It’s that time of year again, when fans of the Grognard Files Podcast gather in Manchester for a weekend of RPG fun. This was my second attendance at Grogmeet.

Grogmeet is not really a convention, but a meet-up of like-minded folks and fans. Everyone I met there was an absolute diamond. This year my buddy James Knight couldn’t make it, and he was sorely missed.

This year Grogmeet was hosted at a new venue, the Brick House. All the games were thus hosted under one roof, and this made the experience much smoother as there was no necessity in having to race around the city to find multiple locations.

The event was sponsored by Chaosium, who are celebrating their 50th year in business. To celebrate, a load of RPG goodies were given away to the GMs of the event. I managed to win a collection of Pendragon adventures, which was pretty nice having just backed their reprint of the Classic Boxed Set. Cheers Chaosium!

Now, onward, to record the great games I played.

Party like it’s 1975: The Original Tomb of Horrors Tournament Dungeon

I finally got the chance to play through the Tomb of Horrors, the world’s pre-eminent FU dungeon. Not only was it ToH, but it was the original 0e tournament module. Six of us turned up to give the dungeon our best shot. We were handed a pile of little brown book pre-gens, of which I selected a 4/4/4 Elf Fighter/MU/Cleric. Chris Sharp was our Dungeon Master, and as we all sat down to select our characters and equipment, we had a fun chat about the different interpretations of multi-classing from the original game. There were no thieves, I believe. This was as old school as it gets.

I was selected to be the caller, and we set off, ready to do as best we could.

Now, full transparency, I have read the 1e Tomb of Horrors module. There are probably few AD&D fans who haven’t. When I was selected as the caller, I made an agreement with myself to try and not use my insider knowledge where possible, and follow the lead of my other players. I also hoped that the LBB incarnation of the module would be significantly different in its design to the 1e version I had read. As the game proceeded, however, I found that my memory of the dungeon was not particularly great. There were certain elements I remembered well (who can forget that giant green satyr head), but there were many elements I had essentially no knowledge of.

Over the course of four hours we stomped through about 50% of the dungeon. Almost getting trapped in a false entrance. Smashing plaster from walls, we found secret doors. We busted up four-armed gargoyles. We found some nice treasures, but most were lost in the FU tricks and traps. The amulets we gained from the gargoyles were lost when a PC wandered through a portal and was teleported to the start of the dungeon without any items, totally naked. We found a ring of X-ray vision, only to sacrifice it to a ring-shaped hole in a wall, thereby opening a door. I opened up some church pews only to get us all blasted by poison gas. A highlight was being shown the original 1975 illustrations of dungeon elements, which were pretty amateur but charming.

This was a great game and a fantastic kick off to the weekend.

Pulpen Heroes

When I was selecting the games from the sign-up sheet, I made sure to choose at least one game I knew nothing about. That game was Pulpen Heroes. The system was a superhero RPG published in 1984 by Games Workshop called Golden Heroes. This particular scenario was based in an alternative 1920s Britain where the Great War had never happened. It was inspired by the pulp fiction of the period. Characters like Buck Rogers, The Shadow, The Spider, and Doc Savage were our fictional touchstones. I’ve never played a superhero RPG before, but I love this period’s adventure fiction, so this sounded like a great way to try it out. Our GM was Mark Willoughby, and once I sat at the table I quickly became aware that not only were the majority of the players at the table old hands with the system, but one of the game’s designers was with us; a gent named Simon Burley.

We started the game by rolling up our Heroes, starting with our attributes, and then a series of superpowers from a random table. We then had to try and invent an origin story that made sense of all of these powers, and that sounded feasible. I rolled: cosmic rays, stun gun, precision strike, and tough skin. The character I came up with had a criminal background, and was once a grave digger and labourer who witnessed a meteor strike. Attempting to open the meteor with his handy spade, he was blasted by cosmic energies as an alien intelligence possessed his implement. Thereafter, he was able to shoot cosmic rays from his tool, and when wielding it could deflect projectiles and strike with it meticulously. And so he assumed the alter ego: The Spade. Everyone else winced at my name choice, and I chuckled.

