What the first Eldritch OS alpha table taught us

On the evening of 1 September, a GM ran a two-hour session in Eldritch OS with six players at the table. It was the first alpha playtest session run by someone other than us. This is what we saw.

What happened

The GM is an experienced Owlbear Rodeo user. They had sat in on one session with us before, for an hour or two, and we expected that to matter. It did not. They had the tool worked out in under an hour, and they used our account rather than one of their own.

Then they ran a full table on it: six players, two NPCs the GM played themselves, and a large number of monsters, all while running the game.

Doing that in a tool you have used once before is a real feat.

What worked

Scene generation. That is the headline, and it was not the one we expected.

The GM brought their own maps. Eldritch OS does not generate maps; that is not built.

What they did was set those maps up, mark out scenes on them, and have the assistant write each scene up: the read-aloud text, the encounter in it, and what is hidden where.

The result was lively, and it skipped the part of prep the GM would otherwise have done by hand: writing all the copy, and wiring every encounter to the room it belongs in.

We built that to save prep time. Watching someone else lean on it, in a session they were running for real, is the first evidence that it does.

What got in the way

A handful of minor bugs. None of them stopped the session. We are not listing them here, because we are fixing them now, and the next post will say what they were and what changed.

What we are doing about it

Fixing the bugs. That is the whole list. Nothing about the roadmap changed because of this session. The page listing what ships and what does not still holds.

What we are asking the next tables to try

• Bring your own maps and try the scene tools on them. We want to know whether it holds up on maps that are not ours.
• Play more than one session. Two hours tells us how a first night goes. It does not tell us what wears thin by the fourth.
• Tell us where it slowed you down, not only where it broke. The bugs we can find ourselves. The friction we mostly cannot.

If you run a table online and want to try this, join the alpha playtest.