Three Wolves Stories

Be warned, this post is a very long, entirely unedited stream of consciousness.

Most of my RPG activity recently has consisted of running Wolves Upon the Coast for different groups of friends. It’s a gigantic hexcrawl (over 500 keyed hexes across a 51x32 area!) covering a region analogous to Northern Europe in the viking period. It comes with a dedicated ruleset, its own magic system, and a whole catalog of monsters and treasures. The entire game can be run “out of the box” as it were, with no outside material.

The system itself is unremarkable, aside from Boasts, wherein characters grow stronger by bragging about attempting a feat of heroism and/or stupidity. Essentially, it’s “hold my beer” as a game mechanic. Brilliant.

I’ve been playing an in-person open table game with friends where I live for about a year now, and I recently started a game over Discord with friends who live outside my city. I want to compare and contrast the in-person versus online format, talk about all the cool shit my players did, and explain what I’ve learned.

If you just want the stories, skip to parts 2, 3, and 4.

Part 1: Organizing the Game

For the in-person game, I knew I wanted to run an open table when I started. It was flexible for a bunch of twenty-somethings with full-time jobs and other commitments, and many of my players had never played an RPG before. I didn’t want them to feel like they had to commit to more than one night of fun.

I initially put all my players in a group chat and texted them whenever I wanted to host game night. This worked… okay, at first, but there were two problems. Texting has a low bar to entry — nobody needs to download a new app — and it’s a very direct way to contact someone. But it’s quite easy to ignore messages in a large group chat, especially with people you may not know very well. I found that as my player count went up, the less likely people were to respond to invites. Apple only lets you add people to an existing group chat if they have an iPhone. Since many of my friends had other phones, I was forced to create a new group chat each time I wanted to add someone.

I eventually switched to Discord for those who use it, and individual texts for everyone else. I wouldn’t say it’s the best way to organize an open table, but it’s worked well enough for me.

For my online game, all my players were already on Discord (it’s the same group that played Gradient Descent), so it was just a matter of finding a time that works for everyone. Logistics hasn’t been a problem.

For the in-person game, I printed out a few copies of the rules, a quickstart equipment list, a rules summary sheet, and a few character sheets. Again, I was thinking of accessibility for new players. Wolves isn’t exactly huge, but I wanted to make doubly sure that new players had as little a barrier to entry as possible. I kept these materials and everyone’s character sheets in a binder with a few dividers.

For names, I sent them a link to this wonderful random generator. Not everyone elected to use it though, resulting in a hilarious contrast between names like “Arvak of the Rushing Waters” and “Mosseater Brineman the Cartographer,” and names like “Ha,” “Meow,” “Flink,” and “Weed.”

I took notes on Google Docs. At the top I had a list of every character and NPC follower, followed by a list of boasts, a reputation table I made up, and a table of rumors. Further down, I split my notes in two — one list recounting what happened session-by-session, and another acting as a calendar with the weather, random encounters, and what happened each day. Here’s an example:

I recommend keeping a calendar for your hexcrawl. It lets you roll weather and encounters ahead of time, and gives you another way of keeping track of the players’ actions. However, for my online game, I opted to track the days in a separate spreadsheet instead of in the same place as my session notes. I think it helps keep my notes less cluttered.

Furthermore, I decided to take advantage of the online format and delve into some of the harder-to-track aspects of a hexcrawl, like inventory management and food upkeep. I didn’t do this for my in-person game, limited as it was by pencils and erasers and sheets of paper. But for my online crew, with the power of spreadsheet functions, I wanted to emphasize the game’s more survival elements. Thus was born the reference doc:

This is a player-facing document I sent my players so they can easily track equipment, NPC follower stats, and boasts all in one place. Is this necessary to run Wolves? Absolutely not. Did I have fun making it? Yes I did.

Alright, that’s enough GM prep talk. What about the actual game?

Part 2: My Players Burned a Church to the Ground

Spoilers for locations in Ruislip.

For the in-person group, I started them off in Ruislip — analogous to Ireland, and the most common starting place for new Wolves players. They spent the first arc of the campaign rampaging down the west coast, making a name for themselves by slaying every monster they could find. They had killed a troll, a manticore, and a mummy, learned a powerful fear spell after saving the life of a wandering druid, and made friends with the court druid in the town of Dorbog. They were riding high.

