If you want to run an old-school dungeon crawl game, how do you adjust your Old-School Essentials/Dungeon Crawl Classics/Shadowdark campaign for the 2020s reality of 3-hour sessions once a week, if you’re lucky? How do you keep the pressure on while speeding things up?

Quick-build Your Campaign Setting

I’ve posted multiple campaign setting helpers. Use one of these to get started quickly. And I’ve posted many articles on world-building.

Remember that people know a lot about their home town and a good bit about the nearest town and nearest city. Everything beyond that is just bits of trivia: who is king and queen, the names of some other cities, the broad history of the realm….

Each mapped city should have a specialty. That gives the heroes reason to travel in order to buy rare items or meet certain people.

• “If you want a fine instrument, bard, Darnival is the place for you.”
• “If it’s knowledge of the Veldric people that you seek, then Malagor the Wise is whom you must meet and Antaril where you must go.”

Other major points of interest should also be mapped, such as known ruins and spooky swamps. But you should also have a list of minor points of interest that you can drop in when the heroes are traveling or when you need to stall until the next session to do some prep.

Central Tension

It’s good to have some sort of central tension to help drive some of the heroes’ mid- to high-level adventuring. It can start out as the background to the campaign world–some ancient evil threatening to rise again, some awful tyrant ruling from far away, or some ongoing problem making life difficult, like a disease or ongoing war.

Avoid a lore dump to describe the central tension. Just give the players a paragraph or so and dole out the rest in pieces thru sages, officials, and nobles. If it’s central to the setting, it should come up pretty frequently as the reason certain things can’t happen or have to happen. But the heroes are sheltered from it in their starting town or city and learn about it as they adventure and encounter minions of the evil overlord or victims of the war.

Five Ten-room Dungeons

Make your own dungeons and keep them small. The principle of the five-room dungeon is a good start. Ten to 15 rooms are easy to create if half of them more-or-less empty, as they should be.

Find pictures of cool dungeons, ruins, and wilderness locations, and set your adventures there. That way, you gain inspiration for an interesting location and have a cool image to show players to help them picture it. (Don’t go the other way and try to find a picture that illustrates your cool idea; you’ll waste your time and end up frustrated.)

Place these around the heroes’ starting town and the nearest town and nearest city at different distances and in different terrain, so the players’ choices matter.

Simple Experience & Lifestyle

If you can’t play regularly or long sessions, you’ll probably need to award more experience points, or the heroes will level up too slowly to hold player interest. If you want them to level up after each adventure, award 96% of the XP they need for a successful adventure. If you want it to be every two adventures, make that 48%. They need to spend gold to get XP (1 gp : 1 XP) to cover the rest.

Require the heroes spend to gold on their lifestyle (household, clothing, carousing, training, arcane tomes, donations to their faith, etc.) after each adventure (not monthly), perhaps 100 gp per level. Higher lifestyle spending should get them better reactions from NPCs: fancy clothes and such are impressive, particularly to nobles.

Make a list of physical things they can buy with their loot, like houses and ships, but this should include divine goodwill (via donations to the temple) that can tell them where a cool magic item they want can be found. The donation should be 50 to 100% of the market value of the magic item, depending on how much work the heroes have to do to claim the item.

That eliminates “magic shops” and even magic item brokers and combines spending down loot with the fun of choosing magic items and the adventure of finding and seizing magic items.

They should also be able to buy (donate to their faith to get) restoration and resurrection spells to fix those pesky lost limbs or lives.

A Home Base

Give the PCs a city that is safe to return to. They should get rumors as well as supplies, so the players can pick what you prep for next time. But keep social encounters brief. Does the fighter want to buy nicer armor? There’s an armorer who will have it ready after the next adventure–no role-playing something so mundane. Does the party need to identify a strange object? There’s a sage up the street. Have NPCs ready.

A Supporting Cast of Characters

Give them about five NPCs to keep track of:

• The merchant who buys monster parts and gems and gives them rumors/tasks.
• The bailiff who runs the town and pays bounties on monsters and outlaws.
• The innkeeper or taverner of the place they frequent, who gives them rumors.
• The sage who helps them with mysteries and sometimes rumors/tasks.
• The lord or bishop who possesses the local lands and sometimes pays bounties.

