My 4th Campaign on Roll20

 

So as of last night my new 5th ed. campaign, The Lost and The Lurking (yep, title totally stolen from a Silver John novel). Well, actually, the first session zero was a couple weeks ago, but out of the four in that (long time player Terry could not make it) only two remain, the eager and adorable noob couple in their 20's who I, as I often do with couples, refer to as "The Twins." One guy seemed promising, but he wanted both a more dark ages setting, and he wanted orcs to be like Warcraft orcs. Well, my setting has progressed (after over 100 years of character continuity) to being sort of post Italian Rennaissance-like, and pre-industrial Britain-like. Strike one. And Strike two was my orcs are nasty, stinky, rape your wife and eat your guts Tolkien orcs. Warcraft? As if. Those are just big humans with tusks. Fucking boring. The worst thing to ever happen to orcs.  So he was out. The other was a girl who seemed great, I hit it off with right away, and immediately thought of her as player numero uno. The others were mostly new to the game, so it's always helpful to have a seasoned vet. Especially since I haven't exactly memorized the PHB. 

But then after the session zero, she started being problematic. She was running an Eloquence Bard. I didn't study up on it at first, because she was talking up how she was sort of an acrobat high wire performer. That sounded cool, but I should have seen a red flag when she kept asking about running some sessions featuring her circus family as the NPC's. Hm. That was usually a mistake in the past. OK. Maybe. But then another new guy told me "hey, do you know what you are in for with that class?" 

So I looked it up and was like "wow." This bard by third level will pretty much be successful with every persuasion roll. Its called "Silvertongue" or some such. Plus the character will get the ability to reduce the saving throws of foes, a lot, and will also be able to give almost endless bardic inspirations. So I was a little concerned. I told her so, and though I won't nerf it, we need to be on the same page on how some of this stuff would work. I was being nice about it, but she seemed offended. Accused me of calling her a power gamer (which she was being...she was also asking to start with a powerful 4th level feat). It was getting negative, so I bailed on her. I felt bad about it. Almost sad. I went from being excited she would be involved to in a week not wanting to deal with her. So out out out. 

More humorously, another girl, an 18-year-old, contacted off the forum practically begging to be in the game. I much prefer folk 25 and older, but she said she did art and likes to make images throughout a session. That was enticing. But when I let her into the Discord to talk more, she started demanding written up setting information. Well, I have an "info dump" setting channel for random thoughts on my setting I post, but she was all like "no, if people are going to play in your world you need organized and detailed info on politics, important families, etc etc." Sorry kid, I don't keep piles of notebooks anymore. I've had this setting since I was a kid. It mostly lives in my head. And that she should maybe be more concerned about what happens in the course of the campaign than detailed background durp. Then she started demanding to know what the "story" will be and was name dropping Critical Role. Ah, that makes sense now. I told her that CR is actors pretending to play D&D as a performance and there are plenty of groups doing that out there. So lotsa luck.

Ah well. I promised myself I would heavily vet the group, so that was what I was doing. But with a couple more dudes on board, and Terry doing her dwarf from the previous campaign, we were up and running. I used Marge, the major caravan master from the last campaign, as a sort of patron for this one. This would not be a caravan campaign. The NPC is simply taking a couple seasons off to invest in some expeditions. I'm using LOFP's Death Frost Doom as sort of an inspiration. I personally find that adventure to be sort of Unrunnable as is, but there are gems in there, including the Lichway rip-off ending. I love Lichway. 

From DFD I'm mainly using the mountain, town below, graveyard, and cabin. I would be using my own, decently smaller, dungeon map for the temple (I will show in a later post). The temple in this case will be a temple of Orcus. Here's is the information Marge will show the party next session (this session was mostly dealing with some town thugs and a kobold cave).

This cult arrived at the pass some 100 years ago (year 1 of the New Age), when there was still a well-trod overland trade route between the West and The Acherian Empire to the northeast. 

