A Dolmenwood Retrospective

I recently wrapped up my Dolmenwood campaign of nearly two years. This was the first non-5e campaign I played or ran (in the modern era anyway – I played other things in the 1990s before a long hiatus), and it really challenged me as a DM and changed the way I think about running campaigns, and gave me an appreciation for a style of play that uses well-curated random tools and procedures on top of worldbuilding to give adventures that are unplotted but that have drive and momentum anyway, and that are really engrossing for both players and GM. Beginning Play It was a bit difficult for our group to start Dolmenwood because we lacked a lot of the context of the game. I had never heard of B/X (the game is built on the chassis of the early D&D Basic/Expert Rules). I did not know that Dolmenwood was an OSR game, or really what that was (a style of gaming more aligned to early playstyles, please don’t ask me to explain, people fight about it all the time). I had no idea it was related to…