Spirit of 1974

Gygax's 1st Edition Dungeon Master's Guide contained an "example of play" section giving a transcript of table talk as the players moved through the Monastery Cellars & Secret Crypts provided just a couple pages earlier. This section was instrumental in my learning how to referee a dungeon crawl in the Old School way, but I've never seen something equivalent for a Hexcrawl. So I'm going to post my own Example of Play, in case others go searching for one as I once did. Our party consists of Amber the Lawful Fighter and Betty the Chaotic Cleric. The two have returned to the starting village, used the gold they looted from the goblin-occupied castle to stock up, and decided to accompany their new Dwarf NPC companion back to his home in the eastern Rock Halls. The sun is rising on a new day, a crisp Autumn breeze from the north contrasts with the oceanic winds to the west, and the party prepares to set out.  DM: "All right, you have six directions you can

Beneath the crumbled ruins of the Jeweler's Sanctum, an adventure in Volume 1 of the OSE Adventure Anthology, there exists a Queen of Rats. Skilks, as she has called herself, has accidentally slipped a magic ring onto her finger. The ring is a trap - it grants the wearer basic sentience, the ability to speak common, and little else. It overwrites the user's previous operating code, so to speak - a rat will have its brainpower enhanced with these skills but a human(oid) will be reduced to them (to model this more concretely, the ring reduces intelligence to 3).  Skilks is a gracious queen to the 5 giant rats that follow her (none with magic rings of their own), and eager to trade with visiting diplomats from other nations (i.e., wandering adventurers). She is pretentious and ambitious but utterly naive and basically harmless.  The same could not be said for Norrin the Illusionist, a player character with a lust for the magic ring. The party went through an extensive trade sessio