At that time in the area it had a force of several Orcus  (a foul devil lord who has nothing to do with orcs) clerics, a few dedicated and well-trained guards, and always a dozen or so slaves, and with the fierce power of the cult protector and anti-paladin Atrigan the Deathdealer, they carved a hidden complex on the top of The "Broken Spine," a local mountain with a high peak and a rambling trail that lead up to it. It was what the religion of Orcus called "a material plane undeath garrison", a place where worldly worshippers of the Demon God tortured living humans to drive them chaotic mad, and then murdered them to temporarily lay them to rest, seizing their souls so they could be unleashed to help create an undead army at such time as when Orcus decided he wished to conquer the living world with a great force. The bodies of most of the priests, after they passed away for whatever reason, would also share this fate. Even his worshippers will serve Orcus in death.

Apparently, there are many such temples and "garrisons" across the lands. And perhaps waiting undead armies of a variety of Lords of Hell. The thought is chilling. Perhaps many of the hostile undead encounters in the dark corners of the earth are souls who have awakened early to inhabit their devil-cursed material forms. 

In the 100 years since the creation of the temple at the top of the "The Broken Spine" the dead where never called upon. But over the years the progeny of Atrigan and the other priests continued to slowly accumulate victims from the trade pass and remote villages, and eventually bury their bodies in the dirt consecrated for Orcus. 

Captive non-humans, elves and dwarves, were unwanted as soldiers of the future undead army of Orcus (for Orcus was a devil brought about by human sin), so after proper torture, degradation, and murder, the bodies of any non-humans were burned in a kiln that the Orcus priests trapped a fire elemental within.  

In the year 40 of the new age, 60 years ago, the cult got greedy and instead of the usual furtive and secret capture of a select few unwary folk from year to year, attacked a well-guarded Acherian noble caravan going through the pass, as they had a surplus of living slaves to force into battle. A dozen captives were taken. Among them was Grunhix Maxima, the young niece of the then Acherian Emperor Decemberious Maximus The Third. Grunhix was on a sightseeing tour of the trade roads to the west.

The Emperor back in Acheria met with his royal Oracles,and was told of the cult and what they did with captives. The forces he sent to destroy the cult on the top of the mountain found the trail up The Spine to be treacherous, as both guards, slaves, and landslides were sent down to rain devastation upon them. The troops camped at the bottom of the mountain, and the emperor sent them three high priests of the Acherian Empires cruelest and most powerful gods of the time. A priest of Borias, God of the North Wind and Winter, a priest of Jubilex, lord of slime and corrosion, and the priest of Flambix, Goddess of flames and wartime destruction. The powerful Flambix priest personally killed the Orcus priests and their mad slave defenders, the priest of Jubilex cursed the underground temple with acidic green slime to keep the complex uninhabitable, and the priest of Borias covered the mountain top and its graves of woe with eternal winter. 

Ironically, it was a few handful of years before the Kingdom of Tanmoor ousted Acherian forces from the western kingdom and gained independence, and the great East/West pass became far less travelled. 

Apparently, there is a village at the base of The Broken Spine Peaks that was founded by the last freed slave of the Cult. 

But the temple of Orcus at the top of the spine still sits, quiet and undisturbed.  Only fear, and the constant chill of never-ending winter on the mountaintop, keeps the greedy away from any possible wealth there.

So a nice sense of grittiness there. This will be the first several games. I purposefully have no plans yet for the rest of the campaign. I wanted it to be open depending on the characters and hooks they get and so forth. So the characters are:

Female dwarf fighter

Female gnome wizard

half elf ranger (grasslands)

human fighter (cavalier)

Half elf warlock

(Pic unavailable)

I think it's an interesting and diverse group. More to come

Cheers

When NPC’s Chime In/Super NPC’s

When I was first introduced to D&D as a kid, and for years afterwards, it was very common for Dungeon Masters to use what has become known as the “Super NPC.” A classic example I can remember is from a game some dude ran at the Santa Monica Jewish Center on Santa Monica Blvd when I was in my mid-teens. Yes, that was kind of a trippy place for a catholic kid, but one of my D&D buddies at the time was Jewish and we often had games there on a Tuesday night. I was going there almost every week for a year at around the age of 14 to play. I had been to this pal’s Bat Mitzvah as well. Maybe these experiences are why I have such love for Israel and Yiddish people worldwide (I would run into this guy a few years later when I was going to some Society of Creative Anachronism events with a girlfriend of the time. He had been a good kid, but by then it was obvious he was growing up to be a grade-A dipshit; I hope D&D didn’t do that to him).

