DolmenStein Campaign Report Fall ‘26

Where have I been? Deep in the gaming mines. Making my friends actually run sessions. Making my players use email for orders. Making a bot so we don’t have to use email for orders.

The last session report left you with a Braunstein resulting in a huge, intricate battle, with the lives of many Campaign Characters hinging on its outcome. But that was about five months and 13 turns ago.

Since then

Much has happened! A Crusade was called against the Nag-Lord and his army. Cobton and the nearby tower were fought over back and forth. Lord Malbleat and a coalition of various other major and minor noble houses killed the horrid Hag of Hag’s Addle. The Duchess was kidnapped, leaving many suspecting the Duke. A wish was used in an adventure session to hand the Nag-Lord’s tower and base over to the Drune (Druid faction). The Abbey of St Clewyd, rebuilt real-world years ago after players cleared it and after months of construction, was taken by the Nag-Lord and his army, ruining it once again. And so much more!

I return to you now coming off another Braunstein resulting in a huge, intricate battle, with the lives of many Campaign Characters hinging on its outcome. Here is a little bit about that, and about the situation it brought about.

The Convergence

A just plot against the Duke

The schemes of a few faction players and mounting tension in the campaign called for a Braunstein centered around Lady Misthraine’s Tower of Frost in hex 1007. There, the frail and demented Duke of Brackenwold, his daughter Lady Zoemina, and his army await support from his subjects. He waits alongside Lady Misthraine and an army of 400 frost elves, sent to her by her true liege, the elfin Cold Prince. The Church Orders of St Sedge and St Signis were to arrive a day apart.

The scheme mentioned above involved the various factions and characters on the side of Law and civilization considering ousting the Duke before he could do anything rash. It seems they may be too late.

The Duke’s scheme was to ally with the Frost Elves, send his daughter Lady Zoemina off to marry the Cold Prince, and use some time-warp magic to send their offspring back in time to rule Dolmenwood as a magic lord in the current day… I guess… this is what I was told by the player.

The Elves’ scheme should be obvious. Trick these stupid humans into giving you a shot at taking over all of Dolmenwood and ushering in a second reign of the Cold Prince over these woods.

Set-Up

The scene was set. I took a look at the scenario above and picked it apart to see which characters should be driven by players for this game. There are three main factions here, each with a few Campaign Characters. Faction leaders aside, Lady Zoemina is an obvious choice; Misthraine’s four charmed servants could be interesting; then there’s the Duke’s head guard and the commanders of the human and elfin armies. In broad strokes, I assigned some goals/desires to these characters.

The Duke wants this elfin alliance and to secure it with a marriage. Any one of his subjects would want to prevent it and get help for, or oust, the Duke. Lady Zoemina does not want to get married off to an Elf King. Misthraine wants elf-kind to take over. Her servants are charmed but otherwise would want to kill her. The Church hates the elves, and the elves hate the Church.

Players picked roles, and I gave them a few sentences on what they wanted out of this and a page to reference for their stats.

Before the game, I set up the JoshuaGaxian Space in the server and made voice channels for each floor in the tower and for both army camps. I don’t have a screen shot but you can imagine.

With only about 30 minutes of contemplation that day and some Discord organization right before the game, we were ready to go by 10 p.m.

Everyone had what they needed, and my part was largely done from there on out.

The Game

You can’t be in all of these voice chats at once, so I decided to be in none of them. I stayed in one chat labeled JOIN IF YOU NEED ME until I was needed, returning after things were resolved. I had seen BDubs do something similar in session Braunsteins in Umbros. This is also pretty much how Wesely’s Braunstein works. He sits in his chair, and you approach him if you need him. One thing I would have done differently would be joining a chat if I saw all the players were in it instead of waiting for them to call on me.

While the players played I drew a map up in MS Paint. Between that, resolving a few things and walking away to tend to some non-game stuff I had the map actually uploaded around 11pm. An hour after the start. So it wasn’t really necessary for the game at all. Fun to make though.

I have pretty much no idea what happened between the players. You can never really know what happened between all of the players, though. That’s like knowing everything that happened between everyone at a party. Some were charmed. A spy from the Drune was present.

By around 11:45, the players had coalesced in one chat. I joined and found out, much to my chagrin, that all factions involved had decided to team up and march on the Nag-Lord. Eighteen or so miles to the north, he occupied St Clewyd’s Abbey and held an unknown number of prisoners beneath it. This was the Duke player’s plan the whole time.

These games are SO unpredictable that sometimes things ACTUALLY GO ACCORDING TO A SOMEONE’S PLAN!

Could this have gone differently had I been mothering over everyone in chat, telling them, “No, the Church wouldn’t do that”? Probably. Would that be more fun? Absolutely not.

From there, they marched. Runners were sent to inform a few other factions. I ran the numbers and determined that all parties present for this Braunstein, the Drune, and House Harrowmoor with all other armies stationed in her lands could make it there on the same day, the latter arriving on a forced march.

After establishing this, the very last bit of the game was an RP interaction between the Duke and the Nag-Lord. The Nag-Lord polymorphed into a man for the negotiations, which creeped everyone out a little. The Duke positioned himself out before his army and offered the Nag-Lord some portion of his lands to rule forever. The Nag-Lord agreed, and the Duke called for all of his men to shoot.

Total Non-Stop

This is the scenario we are left with: the Abbey surrounded, the Nag-Lord and his minions within, the Duke in a suicidal position.

The Drune want to capture the Nag-Lord. The Church would never allow that and, along with the Nobles, wants to destroy him. Elves, Church, and Nobles are in an uneasy alliance. The Nag-Lord and his army are holed up in the Abbey. The Elves, Drune, and Church all hate each other. The Duke’s men think he has gone insane and doomed the realm. Some individual Campaign Characters sent here to lead men have desires leaning toward one faction or another, some away from the faction they’re supposed to be representing.

Four or five different sides, up to ten if you wanted to split each Church Order and Noble House. Hundreds of men, dozens of heroes and monsters. An absolute monster of a wargame scenario if it were to be resolved that way immediately.

It’s like a Three-Body Problem: with all of these actors, I cannot begin to predict what would happen here. I cannot remove one element or resolve conflict between any two factions without considering the actions of a thrid. The solution

Braunstein

With all of these factions in one place in what is ostensibly a multi-sided siege situation, I will run ANOTHER Braunstein this week to try to make some sense of the situation. I will set something up like last time and see if it devolves into a complete mess of a wargame or not. I expect a few faces totally new to this sort of game. Let’s see how it goes.