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Last night the DM of my regular Saturday Night D&D game wasn't available, so I ran another session of The Hole in the Oak for the other players in that group, minus two who weren't available, as I have been doing occasionally when the regular DM isn't available, or between games which that DM is running. Apparently, the last time I ran this game was in 2022… The regular DM is very consistent at running, generally only not available when on vacation, and runs fairly lengthy campaigns.
I ran it online using the Old School Essentials ruleset in Fantasy Grounds. It to us a while to remember how things work in the OSE ruleset, and to introduce a new player to it. Luckily I had a pregenerated character that the new player was willing to claim, so we didn't have to work through generating a character.
The group has been down into this dungeon several times, but hasn't explored everything yet, and it had been such a long time they had forgotten what they had explored. They ended up exploring a area where they had meet some unusual sheep people and left after a confusing philosophical discussion. This time the area was inhabited by some skeletons.
They found the first three skeletons while exploring three cloak nooks off the side of the main passage. Two died in the ensuing melee, while one fled when turned. They followed that one through two rooms until they came to a kitchen with three more skeletons cooking steaks, with the skeleton they were chasing fleeing beyond the kitchen. They killed a couple of the skeletons, but the one cooking steaks fed one steak to the dead skeleton and it came back to undeath and sprang up to fight.
They were able to disrupt the rising of the next skeleton to be fed a steak by attacking it. Three more skeletons came out, and turned out to be those of the sheeple they had met before. The ram skeleton who was the leader was indignant that they'd come back, and more fighting and steak feeding happened, until finally the remaining three skeletons were turned and forced back into the bedroom of the sheople, there to be destroyed.
The kitchen had butchered humanoids in the cabinets and the bedroom had a great pile of weapons and armor, apparently from adventurers these skeletons has killed and eaten. There was money in a chest, and some weapons that were much better made than normal, so they took that and headed back to the village and inn nearby, both named Dooley's Rest.
The players were entertained by playing Old School D&D again (this group mostly plays D&D 5E these days), and appropriately horrified by the skeletons coming back to undeath after being feed steaks that turned out to be from intelligent humanoids. I was pleased at how well the OSE ruleset works in Fantasy Grounds, and by the fact that some newer features, like death splatters, worked in the OSE ruleset this time around.
All in all everybody had fun.
I enjoy playing D&D 5E, but I also enjoy playing and running old school D&D. In the long run I found D&D 3.5E to be a burden to prepare for and annoying to run, but fun to play. I'm not sure why, running it was annoying since it is less complicated than GURPS, which I enjoy running. Anyway, nowadays if I'm going to run D&D I prefer some form of old school D&D.
41 minutes ago