Dolmenwood HIS MAJESTY THE WORM House Rules

I've been a big fan of Dolmenwood for a long time now. I bought almost all of the Wormskins back in the day (losing out on some of the first and the last one). Gavin's house rules for camping, hex crawling, hunting, etc., wheedled their way into my brain and served as inspiration for HIS MAJESTY THE WORM's own focus on the micro-scale. How are you keeping warm and snug in a dungeon? What exactly are you eating? These questions are important for me.

Having drawn my playtest of HIS MAJESTY THE WORM to a close (total 8 years, ~5 years in the same campaign) I wanted to run a different game. Dolmenwood has been on my vision board for a while, so out of the dungeon, into the wilds!

My group is doing their session 0 on Tuesday. Here are the materials I've prepped for them.

(It's entirely possible that these rules are pat nonsense to anybody unfamiliar with HIS MAJESTY THE WORM. I apologize. I hope when the book comes out, maybe these house rules are useful to you.)

Art by Tom Kilian, who also has some pieces in HIS MAJESTY

Character creation

His Majesty the Wyrm Lifepath Character Generation - I had half of this written, then my players said "What if we were a coven of witches?" Most of them haven't read the intro yet, and I was hesitant to align them with a particular faction yet, so I went with an Umbrella Academy-esque/"Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters in Dolmenwood" bit. 

A lot of this is directly inspired by Beyond the Wall, my favorite OSR hack. 

I hate how specific this is. When players uncover other factions and unlock other player choices, I'm going to have to do more work to make this generic and applicable more broadly. But I also think some of these choices are pretty flavorful and fun.

House rules

Dolmenwood HMTW Player's Guide - Since we're moving into the overland play space, I adapted and expanded the optional hexcrawling rules. Then I pulled in a bunch of Dolmenwood specific flavor stuff that I think players will want to know--what food can I buy at this inn? What do the herbs do?

I've been playing HIS MAJESTY THE WORM by the book for 8 years because I wanted to make sure the rules worked as intended, but I hate playing any game by the rules (and don't expect anybody else to stick to the rules when they play the game). This campaign is a chance for me to mix stuff up. Introduced a bunch of new talents here for the setting. Playing fast and loose here, no promises that these will work.