Anyway, one night an older guy, probably in his early 20’s, ran a game for us. I don’t remember the particulars of our characters, but I remember our asses getting kicked in the game. We ended up needing help, and helpful locals pointed us out to what was obviously a favored character of the DM’s that he was using as an NPC. That was as easy as it could happen. Mr. DM is winging it in a game, needs a strong character to save the day, and then *taadaaa* he just inserts one of his characters from some other DM’s game he’s played in into the mix. Oy vey!

In this case, it was some badass fighter with twin magic blades who could cast Haste on himself. I can recall our PC’s walking down the city street with this super-character, who was whirling his blades around at Haste speed and juggling them and generally showing off before the big fight. Some big fight. I think his guy mopped up the bad guys while our PC’s stood on the sidelines shouting “hooray” while doing a respectful golf clap.

I have to admit that I fell into this heavily in the 80’s. The very first character I rolled up as a kid, a ranger named Arcturus Grimm, was my first major NPC in my homebrew gameworld, and I still use him to this day. Although as a player character I probably had only gotten him up to around 5th or 6th level before he became a super-NPC in my world. But what with all his misadventures over the hundred years or so of game time that has gone by since around 1980 (no worries, he’s partly elf) he stands today, a ranger in the upper teens of level and on the verge of some kind of godhood (yeah, that is very high level for my world). I’ve used him quite a bit in the early portions of this current campaign, but only as an advisor really. He has some sons and daughters as NPC’s involved in the ongoing campaign shenanigans.

I could easily give a dozen examples of other favored super-NPC’s (one or two actually former characters like ol’ Arcturus), but the overall point to this is that I don’t use them so much anymore. I never really used them as in the example I gave about the DM at the Jewish Center, but I have toned down their general involvement. And after so many years, some have retired or disappeared altogether. After some bad experiences in the last couple of years, I am inclined even more to use them less.

Like when I went to a couple of Sunday Star Wars Saga sessions in Santa Monica (trying to little avail to get to know the rules so I could run for the infamous Hollywood Star Wars group). The GM, a 20 year old, pretty much just ran tactical combats with his super-NPC Jedi’s jumping in and doing most of the work. It really sucked.

The months later when I went to run KOTOR for an established group, the “lady” who was “in charge” was almost fanatically against NPC’s. She even talked about the young dude in Santa Monica’s use of NPC’s, which blew my mind (she knows somebody who went to one of his games). I said “no problem,” but I did have an NPC involved with the group as part of the ongoing adventure and I learned later that was one of many things that bugged her. Not that I care about what bugged the clueless dolt, but it did make me give some more thought about my use of NPC’s.

When player are having confabs as their characters, I have a bit of a habit of jumping into the conversation with an NPC (hey, the DM is supposed to have some role playing fun too, ya' know?). This is usually when there is information to give or it is just an appropriate time for them to speak, but I realized I was doing just a bit too much of it. I should be encouraging characters to speak more. Given, I only really have two players who really have conversations in character, with the others speaking up here and there. But I’m trying to lean more to letting it be the characters words that rule the day (good or bad).

So in our Night Below session last week, there was a point where a player or two were cooking up plans for another assault on The City of The Glass Pool, and rather than be a part of the conversations or have to hang on every word, I spent time doing other things. Looking in books, stepping outside, etc. Just listening to enough to catch good role play. It’s really only the DM’s job to react to what the players try to carry out, but in this case my distancing myself from the planning there were a few misunderstandings. So there needs to be a fine line. Me listening to important stuff, without feeling compelled to speak out as an NPC.

Now, I’ll readily admit that a lot of speaking up as NPC’s has come from a certain degree of my having to give information to move the game along. This group is kind of quick to action and short on understanding. They aren’t stupid, but I believe a “thinking man’s D&D” is not necessarily what they are after. They want combat and cool set-pieces to have it in. Hey, I can relate. As a player I like action over politics and making the proper decisions to move storylines along.

