I backed the Dolmenwood kickstarter. IMHO they've done a tremendous job on the quality of the product, the changes they made to the OSE rules, and the setting is awesome.
One thing that's sort of odd it's it is explicitly designed as "you're a bunch of normal people encountering fey weirdness, which you can tilt more or less towards horror". For example it lists as inspirations Over the Garden Wall, the Green Knight, etc.
However, it gives you the option of playing all these different character species - dwarfs made of moss, elfs from the fae realm, half/goat people, etc.
So if you had a party made up of all these, how would anything you encounter seem weird? I barely understand how you would roleplay these things.
I'm starting up a Dolmenwood campaign in a little over a week, and I fully expect several of my players to go for the weirder character types, so I'll try and report back on how it goes.
I'm not sure Dolmenwood necessarily is going for the whole "normal people encountering the unknown" thing. The setting is so thoroughly infused with fairy magic that it seems like it's supposed to be an everyday thing for the people there. I mean, if there's an entire region populated by goatmen, and their leaders are active in local politics, you've got to expect that the village bartender won't even raise an eyebrow when one walks in. I read the setting as being more like the Middle Earth depicted in The Hobbit, where even in a place as remote as the Shire, they know still know about Dwarves, Elves, Dragons etc., it's just not something that figures in their daily life. Given that another book they cite is the first part of Fellowship of the Ring (i.e., the part that takes place in and around the Shire) I don't think I'm too far off base with that assessment.
Honestly, I think a lot of OSR people get ahold of the wrong end of the stick about "weirdness" in games. The problem is that even if the PCs are all illiterate peasants, the players are still genre-savvy veteran fantasy enthusiasts. Elves, animal-headed humans and even fungus-people are going to be old hat to them, whether they're available as PCs or not. A sense of weirdness is only going to come from things that are outside the general milieu of fantasy fiction, which from what I've seen (the full books haven't come out yet), Dolmenwood is aiming to achieve through its unique monsters and fairyland rules. Even then, I think a game which still features a medieval kingdom in a forest, slight variations on the same classes and spells that are in every other OSR game, and a bunch of creatures from European folklore, is going to have an uphill battle to wow players with its weirdness.
I guess that's true, but most players can put themselves in the mind of their characters. And it seems odd to me that as a GM i'm going to create a situation where "look, here's a weird situation involving the mysterious Fey," and one of the players is an Elf, from the Fey.
In Fellowship of the Ring, Hobbits are basically just english country farmers. Nothing weird happens in Hobbiton - that's explicit in the text.
Quote from: PencilBoy99 on October 20, 2023, 04:19:42 PM
In Fellowship of the Ring, Hobbits are basically just english country farmers. Nothing weird happens in Hobbiton - that's explicit in the text.
The Hobbits are acutely aware that they live in a magical world. They just don't understand how deep it goes. Dwarves pass through the Shire from time to time, but they don't know anything about Aule, or Moria etc. They know there's something odd about the Old forest, but they don't know what. Farmer Maggot knows Tom Bombadil, but he doesn't know that Tom Bombadil is potentially millions of years old. They even went to war with the Goblins in their own recorded history (the story of Bullroarer took), but they don't seem to know about Sauron.
Come to think of it, I would guess the Old Forest section of Fellowship is probably the reason the Dolmenwood writers cite it as an influence. The idea of an ancient and deeply magical forest on the borders of a settled region that barely understands its nature.
Quote from: PencilBoy99 on October 20, 2023, 04:19:42 PM
I guess that's true, but most players can put themselves in the mind of their characters. And it seems odd to me that as a GM i'm going to create a situation where "look, here's a weird situation involving the mysterious Fey," and one of the players is an Elf, from the Fey.
I actually agree with you here. The Elf and Grimalkin race options are a curious and possibly ill-advised addition. The Breggles and Mosslings aren't fairies at all, and with the Woodgrue, they make a point of saying that they no longer live in Fairy. But the Grimalkins are Fairy natives, and the Elves are specifically stated as the main inhabitants of Fairy. My concern is less about it messing up the tone, than it being an excuse for an annoying player to abuse the game. I can just picture a certain kind of player constantly going "well I'm an elf, so I should know about this, right?" and complaining when all the human NPCs aren't in awe of them. Plus there's this:
Quote from: Dolmenwood Players' Book
Elves of Many Kinds
In the boundless reaches of Fairy and its countless kingdoms, many kinds of elves are found: from the pale elves of the lightless realms, to the dark-skinned, crystal-rimed elves of the cloud palaces and the cold-hearted and frigidly beautiful frost elves who serve the wicked Cold Prince.
I could easily picture the same kind of player explaining to me about how their character is sitting in a random tavern looking like this:
(https://i.postimg.cc/JhTPBtKF/Ranni.jpg)
Like I said, I'm going to be running the game here pretty soon, so we'll see how it goes.
Well, those hands, at least, are absolutely horrifying.