Stories from The Grimmswald
Wherein I Share Some of the the Stories I Wrote for Only Five People
You will forgive me, I hope, if I give you some fiction.
I recently finished running a campaign for my friends. Which means, for the uninitiated, that in our game of tabletop roleplaying shared storytelling, I created a world and the bones of a story, and led my friends through it. I was the Dungeon Master.
Some details:
We played the game Old School Essentials. OSE is a game that reprints, better lays out, and “restates” the Dungeons and Dragons edition sometimes called B/X DnD. It was the version originally published in 1981, the one revised by a TSR employee named Tom Moldvay. Significantly, B/X DnD was the edition my Dad bought for me. The Pink Box. It was my introduction to the game. It was also a game that I played or ran in some sort of formal way maybe once—for my dad, if I recall correctly. I seem to remember my dad, a guy who did not enjoy and rarely played games, agreeing to sit down and try to play DnD with me.
It wasn’t until a couple of years later that I actually played DnD, and that was 1st edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, which I played with a classmate and some friends from a small, rural town near the small, rural town that I grew up in.
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The campaign I ran for my friends—
Wait, should I explain what, in the context of a tabletop roleplaying, a “campaign” is? I should, right? My mom reads this sometimes.
Hi, mom. “Campaign” is the word roleplaying game players use to describe a long, interconnected series of game sessions where the collective story being told by the players all takes place in—often, but maybe not always—a shared world first created or at least organized by the Dungeon Master. Like this: the Dungeon master has an idea—”Hey, let’s play a fantasy game where you all create characters to interact in a story about, maybe, some sort of hunt for a terrifying monster!”—and then the Dungeon Master creates a world, and places in the world, and people in that world, and the players play there, interacting, searching, learning, bedeviling, etc.
So I ran a campaign for my friends.
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I called the setting The Grimmswald. I found the word “Grimmswald” in one of the Dolmenwood setting Wormskin zines. It is a day of the week—Wednesday, I believe. It is also, apparently, the name of a town in The Witcher. I like the word a lot. The Brothers Grimm told stories. Wald is German for “woods.” My setting, inspired by Dolmenwood’s fairy tale forest, was a Pacific Northwesty, temperate rainforest sort of place—damp, mossy, dark.
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To create the campaign, I began by determining a theme. In this case, “Stories.”
I like stories. I like stories about stories. I wanted to get together with my friends and have us all participate in a story about stories. So I began with the theme, and then I built the setting around it.
Stories as currency.
Libraries as churches.
Eaters of words.
Phrases plucked from the air and combined to make spells.
Histories forgotten.
Background “characters” who, because the narrative does not pay much attention to them, appear hazy and half formed.
People with memories that are jumble, who are unstuck in their stories and float back and forth through their arcs, because the pages of their books have fallen and are scattered across the floor in an out of order mess.
Margin doodles come to life.
Bookworms making a hash of the world by eating through a noun that held together a building.
Stories.
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In order to make a mystery for the world, an urgency to keep the players exploring, we played it as Strangers in a Strange Land. The players were somewhere new, somewhere unfamiliar, and weren’t sure how they got there. And so the game included a hunt for clues in the stories around the setting.
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A conceit in the game was that the most important characters that the players would meet would have, and could be convinced to share, stories with the players. Sharing a story was an element of etiquette to some, a greeting. They would offer a story, and in return, expect a story from the players.
Happily, my players obliged. They would meet a character, get a story, and then respond by, in the early days of the campaign, improvising a story back. Eventually, they started writing a story to have on hand, just in case. No one was put on the spot, though. And everyone was encouraged to offer a story only if they felt ready.
Stories were rewards for quests, too. And each story, deep within its narrative, gave clues to the campaign’s central mystery. (More on that in another post, maybe.)n Also, within the world there existed three Forbidden Stories, three tales that more directly offered information about the world, about the people, and about how the PCs found themselves where they were.
One of my favorites parts of my prep work for the campaign was the writing of small stories to read.
So, here. Have a few of the stories.
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FESTER’S STORY
Fester was the first NPC that the players met—a talking crow who helped introduce them to the campaign world, and would check back in with them from time to time to see how they were doing.
When the world was smaller than it is now, there was a magpie who would fly around it all, seeing what he could see, and seeing if he could find a place to rest.
He found the crow, and the crow showed him his realm. It was dark, and the sky was much closer to the ground there. There were many crows, bustling and cawing. It was loud and confusing, too closed in. The magpie felt uncomfortable in that place, and he thanked the crow for his hospitality but flew on to see what else he could see.
He found the rook, old and crooked. The rook lived at the top of a gnarled, leafless tree, alone. He was quiet, said nothing to the magpie, but pointed his beak at the stand of dead trees around him, clicked his beak a few times in satisfaction, and then stuck it in his wing and went to sleep. The surroundings here were also not to the magpie’s liking, to quiet and reverent were they, so off he went.
