"Where are the damn books?" - A Stygian Library session report

I have just ran a one-shot of the Stygian Library using Old-School Essentials and figured I would share a session report and some thoughts.

Old-School Essentials is essentially a reedition of old school Dungeons & Dragons, keeping the 80s rules but providing clearer formatting and explanations.
The Stygian Library is a module by Emmy Allen where player characters explore an infinite library that is generated as they progress. This means that even the GM doesn't know the layout in advance and you roll dice for each new room explored. More on that later.

A session report

The setup:
A large party entered the infinite Stygian Library looking for a specific book about Prophecies and Gambling (I left the topic of the book up to my players...). Unfortunately, due to the many dangers of the Library and its constantly shifting nature, the party was split and decimated. As the session begins, we follow a group of 4 adventurers:
- Tamara (Thief 3), an agent of the Queen tasked with sabotaging the machinery of the Library
- Lou Xi (Magic User 2), a teenage prodigy curious about the true mission of the Librarians
- Crazy Wilbur (Fighter 3), a lunatic with a tin foil hat worried that floating brains will steal his soul
- Fivefingers (Thief 4), a ranger with an adorable pet dog who's looking for portals to other planes
(I created a bunch of pregenerated characters and had my players draw one randomly. I gave each character a personal goal to accomplish in the Library: doing so would earn them an instant level-up! The other characters were meant to be replacements, but all PCs survived!)

The library-crawl:
The session opens with our heroes crawling out of a hatch into a boiler room, separated from the rest of their fellow adventurers. The room is thick with fog and lit with candles. The only noticeable piece of furniture is a black furnace linked to innummerable brass tubes, supplying the rest of the mysterious machines found throughout the library with steam. Tamara briefly considers sabotaging the furnace, but the party prefers avoiding the ire of the librarians for now and moves on.

The second room they find includes a single pedestal with a massive book: the one and only Catalogue of Contents! Investigating the book,, Lou Xi manages to make good progress towards finding the book they seek. After a few minutes, a mysterious fog starts seeping into the room from one of the doors and takes human form! The party is immediately on edge, but the apparition turns out to be the ghost of a most gentlemanly historian who makes small talk and explains the roles of the various orders of Librarians to the party before moving on.

Following the instructions of the Catalogue of Contents, the party continues forward and walks through a room with five large vats of ink and walls lined with clockwork machinery. The fifth vat immediately catches the party's attention: the label reads "Infernal Ink - caution is advised, contracts written with this ink cannot be broken". Wilbur and Fivefingers immediately proceed to fill vials with infernal ink, but doing so releases an ink elemental from the vat! The elemental is territorial and unfriendly and immediately starts growling. Since Wilbur and Fivefingers do not move away, the creature swipes at Fivefingers, nearly killing him in one blow. A few weapon attacks quickly reveal that the elemental is immune to regular weapons, but Wilbur manages to set it on fire with a homemade molotov cocktail. Fire is actually the elemental's weakness! The creature starts boiling and growling in pain, and the adventurers take advantage of the distraction to run away.

The party then proceeds through a corridor lined with stuffed animals. For some reason, gravity does not seem to apply here, and the stuffed animals are drifting, tethered to the floor with chains. The party soon starts drifting as well, to the confusion of Fivefinger's dog.
This is at this point that Fivefinger makes the session's first memorable remark: "Where are all the books? We must've gotten lost! I don't know what this is, but this ain't a library!". Up to this point, none of the room details I had rolled had anything to do with books...

Continuing forward, the party explores yet another machine room and found the body of one of their fellow adventurers there, slain by Ogre Spiders. As the spiders notice the party and start crawling out of holes in the walls, the party retreats behind a portcullis and shoots arrows at the spiders until they leave. Expecting the spiders to come back, the party runs through the room without investigating it further.

The next room includes a huge vault door as well as a few bookshelves (at this point I started adding bookshelves to all rooms because, seriously, it's a library not a submarine). Fivefingers notices a book about planar portals and stuffs it in his backpack. As the Thieves attempt to pick the vault door, six Black Librarians suddenly enter the room to investigate the cause of all this ruckus! They clearly don't trust the party and ask them to leave. But Fivefingers offers them a deal: "If I give you something you truly want, will you let us pass safely?" The Librarians begrudgingly agree and a contract is signed in infernal ink. Fivefingers then gifts the Librarians the book he just stole from them. The Librarians are furious, but the infernal contract cannot be broken: they have to let the party pass safely.

The party proceeds into a room filled with steam, no doubt coming from the boiler room they initially saw. The walls are lined with bookshelves, the books protected from the humidity with wax. Lou Xi looks at the titles and finds a tome about secret assassin techniques. The two Thieves insist to read it ASAP, and Tamara closes the valve venting steam into the room so they can read the book without it being damaged by the steam. The two Thieves then proceed to read the book together, over each other's shoulder. It's really cute, until the pressure buildup in the pipes causes the closed valve to rupture, filling the room with clouds of hot steam. The party runs away before they get cooked.

