Campaign 26: The Shrike (Quarterly Report I)

The Sinners Campaign I

At the end of last year, NBateman called for the Campaign 2026 challenge. While I didn't announce mine to the void, I am running one. Because I spent January and February traveling, it only began in March. The plan, though, is to run it throughout the year or as long as I can. 

(This post is more for myself, eating my veggies and documenting my campaign.)

Campaign Setup

Last year I bought The Shrike by Leo Hunt on a whim. It's a big point crawl in a lost section of hell written for OSE. The module draws inspiration from Dante's Divina Comedia, Dark Souls, and Gustav Doré paintings; you get it. The module has received a lot of praise and some awards, but I couldn't find reports of people playing it. Running it was in part motivated by wanting to find out how well it holds up at the table.

 

Another idea I had was to run The Shrike as a companion/sequel campaign to a friend's ongoing Cairn 2e sandbox, a setup that comes naturally with the book's premise. 

  

This was the pitch for the sinners campaign: 

 

YOU DIED. BUT THIS IS NOT THE END. YOU WAKE ON GREY SANDS. A VISTA OF BLACK PITTED STONE AND SCABBED ORANGE IRON LIES IN FRONT OF YOU. EMBEDDED IN YOUR FLESH IS A BLACK STONE INSCRIBED WITH YOUR SINS. YOU REMEMBER NOTHING BUT YOUR NAME. WILL YOU BE BROKEN BY THE SHRIKE?

 

The Shrike does have some sick art by Jantiff illustrations.

Players would be allowed to play their deceased characters from the unsettled campaign, many of whom had died when I ran Tomb of Horrors as a guest GM in that campaign (dead characters from other campaigns would be allowed too). However, with the module being statted for OSE, I didn't feel like doing the conversion work to an odd-like. In addition, I wanted to tailor the system more to the campaign and its setting. I ended up adapting Grave, a Knave hack by Jason Tocci. This is the rules document I gave to my players.  

 

Grave is one of many souls-like inspired rulesets. I wasn't looking to run a souls-like rpg campaign as my little experience with Elden Ring (I really need to finish that one someday) has made me skeptical when it comes to such attempts.  

Grave has some neat bits of video game logic that I felt were appropriate for the campaign.

 

In Hunt's The Shrike, players can play as deceased sinners. All of them possess a black sin stone that grows from their flesh. If they die, they simply regrow from their obsidian tumor. Generally, sinners do not remember their lives.

 

Grave assumes undead characters (because of Dark Souls, etc.) and uses the Charisma attribute to determine how many times one can die without becoming a husk. 

I also liked that Grave offers the option for characters to regain memories from their past life when they level up but did change it so the players would have to choose between gaining attribute increases, an HP increase, or regaining a memory. The idea that there would be a choice between becoming more powerful and recovering the character's lost personality and history from the previous campaign appealed to me. 

 

As this was to be an open table, but because The Shrike doesn't really work with a return to town setup, I opted for a day-by-day approach and decided that absent characters would just be somewhere behind, shifted into the void, or something else. Hunger and finding food is a big deal in The Shrike (hurray cannibalism!), and this way I could keep this a part of the game.

How it's going

We just finished session 13, and it's going good. 

 

There was a little low around session 8, where player attendance dropped. But a new core of 2-3 players emerged, and they are committed to escaping the shrike. 

None of the regular players played in the unsettled campaign, and their characters were created for the sinners campaign. The plan of making it a sequel or companion campaign did not work out. The fact that unsettled was sunset shortly before my sinners campaign began did not help it. 

This is not something I am disappointed with or upset about; it's just the way things go. 

 

I was a bit surprised that there wasn't more engagement with my looking-for-game posts based on the module's supposed popularity (for example, when I ran Gradient Descent, I got a lot more responses). It might be because of the time slot, my pitch, the choice of rules, or any other factor. Again, that's just how it is when you try to run and play games online.

 

 

A glimpse into a player's notebook after session 1.

What about the module?

We are still running, so these are just preliminary thoughts I may never follow up on... The Dead Letters podcast (alternative link) recently talked about it, and my play experience actually supports a lot of their observations.

 

The book is strong on flavor and vibes; it wears its inspirations on its sleeve. It is also very ambitious. This necessarily leaves a lot of empty space for the GM to deal with. Although the book presents enough locations that are connected to each other through the relationships of their inhabitants, detailed treasure hoards, tables for generating devils, etc. Up to this point it felt like little work to expand on the materials present in the module except when it comes to maps. Aside from the abstract large point crawl map, the module only contains three dungeon maps. Getting maps for more of the locations would have helped a lot in making the location spaces more tangible.

 

Something I am really not happy with is the proofreading. There are multiple mistakes and oversights in the printed hardcover (wrong bolding, page number placeholders not replaced). Considering this was a $70k Kickstarter, it shouldn't be a thing.

 

 

this is where the party is currently at.

 

 

That's about it for now.