The game proceeded and we uncovered a conspiracy to import strange lotus flowers into the Empire from the Orient. There was plenty of combat, the kind that has individual initiative and takes a while to get through. But it was all good fun. There was a lot of back and forth between the players who knew the system well. The combat resolution system seemed to involve the rolling of a d20, adding your character’s combat prowess, then adding the target’s armour class. If the resulting sum was 18 or higher, you hit. The number of actions available were equal to a number of “frames,” which essentially sounded like segments in AD&D. We were superheroes, so essentially always had a greater number of frames than the enemy, and always went first in initiative. Given the genre, this made sense. The conspiracy led us to a secret base below an import warehouse, full of cloaked cultists, dope fiends with super strength, and giant man-eating apes. Nice.

It was a fun game, and the combats were pretty exciting. The GM also brought out the original boxed set including original maps. He also had a great collection of pulp miniatures, which were great. I would play this game again.

Tortured Souls Fanzine 1983 – TOMB OF QADIR

When it came to selecting which game I would run this year, it was never not going to be AD&D (Grogmeet GMs can only run one game). I wanted to select something from the rich history of British AD&D, which definitely had its own flavour. The obvious choices would have been an early adventure from White Dwarf, or perhaps Imagine magazine. Then there were the famous D&D zines of the time, The Beholder or Dragon Lords. Finally, I settled on an adventure location from the semi-pro magazine Tortured Souls. Why? It seems the most metal of all of those mentioned. It also seems to capture best the style and tone of what British AD&D was all about: lethality, asymmetry, a wargamer’s eye view, moral ambiguity, mystery and investigation, and finally some skepticism of high-level play. It was these tastes that would partially fragment British game design away from fantasy adventure gaming and towards systems like Call of Cthulhu and BRP generally, eventually leading to the hybrid system Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. I also own a copy of Tortured Souls no. 1, so I would bring that with me to Grogmeet and let people flip through it. It has amazing art.

I selected the adventure location, The Tomb of Qadir, which is essentially a desert goblin lair on the ground level, and below there is the eponymous tomb: a linear dungeon filled with deadly traps. The document presents the location as-is, a fairly detailed faction and building, and then recommends the DM design a scenario with it. That word “scenario” shows heavily the influence of RuneQuest at the time, which was built on faction-orientated battle scenarios. If anything, Tortured Souls is a great example of the BRP-AD&D play culture fusion going on at the time. Later issues of TS had dual-statted adventures. The magazine has a shockingly low treasure count as well, which points towards a mud-core play culture that stigmatises level advancement (hello Thatcherite Britain).

When I prepared the module, I decided to create some handouts to mitigate the time it would take to describe the location: a multi-level temple complex with plenty of verticality. I also created a hex map of the surrounding area. Since the temple was filled with 75 goblins, the scenario could easily move into wargaming territory.

Below you can see scans of the original layout map and my handouts, which make the area much easier to understand at a glance. Maybe they might be useful for others.

The hooks I gave out were thus: a high bounty had been offered to recover a prisoner held in the lair, and a sage would pay handsomely for any artefacts or antiques from the temple’s tombs, the history of which was shrouded in mystery.

With that, I generated thirteen player characters of varied race and class, each with a different magic item. My reasoning was to give the scenario win conditions (save the prisoner and collect artefacts), and then allow the players to select the characters they felt would offer them the best odds to do so. I didn’t know if they would carry out a frontal assault, an infiltration, or something else like a flanking manoeuvre. I was ready for them to try anything.

These were my players and the characters they selected:

• Andrew played VURGOYD, Elf, MU/THF 3/4, CN
• Max played MOONMERE, Half-Elf, CLC/FTR/MU 3/3/2, LG
• Gav played BERNARD BRECHT, Human, FTR 4, NG
• Paul played WILLOWLEAF, Halfling, FTR/THF 3/4, CN
• Dan played GOLIN, Dwarf, FTR 4, LG
• Toby played TORELL, Half-Elf, CLC/RNG 3/3, LG

Some henchmen were requested also, and so we rolled on the DMG hireling table. They procured three slingers, four archers, and three sergeants.

To start, we rolled which side of the hex they would enter. Then we rolled random weather. The party approached from the SE, and there was a dry wind blowing from the NE.

To start with, Willowleaf and Vurgoyd marched ahead of the pack, using their good surprise odds to their advantage. Surmounting the high terrain in the east, they observed the temple ruin for a while. Eventually, they decided on cautiously approaching the central hill through the long grass to its north.

On their bellies, they crawled up the hillside of the complex and got a good view of the northern face of the structure. Then I placed my handout on the table and described what they saw. Seeing that there was a large collapsed portion, the two thieves again sallied forth to investigate.