It was at this time that one PC, Flink, decided that he wanted to become a druid himself. One of Ruislip’s major conflicts is between the native druids and Christian invaders, though at start it’s more of a cold war. As thanks for the party’s efforts in ridding Dorbog of its many problems, the court druid gave Flink the location of the druids’ secret grove. Flink left the crew to journey there, and learn how he might be inducted.

The crew spent more time adventuring — duelling with a band of orcs, gaining an audience with Ruislip’s big Christian king, and picking up adventure hooks — before Flink returned to the party with a mission: assassinate the abbot of a nearby Christian monastery.

This was controversial among the other players, but they had already made connections with several powerful druids, and didn’t trust the Christian king. After some extensive intra-party negotiations, Flink recruited two other players (Meow and Leef) to infiltrate the monastery under cover of darkness. Flink boasted that he would not only murder the abbot, but that he would burn the monastery to the ground. Leef boasted that he would steal the bones of a saint interred there.

Things went awry almost immediately. During evening service (when most monks were busy in the chapel), they scaled the wall and snuck into the chapterhouse. They snuffed out all the candles and waited patiently for the abbot to return. When he arrived with three other monks, what was supposed to be a quiet assassination turned into a brawl.

The PCs pulled off the murder, but the screaming alerted the monks outside. Meow and Leef barred the only door in or out, and started piling furniture up to keep the door shut. For his part, Flink chipped away at the stone slit window, creating a hole wide enough to slip through. Meanwhile, the monks set fire to the pile of furniture blocking the door, filling the room with smoke that would have killed the PCs if they hadn’t escaped.

The PCs regrouped in the woods and decided to return to the monastery. Flink cast his fear spell, forcing every single monk to make a difficult save or else flee in terror. Almost all of them failed. This gave the players a critical opening. They set fire to the library and chapel, but weren’t able to take the saint’s bones after being attacked by the few monks who made their save. A second fight ensued. When the last monk turned to flee, he took an arrow to the head.

At this point, we came to a horrible realization. The monks inside the chapterhouse didn’t survive, and the monks from the second fight didn’t survive, which means nobody was left alive who actually saw the player characters. They got away with it.

Part 3: Suplexing a Medusa

More spoilers for locations in Ruislip and magic items in Wolves.

The monastery’s destruction broke the fragile peace in Ruislip. Blaming the ruler of Dorbog, the Christian king mobilized for war. Outnumbered and outmatched, Dorbog’s court druid recruited the players to seek allies for the impending fight. They had heard rumors of powerful magic in the abandoned city of Donenashoe. They set off there, the first of several stops to muster support for the druidic cause.

At this point, I should note a major mistake I made earlier. There’s a little detail with some of the monsters called supernatural HP. “Rather than rolling HP, simply track attacks causing 6+ damage. Once this number equals or exceeds listed HD, the creature perishes.” I had completely missed this when running the players’ earlier fights with the manticore and mummy. I told them about my mistake, and said I’d correct it going forward.

This was about to become a big problem.

Donenashoe is a strange place. It’s a lost city inhabited only by goblins and an enormous Shadow of the Colossus monster. The crew ducked between buildings, occasionally diving into basements to avoid being crushed underfoot. As they got closer to city center, they noticed the streets were filled with perfectly-carved marble statues. At the center was a vast field of statues — goblins and humans, faced contorted in agony — surrounding a temple I described as looking like the Hagia Sophia.

They realized what was going on here. They entered the temple and made their way to a burial chamber when they heard the sounds of slithering in the south gallery. They closed their eyes and readied their weapons to face the medusa. Since they couldn’t see, they faced disadvantage on every attack roll. When it became obvious they wouldn’t win the fight, they jumped out a window and ran for it.

Not content to run away, the players planned for round 2. They traded some candlesticks for a mirror with some nearby goblins, planning to use it to aim their arrows and sling-shots. To create some distance, they decided to fight out in the open, in the statue garden. It was another draw — the medusa shouted for the attention of the juggernaut, causing it to trample the statue garden. The players had no choice but to turn and run.

After a few sessions’ absence, Flink and Meow were back in the party, ready to face the medusa themselves. They boasted that they’d defeat the medusa and seize the treasure in her temple, and drew up a plan for round 3.