He found the jackdaw, who was set up in a nest by the side of a great purple sea, but it was rainy and wet there, and the magpie did not like the salt air and the spray, so he bowed and flew off, searching for his next home.
He found a jay, surrounded by more jays, feasting at a great table, getting so heavy with their food that many of them could no longer fly. Distressed by the excess of it all, the magpie took his leave.
He found a treepie, who was surrounded by nutcrackers. The nutcrackers loved the treepie, though the treepie was indifferent to them. They brought him food, they carried him from place to place, they sang him songs. He remained indifferent. But then sometimes he would sing, and the song, rare and beautiful, enraptured his nutcrackers. It all seemed cruel to the magpie, who flew away without a word.
And he found a raven, alone in an abandoned building filled with shelf after empty shelf. The raven sat in front of a great fireplace, before a roaring fire, throwing pages of ancient books into it. It seemed a terrible waste to the magpie, whose mother had taught him to read when he was very young. So the magpie, offended, left.
Eventually the magpie decided that his place was everywhere. So he took everywhere as his home, and everything as his bounty. He wanted for nothing, and slept well wherever he chose to. And the other birds hated him for it, but they left him alone.
BARON TREE’S STORY
The Barons were a faction of untrustworthy, avaricious merchants (robber barons), led by a giant of a man named Baron Tree.
In the olden times, money grew on trees. But the greediest men in the wood gathered so much of the money, that the trees decided they needed to grow to enormous sizes, take their money up high into the sky where no one could reach it, and in that way protect themselves and their treasure. When the greediest men climbed the trees in order to pluck money from the branches, the trees shook and shook and shook them off, and the greediest men died as they hit the ground
But one day, a young and clever man made a plan. He befriended a magpie through the careful cultivation of social interactions. Magpies are notoriously gregarious, and the young and clever man was notoriously clever. He knew how to capture the attention of a magpie with a short rhyme, to keep its attention with a short tale, and enrapture it with a song. Once done, the man could convince the magpie of anything, including getting it to steal from the tops of the trees, where the most valuable coin grew.
In that way, the young and clever man got rich while others toiled.
UNCLE’S STORY
Uncle was a werewolf in an eternally contentious relationship with an immortal druid named Auntie.
Though betrothed to another, in a fit of passion a young man married the moon.
His parents had arranged his marriage with a young woman exactly right for him—his station, his potential, his physicality. But the young man, though he understood what was his duty, was pulled by the moon, who looked down upon him every night, and sung to him.
One night, he climbed out of his bedroom window and climbed up to the roof of his house to be as close as possible to the moon.
The moon was flattered. He looked down on the young man and offered him a boon—the moon’s favor. As long as the young man kept to the night, and forsook the day, the cold light of the moon would harden his skin, make it invulnerable to piercing and cutting. And his heart would pump stronger and faster.
The young man took the moon’s favor and he used it to act as his champion. He stayed to the evening, the dusk and the early, early dawn, and he fought the avatars of the day, the demons of noon.
The day of his wedding arrived, and the young man, sick with sunlight, arrived. But when asked to commit forever to the young woman, he fell to the floor before the altar, professed his love for the moon, and attempted to escape. His family and the young woman’s family grabbed him, chained him to the altar, stuck the ring upon his finger.
But his heart was bound above.
He did what he could, spent his days hiding inside under the covers of their marriage bed. He suffocated for 12 hours a day, choked and smiled.
But at night, he crawled through the window, tore the ring from his finger, and ran the woods in search of the enemies of the moon.
Every morning, she found him laid out at the front door, his jaws covered in blood.
THE FISHERMAN’S STORY
The old Fisherman lived alone on a beach, where he pined for his lover, Calla Lily, drowned at sea and living at the bottom of an upside light house, a demigod made of driftwood.
A man was lost at sea. His ship had been wrecked, cracked and crushed and tossed by the indifferent tail flick of a leviathan, but the man lashed the ribs of his kills together and used them as a raft.
And so in the sea he floated. The glassy water was still. The sun was high and burned his skin. He had saved a cask of whiskey from his ship, and drank it sparingly to keep hydrated.
He stared down into the blackness below him, and it went on forever. He swore he saw shadows deep within, long black bodies moved so far down that they were barely perceptible, but they were there.
A gull came to visit often. The first time, it brought a crust of bread. The second, a book. The third, a pot of honey.
The man thanked the gull once. Twice. Three times. And then he grabbed it by the neck, cracked its bones, and ate it raw, covered in honey.
He emptied the cask. He finished the food. He went hungry, and sun mad. He burned.
He decided to die. He rolled off the raft into the glassy, dark water.
And he found that the water was only a few inches deep.
He had misunderstood his eyes.
He stood, observed the position of the sun, determined east, and walked all the way home.
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Currently listening to:
Rock mentions dice towers and d20s on this one.
Currently playing:
GOTY, so far. (Though, kind of the only new game I’ve purchased in 2026.)
Currently reading:
Living in a D.A.I.S.Y. Age by Austin McCoy
RIP Dave. Love De La Soul.