Thracia - Campaign Heat Check
Now that I am taking a month off from running Thracia I feel like it might be a good time to reflect on how the open-table has been going so far. I've been writing up reports weekly but rather than post those, which are purely notetaking excercises, I'd rather discuss my feelings on running the game so far, based on how it's played out.
First off, if you are player reading this: Thank you for being a part of this weekly delve! Whether you only jumped in for one sessoin or are one of my regulars, I appreciate every single one of you and am grateful to get to spend two hours every Monday in your company. Greatly looking forward to our future sessions starting up again in mid-August!
For anyone else reading this, I'll start with a bit of context: for a couple of months now I've been running a weekly game of Caverns of Thracia using Shadowdark as my base system. Sessions are 2 hours long on Mondays (GMT+1) and it's an open-table format. Each session starts and ends at the dungeon entrance and a week advances between each delve. Downtime, shopping and town actions are all handled via play-by-post on discord. Players can have up to 3 characters in their stable (fully optional) to accommodate for party balance. Only one character may take a downtime action per week, to make it easier to handle. Game time is reserved exclusively for the delve.
The reason it's structured this way is to make it as seamless as possible for players to jump into a delve no matter how many sessions they've attended prior. Normally I am not averse to just letting players "spawn" in wherever the party is during a campaign, however I wanted to play with the added pressure of needing to delve, loot and extract within the session time limit. I also wanted to lean into downtime between delves as an important pillar of the campaign.
To do a quick writeup on the events that transpired:
Every character in this campaign is sponsored by the Thracian Revival Company (TRC) and is an active participate of the Thracian Expedition. The TRC is funded by a mysterious figure named Orpheus, who is particularly interested in treasures from the ancient Kingdom of Thracia, and is known to pay handsomely for them. He is especially keen on sourcing a suit of Ancient Thracian plate armor in good condition.
During the first few sessions, the party were barely scratching the surface of the caverns, having only just scouted the main entrance and the neighboring eastern hallway. The main focus was actually mapping out the Lost City above, and familiarizing themselves with the patrols and potential entrances.
From the get-go, the party got on the bad side of the beastmen, who from that point onwards became hostile to their presence. The cult also got off to a bad start with them, but through some trickery and kidnapping of a cleric, the party was able to familiarize themselves enough with the cult's customs and aesthetics to effectively infiltrate.
Within the dungeon the party found the Gates of Death in the easter hallway of Level 1. They also established contact with the Lizardmen and built cordial relations with them, discovering that they wanted to find their ancient king who is believed to still be alive somewhere in the Caverns.
The party also witnessed a cultist ritual sacrifice, and rescued an Elf woman who was thrown off a cliff, without being noticed by the cult. They also managed to rescue a human slave named Grassus who was raised by gnolls that same day.
After weeks of trying to perfect the formula, one of the party's wizards, Zema Zafat, created an explosive out of bat guano and used it to blow up a wall that connected the main entrance hall to the cult's funeral room. This allowed the party to get an insane haul of loot, but also opened up the eastern half of level 1 to the cult, who saw this as divine prophecy. In subsequent weeks the cult began their expansion into the rest of the dungeon and launched a holy crusade against the beastmen.
Since then, the party managed to acquire enough treasure from the dungeon to build their own outpost, which they called The Roost. They had some additional funds left over and raised a small warband under the fighter, Strabon's leadership. They used this warband to clear the main dungeon entrance of hostiles and hold it to ensure the party's safe entrance and exit during delves.
In the last two sessions, the party led some friendly (ish) cultists down to level 2 where they discovered the temple of Athena, and the teleporter to the floor below. The gnolls guarded it fiercely. The cult launched an offensive, scaling down the chasm above to rain hell on the gnolls. Currently there is a bit of a stalemate between the two factions.
The party used this as an opportunity to skirt the two factions and discovered a secret room on level 2 where they found a man and woman both wearing Ancient Thracian plate armor and both literally frozen in time. They discovered that the man was long dead, but the woman was still alive but unconscious. They stripped the man's corpse of his plate armor and carried the unconscious woman out of the dungeon.
Back at The Roost, the party received a letter from Orpheus requesting to meet them.
So it's been a fairly busy 8 sessions thus far. I still feel like we are just scratching the surface, but progress has been made nonetheless.
When I started running Thracia, I was admittedly quite nervous. This is the first time I've run a module that was written before 2011 and even then I am running a Shadowdark conversion of the DCC Conversion. For all the complaints I see online regarding the DCC edition's layout, I do find it easier to navigate than the original publication. It's a matter of personal preference and nothing more.
The only annoying thing is how poorly laid out creature stat-blocks are within the room keys. They just take up way too much space, and seem remarkably busy for DCC stats. I think this is a side effect of GG publishing this for both 5E and DCC, but can't confirm as I have not read the 5E version. Highlighters and tabs have been tremendously useful for prepping this and I've been able to comfortably use the book as an at-the-table reference as a result, though I highly recommend printing out the maps and keeping them on hand to save on page flipping.
While the adjustment to running the module from the book only took a few sessions to get the hang of, I think my bigger issue was one of mindset. It feels silly to say but I think I was being way too precious with preserving the integrity of the dungeon. Thracia has a deservedly legendary reputation in this hobby as a seminal mega-dungeon. The OSR tradition of Jaquaysing the dungeon is named after this dungeon's author, Jennel Jaquays, who pioneered what a published dungeon even looks like and set a high bar for future dungeon designers to match.
Thracia isn't big so much as dense. There is a lot going on here, but at the same time not a lot of guidance of how to tie it all together. Notoriously, the timeline for the background lore is confusing and this GG reprint does not alleviate that. It feels like a lot of it is left up to the GM to infer or build on. A lot of what is here is presented as challenging encounters, either with factions, hazards or general monsters. Sometimes those things are given context, other times your guess is as good as mine.
In the beginning I have to admit I felt too cautious to add anything that might pollute the "designer's vision" so to speak without realizing that actually, the whole point is to make this thing yours.
I'm at a point now where I feel much more confident to let the dungeon grow with the table. Jennel Jaquays did not build an intricate machine where all parts fit together and make sense. She put a bunch of toys on the table for the rest of the world to play with. I mean, if I really cared about running Thracia as written I would not be running this with Shadowdark off of a DCC conversion, so why apply this line of thinking to the dungeon as a whole?
Moreso than any module I've run before, it feels like Thracia is inviting me to just do my thing with it. I almost feel like having the text is useless now. I've read through the dungeon enough times to get a general sense of what's on each floor. So much has changed as a result of player interaction that it only makes sense the room keys must adjust and adapt. Running it exactly by the book would completely crap on player agency at this point.
The big thing I want to focus on going forward is really making these factions feel dynamic and reactive. I think I'm starting to get a sense of how I want to approach it, and already there have been some drastic paradigm shifts, especially on level 1 which will cascade down into deeper levels. The players are the catalysts for change. To play Thracia, is to play the factions. Everything they hit will have a domino effect.
Importantly, I want to give these factions a sense of agency, so they don't just feel like fodder. I know what motivates each of them by now, so it's only a matter of seeing what the players do to judge how they would respond. Often it's not responding directly to the players, but to other factions that they may be set on a collision course with due to player meddling. That's where I feel like my Thracia game is coming alive. The Cult of Thanatos began as an enclave of cloaked weirdos but now is a power to be reckoned with inside the caverns, all because a wall got taken down.
So yeah, when I come back to this game I'll go in with this mindset: let Thracia be our Thracia.