An NPC companion, Hrafnkel, would ride on horseback to the southeast, catching the juggernaut’s attention and drawing it away from the city. Meow had a magic eye of scrying, allowing her to view the battlefield without being petrified. She would act as the commander, shouting orders and directions to her blindfolded comrades. They had brought along two more NPC followers — including a druid who knew a fireball spell. They’d have him launch the opening salvo, before forming a line of melee fighters to protect the ranged attackers.

It was a clever plan, well thought-out. The players were as prepared as they’d ever be, and I thought they had a decent chance of success. But it just didn’t work.

Flink was the first to fall. He had several fulfilled boasts under his belt, and thus had plenty of HP for the medusa to chew through. So instead of attacking, she went straight for the blindfold — ripping it off his face before grabbing his eyelids and forcing them open. It took two combat rounds to do this, and Flink had to fail three straight saves before being petrified. But the players just couldn’t stop her.

After that, Meow pinned the medusa to the ground with a suplex move, giving the others a chance to beat her while she was down. This was good thinking, since melee attacks automatically hit prone enemies. But the medusa had supernatural HP — she shrugged off any attack dealing less than 6 points of damage. Despite outnumbering her, they weren’t fast enough to save Meow.

With Meow petrified, the medusa quickly dispatched the NPC retainers. The only one left was Arvak, a relatively new player who wasn’t there for the monastery debacle. Blindfolded and deprived of any sense of direction, he made a desperate last stand.

He won. The medusa was slain. A victory, but a pyrrhic one.

In some sense, the campaign is back to square one. Everyone who drove the alliance with the druids is gone. Meow and Flink have both been petrified, and Leef left the party as part of a hostage trade with a gang of pirates (and the players just let their hostage die, so…). The war is still going to happen, but none of the remaining PCs have any real allegiance to either side.

I have no idea what they’ll do next. They might stay in Ruislip to participate in the war or follow some other adventure leads, or they might travel to nearby Albann and start over there. Either way, they have a hell of a lot of treasure to haul, and they’ll need to figure that out before anything else.

Part 3a: Wait, Flink’s Not Dead?

Oh right.

So a while back, another player picked up a magic ring. Its description is pretty simple. “The wearer may not die. They are still injured. If the ring is removed, they perish instantly.” After that character took off the ring and died, Flink kept it.

Figuring that it’d be an easy ticket to immortality, Flink put the ring on his toe, cut it off, and buried it in the dirt in the middle of nowhere. Since the ring is still on a part of his body, and the wearer can explicitly still be injured, I figured this counted as “wearing” the ring.

So when Flink was petrified by the medusa, he didn’t die — his entire body turned to stone except for his eyes. He can’t move, he can’t hear or smell or feel anything, but he can see. The only way he can communicate is by moving his eyes around. He is trapped in the form of a stone statue for the rest of eternity unless someone finds that ring and takes it off his toe.

Part 4: Grand Theft Wagon

Spoilers for locations in Pyorra.

For the online game, I decided to start the players somewhere I figured the in-person players were unlikely to go: the continental mainland of Pyorra. They spent their first day exploring the northern coast of the Kingdom of West Frankia. That night, they bumbled into bandits who called themselves the Bonebreaker Gang. I rolled well on the reaction table, so instead of attacking, they invited the players back to their camp, where they were betting on prize fights. One player boasted that they’d take down the biggest, baddest person there, and then proved it by winning a fistfight with a brick wall of a man named Orm Redbeard.

Having made new friends, the players decided to follow them east toward the border fortress of Brekanbast. The Bonebreakers had a plan — a detachment from the royal court would arrive soon to collect taxes for the king, and they planned on intercepting the wagon on its return journey. From there, they planned on driving the wagon south into the enchanted forest of Brecheliant, beyond the reach of the king.

Combined, the players’ crew and the Bonebreaker Gang numbered 37. But the king’s tax wagon was accompanied by 40 horsemen, more than the Bonebreakers expected. Outnumbered and outgunned, the players had to strategize if they wanted to pull off such a daring heist.

