• 10 Dec, 2025 *

Every Sunday for the last [number] months over on the Gay OSR Discord server Bateman has been running a weekly D&D campaign called Devil’s World Heroes, which I had the honor and pleasure of playing in. As of last Sunday we concluded the campaign, at least for the time being.

As such I want to take this opportunity to write up some scattered thoughts, observations and things I liked about this campaign in this post. And there is a lot I liked about this campaign, because this is hands down one of (if not the) best campaigns I’ve played in! These will not be in any particular order, but mostly just be broad categories I want to talk about.

The Big Boys

Playing with other hobbyists

This is probably the biggest one for me. I’ve talked about before in my Hobby Best Practices series about how playing with other hobbyists that are just as skilled (or even more skilled) than you can be fulfilling in ways that playing with people who you are only now in the process of introducing into the hobby can’t. And oh man is DWH a prime example for that. The simple fact is that every single OSR campaign I’ve run, I’ve run it for newbies. People who are either unfamiliar with this style of play/dungeon games, or are fairly new to RPGs in general.

And that’s fine, and I’ve enjoyed all of those campaigns a lot, but oh man playing in a campaign with a skilled referee and skilled players, who all know what they’re doing, how to do it and how to organize and go through things? That is something else. That is the kind of gaming experience I have longed for ever since I discovered the OSR.

Unfortunately, this kind of experience I can only get online, which itself carries issues for me as I struggle with playing in online sessions longer than 2 hours, but on the other hand - when everyone knows what they’re doing, 2 hours can be plenty of time to do a lot!

Arcade-style Play

Arcade gaming is what Nathan calls it so that’s what I’m calling it too. Devil’s World Heroes was not the kind of game where we spent time exploring the deep interiority of our characters, bonding with various NPCs and enmeshing ourselves in the deep and rich setting. We regularly had 7+ players in a session, there was no time for that shit. So instead we just gamed. Go to a place, kill anyone who looks at us funny, take their shit, keep pushing. End of session - tally up your experience points and move on. This type of gaming is often derided by certain circles of the RPG hobby as being somehow lesser or stupid, a sort of crude imitation of the divine hobby of smelling your own farts that those guys practice. But the truth is, this shit is fun as hell. With good players and a good referee (and oh god I can not emphasize how important it is to enjoy playing with the people you are playing with) the game simply hums.

Memories are made, stories are created from simply interacting with a fairly broad strokes setting and engaging in the act of playing the game. This is not in some ways the One True Way to play, far from it, and even Nathan himself has said he wants something different for his next campaign, but as a simple and enjoyable form of gaming? This can’t be beat. Try it some time!

Nathan is Very Good at running combats, you guys

Related to the previous point, we had a lot of fights in this game. Like a lot. Most sessions involved combat, and that’s okay because Nathan is an absolute master at running D&D combat. He has an amazing blog post detailing his philosophy in organizing and running combat, which you should go read if you haven’t!

The skill of staging and running fights, paired with B/X or OD&D style simple and direct combat ("Boring" one might call it, wink wink) has produced incredibly tense and enjoyable moments in the game. Virtually every single "boss" fights that we’ve had has been just peak gaming. You can read about some of those also on Nathan’s blog, btw!

Honestly, I’ve tried my best to emulate what I have seen and learned from him as a referee, and while I definitely think I am not as good at it as he is, this relates back to the first point above - this is what you get when you play with other hobbyists that are as deep into the hobby as you are. You start to learn skills that you never could develop by only engaging in onboarding newcomers!

Character Advancement through play

So, scroll back up and look at that image. Those are The Big Boys, our wonderfully and stupidly named party. It’s a goddamn clown show, right?

That’s what happens when you actually play out this meme:

I will use my own character as an example, because of course I will. I played a few characters in the game, but the longest running one is Meatface, a guy who started as just a Thief with fairly high STR and abysmal CHA. His very first moment in the game was losing an arm wrestling contest during our downtime, getting his arm broken and passing out from the pain of that.

By the end of DWH Meatface had become a level 5 Fighter who merged with a sentient beefsteak, became the size of an ogre, gained supernatural strength, had a custom-made full plate armor that allowed him to regenerate HP and by the end would regularly one-shot 2-3 HD enemies with a single hit of his greataxe (which he wielded in a single hand due to how massive he is). In one case due to low HP rolls he managed to one-shot a 5HD mercenary captain, that was very funny.