Also, for me, NPC’s have been an integral part of how I present my world. I’ve been using my homebrew game setting for going on 35 years , with well over a hundred years of game continuity. This is the gaming James over at Grognardia likes to speak of; starting with a tiny section of a game world and expanding from there. That was the beginning, like, 1978 for me. In the many years after that, I have expanded upon the gameworld big time, and I’m not just happy with that, I’m proud of it. I have a personal connection to my gameworld (and therefore to my own childhood) that I think is rare. My players can often feel that. So yeah, I take NPC’s seriously. If it is more than just an innkeeper or farmer the players will never see again, then it is an NPC worth investing in. But like I said, there needs to be a fine line when NPC’s are involved, so as not to gyp players out of character time. NPC’s should complement the character experience, not supplant it.

Should they just be extra muscle? The clichéd hirelings of old school D&D? Or should they be an integral part of the group sometimes. After all these years, this is still something I am trying to figure out.

Taking Pride in your Group

(pictured above: Our usual host Andy, and also a group that is not us)

As it has been pointed out here and there occasionally in my post comments, I don’t necessarily lean towards the positive all the time when talking about my games or my players. Let’s face it, some of us deal with happiness by just enjoying the happiness without making a big deal out of it. We deal with things we aren’t necessarily happy with by ranting about it. It’s sort of like guest reviews on a hotel’s website; you see so many negative ones because it’s mostly people unhappy with the experience who are compelled to review in the first place. I actually love my group, and I want to talk about it a bit from that perspective.

Currently there are seven of us regulars in the group, which is perfect really. Our games at maximum occupancy are one GM and six players. Perfect amount of players, because you can still have a fun and epic game with 5 or 4 players. Even with three players available we can do alternates or whatever. I keep the player count at a max of 6, but usually have sort of a waiting list of people who want in (a problem I have not heard that other locals groups have). I hear on an almost monthly basis from locals from various sources wanting in on the games. So many that I have considered trying to get a second, separate group together. But it’s hard enough to put together the time for one such group, so I think that is going to have to be my one and only group. Fine by me.

Four of us have been there pretty much since game one (or “game zero” as I like to call it), two and a half years ago. Me, Andy, Dan, and Terry (our token chick player). For around a year we had two or three players come and go, which is usually par for the course in any groups that weren’t all friends to begin with. Then Big Ben and Paul came along around the same time around a year or so ago, and we have had the same steady group now for close to a year and half. Little Ben, who played for a bit the other year but had work obligations, returned a few months ago. He has missed a few games since then, but more out of happenstance of his schedule more than anything else.

So, a solid group for many moons now. That seems to be a bit rare, at least in the Los Angeles area. Most groups I have seen or have experience with don’t seem to be able to keep it together the way they would like to. Not a knock at them, just part of my gratitude for a steady, steadfast group of great players. One experience I had was with a DM in West LA with a presence here in the old school blogs that resulted in my freshly created character being slain by an unfriendly and somewhat hostile player less than an hour into the session (I won’t include any links or names here. Regular readers can figure it out; I don’t wanna be starten’ nothing or cause any epic weirdo freak-outs), who turns out is the DM’s ONLY regular player over the years. Hmmm…wonder why. Regular player and co-founder of my group, Andy, had similar experiences with that GM and that player. As a matter of fact, Andy’s experience with these same people a few years prior to mine caused me to see Andy in a whole new light after my own shitty time with them, and to gain new appreciation for him and his play style. Andy seems just as happy to have a great and friendly group of regulars as I. With what is locally available out there, no wonder.

So yeah, I am happy with, and proud of, my group. For anybody in the past that has commented that perhaps some of my unhappy experiences outside my group is perhaps my own doing, I can only put forth my evidence against that theory: I have 3 people who have stayed over two years for my games, a pair who have stayed regulars for well over a year so far, and one who came back after a several month absence. My running of some OD&D at a local mini-con and then an Orange County Gaming Con last year were very well received, although I will admit that I think some of the friendships I made at those may have been affected by some of my harsh words in my blog about some of my other local experiences. Even Bob over at Cylopeatron, who I think looks at me with an eyebrow cocked lately after initially being fairly friendly, will admit that in his Gamma World session at the MiniCon event that I was the player MVP of the day (helping take the one-shot session to a solid conclusion when it was looking like it would end in a cliffhanger or forced conclusion at best).

