The Foot of Blue Mountain

1000 Statues Retrospective

Introduction

I started running 1000 Statues on August 27th of 2025, a little over a year ago now. The game concluded on October 8th of 2026, about a month ago now. I wanted to write up a retrospective about my experiences running the module, the mindset I took towards conducting the game, and how it went.

The Nitty Gritty

The game was played using Delving Deeper with the following house rules:

All of our mapping was done using TLDraw. You can view the TLDraw as it looked through the player POV for as long as the link stays up here or see the images below.

Discord was used both for dice rolls and for voice. Camera must have been used occasionally but was far from common. The game was an open table, scheduled impromptu during most of its run time (in practice, this meant EST weeknights during the latter half of 2025 and early half of 2026) except for the final month or so, during which the game ran early on Thursday mornings. Sessions ranged from 90-150 minutes, with an average very comfortably at the 2 hour mark.

The System

Delving Deeper v4 is probably the best retroclone of the original game. Where it strays from the original text it does so for sensible reasons, and I find the additions that weren't in the original version of the game cromulent and fun. The system handles Thieves nicely, and Magic Users get a very generous starting spell list. Color Spray remains my favorite spell in classic D&D and a large reason for that is Delving Deeper.

Cleave/multiattack as it is laid out in DD is quite good and helps make sense of the larger encounter numbers in 1000 Statues and the Delving Deeper book as written. While it's certainly not the right choice for every campaign, for this one it was perfect. Fighters made up virtually all of the most succesful characters and had a strong niche.

There is a certain mind worm that likes to burrow in the head of people who take the hobby too seriously, where they decide on a whim that whichever rules text they decide to use is imperfect and needs to be treated immediately with heavy houserules. This is fine and dandy, but there is something to be said for "letting it ride" and trying to run the rules as they are written for as long as possible before you make any changes. For this campaign, anyway, that was a resounding success. Aside from the houserules above my usual answer to a rules question was checking the Delving Deeper reference, and usually (though not always; players are fickle bastards) there was a good answer there.

The Module

1000 Statues is a polarizing text. There is no context to the dungeon besides a poem (or two) and scarcely any ecological logic to speak of. Levels are labyrinthine for no reason and have deeply perverted designs which trick even skilled players. There is not enough experience to level up a party if they die too much. And yet, despite it all, there is a personality there. Beneath the naked keys there are suggestions of situations, things that happened, are happening, will happen, and the careful (and curious, good-faithed) reader is presented with a fertile ground for gaming. It is, miraculously -- Blark's work always feels miraculous -- a moving work made from bits pieces of imaginary toys.

It is likely that my experiences running the game have colored my opinion of the text. Can you read a module and review it's playability without playing it? It's inconclusive, but after spending so much time with a module like 1000 Statues I don't think I can review it in any way more conclusive or authoritative. Inevitably, looking back at the keys, I am reminded of the play that brought them to life. Vivid mental pictures of betrayal and war, silly duels and sordid soirees into darkened hallways, are really what leap from the pages when I think back. Whether this is a function of the text or my own bumbling anti-genius is uncertain, but Blark is owed their due for putting the work together and I certainly wouldn't havebeen put into the headspace from which leapt my joy without it.

The Game

What is a dungeon game without maps?

Wilderness:

The Party Sheet:

As I wrote above, 1000 Statues is terse. There is little in the way of context or justification. One of the monikers of the Gay Beholder Discord, a sort of practical underpinning of the server, is that play creates context and there is so much that happens in play that cannot be replicated sitting alone with your prep congealed in a sticky pile on your desk, grunting and straining with that aforementioned anti-genius.

Being the skeptic that I am, I decided to put this to the test.

I didn't prep for 1000 Statues. Did very little in the way of writing things down. I wrote a paragraph about a small town outside the dungeon, much later made a hexflower, but beyond that I did very little between sessions. My goal was to run a "mirror" to the party assembled. Some people, intuiting some deeper meaning in the keys and my refereeing, took the happenings of the dungeon more seriously than others, who engaged with it in its most distilled form; it's a dungeon crawl, we were there for nothing else. Of course, I had a justification for why I could run it this way. There was a method to my madness that allowed me to be content running it in my home setting, but I never wrote it down and the attention I paid to it ebbed and flowed with the people who came. A lot of what happened procedurally too was the result of party action. The Encounter Table was initially mostly empty but became populated whenever the party committed or witnessed senseless violence. There were exploding gnomes and suicidal orcs and other ghosts made manifest by player cruelty.

All this to say that the people who attended the games affected the way it was played far more than they realized. That's the big takeaway for me as a referee. We can circlejerk a lot about the prep we do, the modules we run or write, and the procedures we craft in the wee hours when everyone but the revelers and the rule-writers have gone to bed, but really tabletop games are about people. It's a conversation, one with a book to reference in case you get confused or scared or angry, but a conversation nonetheless. The people at a table contribute so much to the tone of a game, to the facilitation, and why wouldn't they? They're the majority of the participants in the conversation.

I can say with much more confidence than usual that it was a success. I learned a lot about the social side of running games, how to be an asshole and the finger which explores it, how to congratulate and how to console, and how to laugh and learn to take things less seriously. It's easy to get worked up and self serious if you spend too much time doing this hobby (a weird intersection of math and literature that includes only the egoistic parts, I reckon) and it was a meditation on setting both of those aside and focusing on the people who come to the table. I have nearly no regrets.

The Players

Since players are so important to the realization of this game, I've tried to go back and reconstruct the players of the game through the Discord logs. This is most certainly and simultaneously a herculean task as is and one left incomplete, so if you attended a game but aren't on the list, contact me and I'll get that sorted right away.

Thank you all for playing! There were, including me, upwards of 30 players in the campaign as a whole! I'm so honored to have been able to share something so meaningful to me with so many people :)

Where are your notes, Mr. Mann? What was really happening?

1000 Statues ended up being about memories for me. These games are full of false memories, stories we tell like we lived them when in truth our plush asses were nailed to a chair at a table. A lot of the way I ran it was conscious of this fact (many players will recall the forgetful townfolk). By giving you the Truth I rob you of your memories, the unclear theories and feelings you might still hold about your time playing.

If you didn't play, put in the legwork to track someone down in the list above and ask them what it was like. Their answer is as good as mine will be, or better.

If that isn't satisfactory, then try this explanation on for size: I'm too damn lazy to give you more than what you got already B-)