Retrospective: Arden Vul
I’m going to keep this brief. I ran 19 sessions of Arden Vul using ad&d 1e for a group of 3 players.
I came to both like and dislike 1e. I like how all-encompassing it is and how much friction there is to play. I like segments. I think the classes are boring. I’d never want to write an adventure for it but it was fun to play something built for it. I think I like it more than B/X BUT most importantly, I’ll probably never run it again.
I have a tendency to start big RPG projects (most recently, Arden Vul, my cataphract game, and my AAJ entries) make them way too big, and burn out. I haven’t solved this tendency yet.
Arden Vul, at least how I was running it, was an effort black hole. I don’t like running directly from the book. It’s too scattered and there’s too much context that everything depends on. I think the dungeon really shines when you have a sense how rooms connect to each other (especially when you are near the giant fissures that connect multiple levels), and there’s so many god damn faction interaction and random tables for generating npcs. You can tell where I went wrong just by my prep post. If I had the spare energy, maybe it would have been worth it.
I also hated running the social areas inside the dungeon in general. They required too much effort. Too many fucking characters to keep track of. My favorite moments are all the party exploring areas and filling in the map.
And this isn’t fully true either. My favorite moment was them hanging out in a bar and telling a drink paladin that about the horrible halfling gang and me deciding that the paladin would swear an oath right there and lead the party into a battle immediately (I literally had written ‘Don Quixote’ by his character description). That was awesome, and was almost a TPK but they knew what they were getting into. It was a defining moment for the campaign.
Weirdly, as much as this goes against what I said earlier, ad&d 1e is such a specific experience. I might run it again. There’s just something about it. Everything is so much and unnecessary but I appreciate that about it.
Arden Vul is not really the source of my woes. It’s big and unwieldy and I think suited best for a gm who can be trusted to only take what they need from it. If you are someone like me who tends to way overdo prep, don’t run it. It’s a trap. If you can manage your time well and stick to reading just what you need, it’s fine.
It does feel like a pastiche of old d&d modules at times and I think that's to its detriment. At its core, it doesn’t have a ton of unique ideas. The scale is unique, sure, and combined with the author’s writings from the FB page, you can get an extensively detailed world handed to you if you like. But I don’t really like its flavor of fantasy all that much. That said, I don’t like fantasy much in general right now either, so I’m biased.
This also makes it sound like this campaign was all bad, and it wasn't. The effort was too much though and it's colored how I feel about it. I had a ton of fun and I assume my players did too. The flaws of the game were personal -- too much effort, too much brain capacity spent trying to keep the rules and dungeon in my head.
The main lesson I've been learning after taking a break from the big games is that the impulse to introduce a new organizing trick that will make it all right this time is a flawed one. I didn't start the game with spreadsheets, I used almost entirely paper notes. Those are kind of a rad artifact honestly. Paper keeps you honest and limits how expansive my notes can get. Then I switched to spreadsheets and added new kinds of sheets and tried keying the dungeon digitally multiple ways.
I'm editing this at the beach today. When I sit here by the water, watching the leaves move on the tree above me, I realize how little I actually want to spend on game prep. I probably prepped at least twice if not more than the total playtime of the game. Absolutely not worth it. I'd rather sit with my feet in the water.
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