So in regards to myself, my conscious is clear despite the occasional kerfuffle: I’m a very decent, fun and welcoming GM whose decades of experience shows, and as an occasional player I put a lot of my priority into the good time of the GM and the other players at the table besides my own. The proof has been in the pudding for anybody who has met me and played with me or under me.

Enough kissing of my own big ass. Let me kiss some butt and heap some praise on my worthy regulars a bit (in order of appearance in the group):

Andy: Sometimes drinker, sometimes toker, always smart-ass. Andy pretty much co-founded the group with me. He saw me on meetup.com looking to run some 1st edition (after a several year break), and after some of his less than satisfactory experiences with local groups he wanted to be in on something new. Andy usually hosts us, with his lovely wife Kara giving us the use of her fabric workshop in the back. It’s a nice cozy area, not too small and not too big, with a patio for the smoker/tokers. I was initially annoyed with Some of Andy’s play style choices, but in the long run I have come to really appreciate his excellent attitude towards role playing, and general welcoming nature to new folk who came along over the short years. Along with Dan, Andy is a very vocal player who loves to run his characters in an outgoing fashion, and any GM knows that is a valuable person to have at the table. Not everybody has to be real vocal, but a couple of people need to be. More than anybody outside of Terry, Andy is the most accepting of playing whatever genre I want to run. Can’t `put a price on that. I’m glad we have that. In the main AD&D campaign Andy runs Vaidno, a half-elf bard. In my occasional Champions games he ran a very cool Chop Socky Jackie Chan sytle Hong Kong cop, and in my Metamamorphosis Alpha/Mutant Future sessions he ran pretty much a mutated Billy Bob from Slingblade.

Dan: Big guy originally from South Africa (white) who has lived and travelled around the world. He has swum with sharks, trained in mountain rescue, and all kinds of crazy shit. He is some kind of computer related international business man, and has a nice pad up off Mulholland where we have played occasionally. He recently married his hot girlfriend. Dan has it all, and it’s one of the reasons I give him so much shit. A very outgoing player much like Andy, Dan also tends to be a little powergamey and argumentative with his characters, but funnily enough not in a negative way that you would usually find those traits in gamers. It’s fun to play the put-upon DM to his Munchkin play style. Dan loves the escapist nature of the games, and loves to kill things. I’m hoping he doesn’t one day decide to kill the DM. Dan’s main character in the 1st edtion games is the controversial Krysantha, a female drow raised by druids. She isn’t evil, but is for sure one hell of a bitch.

Terry: I have known Terry for over 20 years, and she has played on and off in my games for that long. I met her at the very first Renaissance Faire (formerly in Agoura Hills) I ever worked in the late 80’s. I actually posted about my appreciation of Terry as a friend and player a few months ago (inspired probably by her treating me to a weekend in Las Vegas), and you can check out that feel-good post here.

“Big” Ben: Call him Big Ben, because we have another Ben in the group who Big Ben has a few pounds on. Ben has a lot of 1st edition experience from the past, and actually knows the rules btb better than the rest of us, without being a rules lawyer. Ben has actually been very valuable in looking up things in the books when I don’t feel like it and am ready to just house rule something (Andy is handy that way too). Ben runs a high Elf mage, Lumarin, in my main campaign. Ben also runs the occasional 1st edition game for us so I can take a break and be a player. In his campaign, he had us all required to run high elves or half elves. Can you see a pattern? Yeah, Ben seems to have an elf fetish. If he was skinny with long flowing blond hair it might seem to explain things, but Ben is around 6 feet tall, burley, and bald with a goatee. Hmmm…

Paul: a young college student with no tabletop D&D experience, he has a lot of experience with the D&D video games, and that seems to pay off at least in game concepts being familiar to him. For a new player, Paul has really taken things to the grill with the MU/Thief, Lily, that he ran. He eventually betrayed to the party to former allies of his, basically screwing himself out of getting to run the character any more. And it was not just to be a dick like a lot of experienced, anti-social type players might. He was actually role-playing what he thought that character might do, in the process having to start playing an NPC provided by me to continue in the game. In the Met. Alpha/Mutant Future mini-campaign we ended this week, Paul ran a mutated tree. He is very cool, with a powerful shriek and acid sap damage abilities. This character was probably the most interesting in the entire campaign. Paul sort of inadvertently named out group last year. I started a private Yahoo page for us, and needed a name for it. I didn’t want some dorky gamer name, so Paul said “you should make it something abstract, like “Waves of a Forgotten Box” or something like that.” Thus, a group name was born. Call us “The Wavies.”

