As you may or may not be aware, I’m currently running a Lamentations of the Flame Princess campaign called Rose of Westhaven, the aim of the campaign was to get me some more experience at running OSR and also to do a game where old-school dungeon-crawling was a big part of it. Currently we’ve had a few sessions to establish a bit about the world background (you can find out more here in the player handout if you’re interested) and a couple of sessions ago the discovery of a corrupted and partially ruined Elven Temple lead to the characters encountering their first larger dungeon.
I’ve had great fun running the game, my players seem to be enjoying it and I’ve already learnt the following about low-level dungeon-crawling in LOTFP:
- Low-level characters are extremely fragile, if even a basic human antagonist gets a lucky hit in during combat then someone is going down.
- Healing is extremely hard to come by necessitating a lot of resting.
- The importance of the Cleric cannot be overstated, that single cure light wounds spell can allow the party to continue for far longer than they otherwise might.
- Having a 10′ pole to check for traps, along with lanterns and ample supplies of oil is an absolute necessity.
- As a GM tracking how many turns the characters lanterns are going to be burning for (and knocking a turn off about every minute when they’re not in combat rounds) is actually perversely enjoyable.
- Having people track rations and stuff like is far more important in a dungeon environment where the players can’t just pop into town and re-supply.