They should learn about the lord or bishop in their early adventures (2-3), then meet his or her steward for certain bounties and tasks (4-5), then meet the lord or bishop (level 6)–assuming they impress the NPCs in question with their successes and lifestyle. If you play to name level (level 9), they gain the attention of barons and earls–assuming they’re keeping up an appropriate lifestyle.

In these encounters, avoid introductions, long room descriptions, and such. Set the scene with one sentence about the location and NPC.

• “It takes a couple of tries, but you get in to see the city bailiff. He’s a heavy-set guy who greets you and offers a comfortable chair by the fire. He says he thinks he can help you.”
• “You go to the sage. She’s an aged beauty with needlework on her lap and an arcane tome on a bookstand next to her. She’s heard of the thing you seek.”

Base your important NPCs on pictures you can find, so you have something to show the players.

Pacing

Keep adventures largely episodic, so the players don’t forget key story points between sessions. Focus on puzzles and traps at least as much as combat. They go faster and are more interesting.

If the heroes search a room, they find anything hidden there; only roll for secret doors and dwarf/gnome stonework abilities. They should even detect most traps just by searching (altho rogues still have to roll to disarm them). Don’t get bogged down in the details of where something is hidden or how a trap or secret door works; but do tell where they find something and how the trap or secret door works.

Tell the players outright that the meaningless thing they’re obsessing over has no importance; it’s just color. Tell them outright that the important thing they ignored seems strange and mysterious on second glance. Penalize them by saying time passes in the game, but don’t let them waste time outside the game.

Ticking Clock

Use a ticking clock to light a fire under the heroes. The light of the Malkmar Orb wanes a little each day. The human sacrifice will take place as soon as the captive virgin is put aboard ship, and it puts out to sea. In a traditional narrative, this often doesn’t get introduced until the middle of the story, so you don’t have to spring it on them right at the beginning; it can be the twist they discover later.

Make the Monsters & NPCs React

Use reaction rolls to give PCs a chance to negotiate with intelligent monsters, especially ones too powerful for them to fight. After all, the heroes might have something the hill giant wants more than the chest of valuable spices he’s sitting on.

And use morale to end combat that is dragging out. No matter how hungry you are, you wouldn’t fight a sandwich to the death, right? Monsters should maneuver to keep an exit open and flee when things are clearly not going their way.

Between Adventures

The heroes can spend weeks in a city before getting enough information to set off on a new goal. But don’t role-play that. Just say, “After a few weeks, you’ve gotten to know some locals and learned the following from various sources….”

Keep track of this time on a game calendar and throw some season-appropriate weather their way. The passing of the seasons is incredibly powerful in storytelling. The bad guys’ plans are probably put on hold all winter anyway.

Moving Headquarters

The party might move to a bigger city after a few adventures to follow up on dungeons and ruins in that area (and rumors of magic items). This will give them new NPCs to get to know, including a shady merchant or head of a mercenary company or church official. This person will head a faction that causes trouble for the heroes or acts as rivals so that their adventures aren’t just an endless series of dungeons but start to involve a little rivalry and personal drama. They may already have encountered some of the faction’s low-level members.

At mid-level, warriors should start getting knighted, wizards should be named a master of sorcery, and clerics should be promoted to monsignor or high priest. Later, they should get rewarded with a stronghold or court position and raised to lord/lady, arch-sorcerer/sorceress, or bishop. All these things keep the characters in motion.

Heck, roll dice and tell them they’re falling in love. Yes, the dice decide that; it’s fate! (Let the player create the NPC paramour.) The limits on your sessions don’t have to limit your heroes’ experiences.

Maximize Agency

Maximize player agency and game autonomy by making it clear what effect the heroes’ choices will have on the future of the campaign. What will change if the heroes buy a ship versus buying a house in the city? Or a stronghold in the country?

Make sure they players’ choices and heroes’ actions change the realm in small ways and, eventually, major ways. Did they save the earl? He leads an army against the Demon Prince who has rule this realm for 100 years.