The adventurers reach the top of a colossal spiral staircase, lined with religious books and descending into some sort of temple. As they rest, they notice a strange presence in the temple below: the floating brains that Wilbur so despises! Descending carefully into the temple, the party gets noticed by the floating brains, but the brains do not appear to be hostile. Using telekinesis to write on a sheet of paper, they explain that the Librarians enslaved their kind, and they want to get revenge! They will help the adventurers find the book they seek if the adventurers help them defeat the librarians. The adventurers accept and decide to investigate the rest of the temple. This is at this point, close to the end of our session; that things went from random weirdness to batshit insanity.

A shifting wall in the temple reveals a hidden alcove with some kind of giant bird nest filled with books and maps. At the same time, one of the temple's doors slams open and a group of phantoms fighting an animated book flies into the room! Lou Xi decides to help the phantoms get rid of the angry book, just as another door opens. Enters a huge, vaguely humanoid bird with elongated limbs, cackling maniacally and running towards the nest, attempting to snatch random items from the adventurers on the way (that's a Bandersnatch and they're even weirder than they sound).
The room now contains 2 floating brains, 6 phantoms, 1 angry book, 1 Bandersnatch and 4 confused adventurers. Also it's time for us to wrap up! After a quick fight against the insane Bandersnatch, I decide to have a final roll to see if the party will find their book (based on the progress they made so far compared to the progress they needed). The dice roll in the party's favor, and we have a short montage describing the end of their adventure and their triumphal return with the book on Gambling and Prophecy!

Running the Stygian Library

Boy. This has been a particularly difficult session to run! It was a lot of fun, don't get me wrong, but generating the library as you go, not knowing what lies ahead beforehand, involves a lot of quick thinking for the GM. There where moments when I had to tell my players "Okay... wait... give me a moment... I just have to roll on this table and... wait no, that's page 34...". I don't mean to criticize the module too much, because its content is great. It was just unwieldy to generate everything on the fly.

Generating the rooms is not a big issue though. The main problem is trying to make sense of it all and communicate that information to the players. One of my players told me in the end "It was hard to know if my actions made a difference because everything seemed so random all the time". I think OSR modules should specifically allow clever actions to make a difference, so that's not a good point... Mind you, some player actions really did make a great deal of difference, in particular setting the Ink Elemental on fire and tricking the Librarians into signing that contract. But this was apparently not what that player remembered the most. He remembered the randomness. As a GM, I like to reward my players with useful information about what lies ahead if they ask the right questions. Here, it was impossible for me to do so: I didn't know what they would encounter next! I felt like I was missing some kind of way for the players to influence the type of room they could encounter.
Another tricky point was dealing with Progress. The Library has a mechanic for players who are looking for specific information. They have a progress counter that increases through in-game events, and when it reaches a certain target number they find what they were looking for. Some rooms and events directly tell you to increase Progress, but this is far from enough to find rare books. Besides finding the catalogue of contents, my players did not really find anything that could increase their progress. My impression now is that the main source of Progress in the library is asking its denizens and making alliances in exchange for information. To be fair, that's what my players were about to do in the end, with the floating brains. But it was difficult for me to know how to balance Progress, especially in a one-shot. I ended up giving it away quite easily when they were just rifling through books in the end. My end of session houserule to see if they would eventually find the book was as follows: Roll 1d20. If you roll higher than (Target Number - Current Progress), narrate the success of the mission.

Finally, a few thoughts about Old School Essentials / B/X DnD. It was my first time running old school DnD. OSE deserves its reputation for crystal-clear formatting, and rules didn't get in the way.  My players were confused because you roll under your attribute but above your saving throws, and I gotta agree with them. Old school saving throws are something I never understood. Another thing I found a bit strange is the tiered progression of B/X: for instance, the Fighter gets nothing besides HP at levels 2 and 3, and suddenly at level 4 you gain +2 to all attack rolls and you improve all your saving throws... Last source of confusion: the Library had its own rules for events, so I got a bit confused about whether I was also supposed to roll for random encounters the DnD way.
But my main remark is this: B/X DnD didn't get in the way, but it didn't do much to make the game fun either. I was a bit underwhelmed. None of the things that made the game fun came from B/X. The best moments are when players find a creative, lateral way around a problem, and B/X doesn't give you many tools for that. Some spells are interesting but that's pretty much it, the rest depends on the module. I want to give my players more fun tools like that bottle of infernal ink! The more I think about it, the more I think Ben Milton was on to something when designing Knave, a game where all your abilities depend on the items you carry... Knave is very bare bones though: maybe I should hack it or use cyphers from Numenera as interesting items? I'm spitballing here, but essentially I'm eager to run a game where my players are walking creative toolboxes.

If I were to run the Library again, I would:
- Generate at least a few rooms in advance
- Think more in advance about what the players seek and what could earn them Progress
- Use another system, maybe a hack of Knave?