The collapsed area showed no mode of ingress, so Willowleaf drank their invisibility potion and climbed up the interior of the structure onto the flat roof. They soon discovered that the stone wall was porous, halving their climbing odds. Still, they made it, and peered through some arrow slits to observe three goblins with crossbows on lookout.

They came back down and let everyone know. Meanwhile, the dwarf Golin marched into an overgrown garden area to the east and began hacking back the weeds. This was spotted by the goblins, and so the bell in the tower began peeling with a dozen rings.

The goblins were alerted.

The mass of hireling slingers and archers began peppering the belfry, and fire was returned.

The party bashed down a door on the north of the structure, dashed inside, and began to barricade themselves inside. Through another door they heard the gnashing of teeth and the howling of wolves. In the ceiling of their current chamber, they saw a trapdoor, which they began attempting to bash open.

Meanwhile, Willowleaf had climbed back up onto the first level, thrown their backpack loose, and squeezed through an arrow slit. Inside, they saw down through a balcony into the temple’s interior. There were at least two dozen goblins handing out spears and led by a burly bugbear.

Now this was rapidly devolving into a sort of skirmish wargame scenario. The goblins exited through the main doors and began to sweep around the temple, rushing onto the archers on the hill. The party had opened the shutters of their room and were throwing axes, javelins, and flaming oil at them as they passed. Vurgoyd had taken a position from the upper level beyond the trapdoor, but as they moved around from window to window with their sling, they came upon a giant spider hidden amongst some rubble. They were bitten, and the poison did its nasty work. Torell rushed to their aid to cast neutralise poison, and Bernard dashed to their defence with their dancing longsword.

The temple then became surrounded by a mass of goblins, who returned sling fire. A large ranged scrum was developing whilst goblins desperately tried to bash down the doors into the party’s chamber.

Willowleaf, being inside the temple proper and invisible, saw a giant secret door open behind an altar, with another twenty goblins sallying forth, led by a half-orc and a shaman. As they passed, she went beyond the secret door, downward, and using their infra-vision, and plenty of exploration, they came upon a prison room where a poor lad was being tortured. She backstabbed the jailer, killing him, and rescued the prisoner, though discovering him reduced to a babbling idiot bent on revenge against any goblin within sight.

This was all occurring as the battle outside raged on. The archers on the hill were all wiped out. The exchange now became a concentration of missile fire through the temple windows. The party barricaded inside, the goblins outside. The shaman fired magic missiles into some party members, who were now running low on their missiles. But a decisive round came when the shaman began casting, and so too did Moonmere. With spells announced, we diced initiative and it was a simultaneous round. The shaman’s spell was web, Moonmere’s was command. Command was the quicker of the two, being one segment.

“Say the command word now!” I demanded, as the players were all shouting their recommendations to Max.

“Betray!” Max said. And I smiled—a genius move.

I diced the shaman’s save in front of everyone. An 8. A fail.

“The shaman’s spell completes, and he points his hands at the feet of the half-orc beside him. A giant mass of tangled web envelops the group. They are all caught in a web!”

The players roared. The last of the party’s oil supplies were lit and thrown down. A great mass of goblins died in the burning web. The shaman also. But the half-orc chieftain lived. The remaining mass of goblins and wolves failed their morale and retreated back to the desert hills to regroup. The half-orc leader arose and dusted off the blackened silk strands, then, hefted high a huge black maul in challenge.

Golin dashed forth through the window to meet him. The two clashed and began hacking at each other until finally, Torell came to the dwarf’s aid, and cleaved the chieftain in twain.

The prisoner then emerged, hanging onto Willowleaf’s shoulder as the party collected the measly silver coins of treasure. They thence marched off into the desert, victorious.

A great game and no casualties, though if the web had gone into the party’s room, that might have been another story. One player described it as “Meat and Potatoes AD&D,” which I took as a compliment since it was what I was trying to dish out. Several of my players had attended my game at the last Grogmeet, so it was great to play with them again. One player had never played 1e before, but seemed pretty enthusiastic about the system after it was all over, which is a win in my eyes.

Call of Cthulhu with Paul Fricker

After my game I grabbed a bit of lunch and excitedly sat down to play some Mythos Investigation with one of my favourite CoC designers. The sign-up said that this game was to be called ‘The Inn’ Crowd,’ but as Paul Fricker turned up, he mentioned he’d be running something else. I didn’t catch the title, but I believe it’s something in the works for an upcoming book.

