Play Report: Through Ultan's Door #1

I ran Through Ultan's Door #1 using Lamentations of the Flame Princess. The players were new to the system and to the concept of old-school dungeon crawls in general, but they seemed to grok the game immediately and had a lot of fun.

The PCs' first encounter was with the black-lipped Guildless. The players loved the idea of the Guildless communicating by flute music, and went to great lengths to make friends with them. To show good faith they left all their weapons at the door and allowed themselves to be taken prisoner. There were some great moments of tension as the players wondered if they were about to be butchered. They were horrified to find that the Guildless were apparently pickling barrels full of severed children's hands. But the players speculated: "Maybe they were some kind of evil children?" - which turned out not to be too far from the truth.

The Guildless shaman sent the party on a mission to kill the sinuous white swine. The party got into a big fight with a swarm of swine protecting their nest. They could very easily have been killed here, but the swine rolled poorly and the PCs managed to set their nest on fire, grab a bunch of gems and escape.

The module was a breeze to run. I didn't make any changes to it, but I did go through the text with a pencil and underlined the most obvious features of each room to help structure my narration. The room descriptions in the module are quite detailed, even florid, but I found them useful in play. For example, having the shaman offer to reward the PCs with "a pearl encrusted bandolier" was much more evocative than just saying "he'll give you 150gp".

The only thing I struggled with was running combat in a timely fashion. I started off trying to run it Theatre of the Mind style, but quickly realised I was losing track of everyone so I drew a quick map and broke out the minis. The OSR dream of running 4-6 combat scenes over the course of one session still seems unlikely, but it did move a bit quicker than Dungeon World and much quicker than D&D4e or 5e.

One thing that really struck me was how, despite my concerns, the players accepted all the old-school tropes without batting an eye. Nobody had any problem with simple initiative, rolling for stats, only getting four classes to choose from, or potentially dying from a single hit. I think I spend too much time reading the opinions of online people who are extremely picky about RPGs, which makes me forget that my real life friends don't know or care about any of that stuff.