I drew a very crude map to explain the geography: Castle Brekanbast lies at a strategic point between the mountains and the sea. From there, the road runs downhill, through a wooded valley, and back uphill to the southwest. The players were camped in another patch of wood some ways away from the road.

The plan they came up with was convoluted, but they had all night to set it up. First, they sent a group to the wooded valley, and weakened some of the trees by the road. They planned on knocking them over to spread chaos through the ranks. Next, they chopped down some of the trees by their camp, and carried the logs up the southwestern hills. Rolling those logs downhill would block the road and further scare the horses.

The brunt of the players’ forces would then charge downhill, taking advantage of the initial shock to drive the horsemen away. The remainder lied in wait in the valley, hoping to surround the horsemen and cause additional panic and confusion.

To run a 37v40 fight, I did a few things:

• All troops on each side had identical stats, so the players could roll 1d20 for each attack and look for the same number.
• Taking a note from supernatural HP, I ruled that instead of tracking HP, we would roll 1d6 for each hit and a result of 5 or 6 would be a kill.
• We used a dice roller bot to roll all those d20s and d6s.
• To simplify the tactical decision-making, we split each side into “units” of 10 soldiers each (as the fight went on, these eventually condensed into two groups). We rolled morale checks by unit.

The ambush was pulled off perfectly. The horsemen were scattered by the initial attack, and only a small group was able to rally and push up the hill against the advance. Those in the woods were pinned from both sides by the ambushers. The horsemen finally routed after the player Squinty slew their leader in single combat.

Still, this was only the beginning of the players’ trouble. The defeated horsemen retreated to Castle Brekanbast, where they alerted the garrison. A smaller group headed west to alert nearby Castle Salhabast. Soon, the king himself would send a detachment to hunt down his missing tax wagon.

The players made a run for the forest edge, where they ditched the wagon and chose to carry their ill-gotten loot by hand. The players’ crew and Bonebreakers disappeared into the forest, parting ways after splitting the treasure between them (after some extensive negotiations about each party’s share). Their partnership had paid off, but what next? The players are trapped between a vengeful king to the north and the strange magics of the forest to the south. What supernatural terrors will they find there? Can they make it back to their boat alive?

Part 5: What did I Learn?

I want to tweak the open table format a little bit. I find that new players often get caught up in plans made by others, without any context as to why this is happening. This was especially prevalent in the standoff with the medusa, where the players who led the party there weren’t present for the first two fights. It’s also been the case that some players might make a plan, miss a few sessions, come back, and realize the crew is in an entirely different location.

Wolves isn’t a complex game, but it’s very fiddly. You roll xd6 under for a stat check, 1d20 over for a save, 1d10 under for initiative, and 1d20 over for an attack. It’s fine after some memorization, but it can be confusing, especially for new RPG players.

There are a lot of little details like that. For the most part, I actually quite like them — there are procedures for handling wind speed (which in turn affects ship speed), ship boarding and ramming, getting lost, finding magical charms, testing morale, and more. I often find I forget some of these in the moment (supernatural HP being the most egregious), but I think they’re to the game’s benefit.

There’s definitely a quality in quantity with the sheer size of the hex map. You could run this game for years without running out of new places to explore. You get a very clear sense of the size of the world, divided up into discrete regions with linguistic and geographic barriers. It’s really good stuff.

I love boasting. It’s gotten players into heaps of trouble multiple times, because they can’t dare the shame of shirking their boast. It’s easily the best part about the system of Wolves.

Luke Gearing, the creator of Wolves, recently posted an alternative to boasts called Obligations. Here, the players get stronger by forming lasting ties with other characters and factions.

An Obligation is an ongoing commitment to another group or entity. Once sworn, a character gains +1HD and +1 to-hit. A character failing to uphold their obligation loses this advancement. They may not take on further Obligations; this includes when being forced to choose between two mutually exclusive Obligations.

Characters with broken Obligations may seek revenge against whomever caused their Obligation to be broken. Succeeding in this allows them to take on future Obligations.

I love this. It doesn’t fit the vibe of Wolves at all — Gearing notes that it’s “more warrior aristocracy, less mercenary kill-squad.” It’s got me thinking about exactly that sort of hexcrawl, where the players form a discrete faction tied to specific people and places. A little bit more like Crusader Kings, perhaps. Or a cross between Wolves and Cataphracts.

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