands/
#cauldron2024 #Convention #dcc #dnd #ose #pnpde #Roleplaying #rpg #ttrpg