Meatface is a prime example of what happens when a character actually survives long enough in classic D&D. The combination of weird magic shit, mutations, magical items and gear being to far outweigh the fairly banal elements of simply leveling up (and extra Hit Die, some extra attack bonus, maybe something else if you’re lucky).

There are tons of other examples too - Gestalt, the weird hybrid creature between a hyper-intelligent hairless ape and an abused, chain-smoking former slave. Hard Candy, a living candy person who was kind of pressganged into the party and simply stayed around since then. Expert II, a hireling with an embarrassing name (his name was Fart) who ended up becoming a holy warrior, a combination fighter/cleric with several special abilities and magical items.

None of this shit requires a book full of lists of feats, sub-classes or other shit like that. It simply needs a referee and players who are willing to go with where the game is going and let it build up into the insanity that it resulted in. While I can understand some people needing the guidance of lists of things, for me the appeal of classic D&D is exactly the lack of them, and the "build" that simply happens as you play the game, and not something you pre-planned from the start, or (god fucking forbid) just copied off some CharOp forum.

The Greatsword of Rhus

The last thing of note I want to talk about is actually related to the previous point, but this one isn’t about a character. It’s about an item.

Right before we started Devil’s World Heroes Nathan ran Wolves Upon the Coast with basically the same player group as DWH. I wrote about it some on this blog.. One of my characters in that game was a guy named Thorgo, who, as the game went on, borrowed a greatsword from the armory of Rhus, one of the small islands in the Wolves setting.

Long story short, he got killed by some druids and the game ended anyway. So we start playing Devil’s World Heroes, I roll my character and get the most bland Fighter type you could possibly imagine. Well Thorgo was that too, initially, and I could not be bothered to come up with a different name, so I just named that guy Thorgo too.

Nathan, being the kind of referee who is willing to go along with shit like this, then simply declared that this was, in fact, the same Thorgo as the Wolves game. As such he still had the Greatsword of Rhus and also a nice 1000 xp bonus.

Thorgo also die (again) in that very first session. But a greatsword is a useful weapon, so the party kept it and thus the story of the Greatsword of Rhus being cursed was born, mostly as a joke. It became a meme after Gronk, another character, died while fighting the Demon Tree in the first dungeon of the game, and the sword passed on to his follow up character, Gronkbot.

Throughout all of this, you have to keep in mind - the Greatsword of Rhus was just a normal ass weapon. It had "story weight" to it, but mechanically it was nothing. Eventually we ended up using some dragon bones to enhance it, and it became a proper magic weapon. Its last and final wielder was Masketta, a new character introduced halfway into the campaign as a new player joined. You can see her wielding it in the group portrait above (she’s the one with the mask!). She is the one who finally broke the (non-existent) curse over the sword (the curse being that you’re a fighter in a D&D game so the wielders kept dying in combat), by using it to slay Darkelf, the final boss we fought to end the game.

The Greatsword of Rhus now rests on Thorgo’s grave, back with the stranger who brought it into this land, having served its purpose at last, and becoming a honestly pretty neat +1 magical sword! It even had a special ability, the Gronk Bonk, which was a one-off guaranteed hit with max damage, if I remember correctly.

This is the kind of backstory for an item that you probably could make up, but it is so much more enticing that it simply happened through play, and through my constantly willing it into existence.

Conclusion

Devil’s World Heroes was, indeed, one of the best games I’ve been in. I look forward to Nathan’s retrospective post on it as the referee, and once he posts that I will link it here. It helped me keep gaming through a stressful and chaotic period of my life, and helped spur me on to try and run more casual and fun games myself.

Also, you can read Mr.Mann’s wonderful epilogue for his character of The Dhunprick Slipper, probably my all around favorite character in our entire party, and one who made it from session 1 all the way to the end of session 30.

As the (apparent) motto of the Big Boys goes: Respect The Legacy and Keep Things Straight!

[#Devil’s World Heroes](https://gorgonbones.bearblog.dev/blog/?q=Devil’s World Heroes) #ODnD #OSR #Retrospective