Four players pulled up to TNT some fish men or die trying (most likely we would die).

We were handed a stack of pre-gens to pick from. All were professionally involved with Miskatonic University in some manner. I picked a librarian from the Orne Library who also happened to be a paranormal investigator with an unshakable belief in fairies. The others were a groundsman, a divinity student, and a science professor.

It had come to all of our attention that our good friend, one of the professors, had left a queer note with one of his colleagues. The professor wished to have all of his classes covered for the foreseeable future, as he would not be attending the university again. He had given the note to his colleague, and then been seen driving off towards the Arkham woods. We all knew that the prof’s wife had recently died, and so we immediately jumped to investigate, worried he might come to some harm. In his offices, we discovered a book of old fairy lore. The pages lay open to a rhyme, which pointed towards some sort of pact with a fairy queen involving marking runes on three trees.

My character, already a believer in gnomes and fairies (and probably some sort of Machenian), rushed to collect some implements of cold iron. The other characters were more convinced the professor was experiencing some sort of mental breakdown after the death of his wife.

We poured through his papers, and then dashed off to the woods, where he’d last been seen heading.

The first clue of strangeness came when we came upon a woodland path with a strange medieval gargoyle atop an old post. Our handyman PC, a frequent walker in these parts, knew it hadn’t been there only a week ago. Hmm.

We moved on, and soon came upon the body of the colleagues who had alerted us to the professor’s plight. It seemed he had gone on ahead to locate him. The poor fellow was ripped asunder, his entrails gathered on the branches of a tree and spread wide. This oddly seemed reminiscent of the image in the fairy book, which had long red ribbons held aloft by fairies.

Investigating around the body, we found another gargoyle statue, only this one was headless. The interior of the statue was filled with gore. Sanity checks were failed. Characters screamed.

Moving on, we found the glade with the professor, who was a gibbering wreck and yammering on about a wish and the red lady. Soon enough we encountered her, moving betwixt the trees. She came upon us and told us to walk into the light and make a wish. Around us, dozens of these small gargoyle-like creatures appeared.

Paul is very good at increasing tension, and he has a habit of creeping around the table and whispering things your character sees in your ear. A great technique I will steal for my next CoC game.

Eventually our divinity student decided to take the red lady up on her offer. He walked between the trees and made the wish to become king over all fairy folk. Well, within a few moments he started to split open, his flesh spewing a litany of black tubular limbs. Bro just turned into a Dark Young. I ran up to the red lady and thrust my cold iron pitchfork into her chest, but she merely laughed and disbursed into a cloud of black dust.

The Dark Young divinity student charged hungrily from the glade after us, and we were then using the chase mechanics to escape.

We reached the car, and I tried to punch a hole in the professor’s gas tank and push the car towards the charging beast. A bunch of good rolls and this plan was enacted. The car went rolling down the path, a trail of gasoline behind it. The beast was nearly upon us, and as we all hopped into the flatbed truck, a single strength roll to turn the crank laid between us and safety. The roll succeeded, and we drove away and threw a lighter onto the gasoline. An explosion sent the woods afire, yet the beast marched on. Luckily, a good drive auto roll had us escape to live another day. Survivors of the Black Goat of the Woods and down only one true believer.

Great game.

Jewels of the Becursed Cloudmaze

Come Saturday evening it was time for more AD&D. Six players arrived to have a crack at our DM, Andrew Walter’s, latest 1e dungeon. I had arranged before the convention to bring along my personal PC to have a crack at it. Ser Norbor once again marched out towards adventure after being one hiatus from Goldigger Bill’s Greyhawk campaign.

We were told that if we gathered enough treasure to level up our PC, then we could consider our delve a win. A great way to encourage players!

We were shown a side view illustration of a giant mountain. There were several exposed entrances into the mountainside, all at minimum three hundred feet above the ground level. Above that, there was a great wall of light emerging from the mountaintop. Above this, there was a huge plume of cloud, and descending down from the clouds was a mass of roots that grew into the mountainside. We were potentially looking at the base of a cloud castle. Our soul rumour was that those who flew higher than the mountaintop were known to be attacked by invisible assailants.

I was designated mapper, and Chris Sharp became our caller. We were given access to several fly potions and also a carpet of flying that could hold four. We also had several porters and men-at-arms in our employ.