Extra Player Characters

Old-school systems tend to be a bit more lethal, and modern tables tend to be a little short on regular players, so encourage the players to have henchmen. If they’re half-share NPCs, the GM runs them, but they take (reasonable) orders from the PCs. If they are full-share adventurers, the players can hand them off to each other.

Perhaps the cleric and the big, dumb fighter who act as rear guard are floaters controlled by more experienced players or whichever players have less to do at the time. This allows players to experience different classes despite not playing frequently and to participate when their main PC’s skills are not relevant or when their main PC gets killed or kidnapped.

Travel Light

Keep travel light; random wilderness combat not connected to the purpose of adventure is a waste of time. But don’t completely skip travel. Describe some ordinary travelers who give the heroes a warning or rumors. Have them just see a dragon or pride of griffons in the sky or wizard on a flying carpet. Have them spy a pair of trolls far off thru the trees and give them a wide berth. Avoid making these cool or intriguing enough that they distract the players and draw them off track.

Purposeful Travel

Drive the campaign by Giving them rumors about treasure and conflict–and a map–so they can decide for themselves where to go next. But they can usually just travel a road most of the way, and roads are pretty safe.

Point Crawls

Don’t do hex crawls but rather point crawls. Hex crawls are random and don’t get the heroes exploring your world, just the immediate landscape. Point crawls get the heroes traveling far and wide, encountering different cultures as well as different perils. It doesn’t matter that how many orc bands are in the Great Forest; the heroes only hear about one that has a treasure worth taking.

Following a road from city to city is a pointcrawl. So is crossing the moors with an eye on reaching a certain landmark before bending your way toward another landmark. You can give the heroes two or three routes to get to their destination, and each route features its own encounters or points of interest.

If they travel the Gray Wastes to get to the Flooded Ruins, they’ll go thru Oakboro city and cross Bard’s Bridge. If they go thru the West Wilderness, they’ll see the Standing Stones of Meer, go thru Irondale city, and pass by the Fallen Tower. Either way, they’ll have three meaningful events before getting to the Flooded Ruins.

In some cases, you might come up with ideas for a low-level, mid-level, and high-level adventure for certain points, so the heroes have a reason to travel back to the Gray Wastes to deal with that basilisk they fled from when they were fighting trolls they once fled from back when they were fighting kobolds.

High-level Play

Introduce elements of domain-level play as you go. As mentioned above, fighters can be knighted for their service; wizards can be elevated to “master” status. Doing so should give them prestige and respect in the social encounters and access to higher-status NPCs.

Give them status as rewards: manorial lands, a ruined stronghold to rebuild, an abbey to manage, a forest to protect, a position at a college of magic. Later, when they gain high level and high status, they’ve already tasted domain play and should be ready for councils of war and such. If they never get there or don’t want that, fine, but at least you made it possible.

If you’re concerned about how to challenge high-level characters, look at how it’s done in comic books:

• Force the heroes to make hard choices about whom or what to save.
• Force them to deal with two different moderate challenges at the same time.
• Use mind control to make them fight each other or unable to fight the villain.
• Make them seek out information about the villains and their plans in order to even have the opportunity to stop them.
• Give them rivals who are good guys, so they can’t just kill them. They must bargain and persuade to come to an agreement.
• Create a war between two equally good factions over land or resources.

Come to a Point

Remember that faction the players took a disliking to earlier? Develop them into a villain or have them turn out to serve a major villain. When that villain is defeated, the campaign is over. Use that knowledge to raise the stakes and build the campaign to a crescendo with dramatic events.

Try to get a sense of what the players want the finale to look like. Drop hints about this or that catastrophe that could happen and see which shakes them up the most. Look for ways to make the heroes’ own actions have repercussions….

Then, start burning down towns, toppling towers, and sinking ships. Get an army on the move. Kidnap the princess. Murder the adolescent princes. Open the hellgate. Send the ancient dragon on a rampage. Run the gamut. You have an unlimited budget.

If you can tie it to the players’ actions earlier–failing to completely wipe out the cultists or pursue the foreign prince across the sea–all the better. Doing so will make it feel like the defeat at the end of act 2 of a movie. Then their response to it will be a satisfying act 3.