So we set off. The party went up first using the carpet. We formed a beachhead formation on the lowest cliff ledge, then defended the area as our teams were airlifted up. During this time we had our first encounter.

Four slick-looking giant weasels emerged from the tunnel and attacked our rank of hirelings. Their coats glimmered with the promise of wealth. I charged in along with the other fighter of the party, a dwarf. Norbor’s blade sang, and beheaded one of the weasels. Yes, he has a vorpal sword! This marked the start of the mega-weasel massacre.

After slaying the weasels we gave their corpses over to our porters and told them to ship them down for skinning. Then we entered the mountain tunnels.

The main tunnels were twenty feet wide, which always makes me nervous about flanking manoeuvres. We passed a portcullis on our left, which seemed undefended but sealed.

We rounded a corner and moved west, coming upon a large infestation of giant rats. Ser Norbor charged into the fray, attacking five times and cleaving the rodents left and right with the mighty king blade. The curs fled.

Then we carried onwards and discovered the passage was recently bricked up. There was a smaller passage to the north. Whilst investigating the bricked-up area, we were surprised by two ogre guards. The battle raged a few rounds, and I was bitterly disappointed I did not lop off an arm or leg. One ogre fell, and the other made to flee, but we cut it down. Beyond there was a chamber with shells spread over the floor—an alarm system. Our thief went forth and found a dead-end chamber with some pits. Inside were prisoners.

We marched down there, and after talking with the prisoners we pulled them out. There was a royal dwarf and some courtiers. There was also a hulking Amazonian warrioress, to whom Norbor gave his maul and paid one of the men-at-arms a fine gem for his armour, which was gifted to her. Thus she joined our party and told us there were a great deal of ogres on this level.

We broke for a tactical discussion. We didn’t want to muck about with ogres—too dangerous, not enough incentive for treasure. Instead we wanted to find a path up to the next level. We set off.

Soon we found a secret door in a marble chamber. This seemed to lead to another secret door. Listening at that gave us a clue that the ogre lair was just behind the door. We avoided it and moved south.

We found a room filled with strange plants growing from the ceiling with large flower heads. Chris’ PC had a potion of plant control, so with a quick quaff we were through the tangle. Then we saw ahead a lair of giant weasels. We surprised them, and they were all asleep. We had earned a great deal of treasure from those previous pelts, so this looked promising. Andrew, who played our cleric, cast silence on their nest. We walked up, and each of us got to roll on the assassination table. Naturally I missed my roll, but the others succeeded. After a round or two we managed to slay the remaining few and dragged our pelts west.

We found a ledge hanging off the mountain. This one had ropes dangling off. Looking over the edge, we saw human corpses dried to jerky. We cut the ropes to rid monsters of their food but became dismayed when we saw a sack of gold loosened and tumble down the mountain. We left our pelts on the ledge, then marched back inside. We were surprised, however, that our men-at-arms in the rear were being dragged into a trap door in the floor. There, ghouls were lashing out. Our cleric destroyed them with naught but his piety and his holy symbol.

Next we found a seemingly empty room. But we soon found a secret door, and beyond there were three chests, each set into the floor. We were getting flashbacks from the Tomb of Horrors. These were also nasty traps. One gave a plume of hallucinatory gas. The next had a fire trap, which killed our thief. The middle chest had a lever to turn off the traps; naturally, we opened that one last. We did find a load of gold inside these chests, though. We bagged this up and marched back to the ledge. We quaffed a fly potion, gathered our fly carpet, and were off.

In total we gathered over 80,000 gp worth of treasure, the majority being very fine weasel pelts. That was enough for old Norbor to level up. Victory!

This was a great game, and I wanted to explore more. I would encourage Andrew to release his dungeon in the future!

Summary

I had a blast. Not only was there great gaming, but excellent conversation and copious drinking. On Sunday, I also got to play a game of The Fantasy Trip: Melee for the first time, which was awesome. Whether it was drunkenly chewing off Paul Fricker’s ear about how I would run the ultimate CoC sandbox game, or defending the use of chainmail in an AD&D campaign, I enjoyed every conversation.

There were even more Classic D&D games offered than last Grogmeet, and maybe the appetite for it is increasing. That would be good, because there is even more Classic D&D coming to the UK this summer in the form of a brand-new convention … GrellCon, July 4th, 2026! Tickets release soon.