“Little Ben”: not really little, but smaller then Big Ben. He played for a bit the other year before his schedule got involved, and is now back playing again. A good guy, he is a solid player despite running a non-combatant in the Night Below games. His gnome, Ormac, chimes in with the occasional illusion. When another player murdered a captured NPC a few games ago, he refused to accept a magic item (want of magic missile) that had belonged to the victim. To me that is some pretty good role playing of a good character. How many spellcasters, especially one with few combat spells, would pass up a wand of magic missles?

There you have it, the current group, and I’m damn proud to be a part of it, much less the main GM. Without them, I would be awash in the gamer sea of flotsom and jetsom out there. How I got so lucky, I’ll never know. Or maybe I’m just that damn good ;)

So, tell me about what makes you proud, or at least happy, about your group…

Earthlings in your Fantasy Soup

I started thinking on this after reading a recent Grognardia post.

People from Earth ending up in fantasy worlds has an ancient legacy. “The Blazing World” of the late Renaissance, regarded as the first true fantasy world/science fantasy story, featured an Earthling stumbling into a strange world of humanoid animals. And Earthlings, even lepers and dumbass English kids who get locked in wardrobe cabinets, have been going to fantasy land ever since.

So how do I feel about a connection between my fantasy world and Earth? Well, over the decades I have been of differing minds on the matter. I still use the same game world I came up with as a kid, “Acheron.” But in those early days I was up for almost anything. Things like the multi-universal Arduin and The City State of The Invincible Overlord inspired me to do all sorts of wacky things with my world.

In those few short formative years I had gods from Earth myth as the gods of clerics; Thor, Odin, Zeus, etc, just like The City State did. It wasn’t until my mid teens when I started coming up with gods for my world from whole cloth, or expanding upon gods my players created, that I started rethinking that. Eventually I would eliminate those Earth gods from my world and stick with the original ones, so in thinking upon those early days I cut my young self some slack. But into the adult years of gaming I only very rarely had any sort of Earth connection with Acheron. When I did, it was not to use any normal sort of Earth human or Earth setting. It was my futuristic Hero Systems/Champions setting that I used.

In the 80’s I had a brother of my major ranger NPC (my first true D&D character, actually, that I ended up using for my own world) get trapped in my Champions setting, and become a sort of rustic superhero in that. So clearly I had established a link between worlds. And once or twice I had dimension hopping characters from my Champions games spend brief times in Acheron when I felt it was appropriate and I wanted some fantasy elements (in one case, heroes chased down some dimension-bending super-hunters who were going to Acheron to kill unicorns and other cutesy creatures).

But just having some d-bag professor or leper or whatever show up to dick around in Acheron? Naw. It isn’t that interesting to me. Maybe because I found Thomas Covenant and Harold Shea to be total bores. It has to be something very appealing to make me break that line between worlds, and the typical “Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” type stuff seems pretty played out to me now. Just a busted, old concept.

These days, I just like to keep my fantasy world pure. I do, however, like chocolate in my peanut butter. That will never change.

Defining an age: “The Age of Dungeons”

When I first began my long running game world (that is, came up with a name for the land my first dungeon and nearby tavern were located in) that I still use for my ongoing AD&D campaigns, I was around 13 or 14. At that time I was still using White Box, plus had only recently acquired Greyhawk and Blackmoor. Dungeon crawling was still the focus of my games, just like everybody else.

Fast forward around 30 years or so, and I’m still running games in that world, “Acheron” (Yeah, Acheron is the type of name for a world that a kid would come up with alright). But the “time of dungeons” has long past. Some 120 years or so had passed in my game world since those first “tavern n’ a dungeon” games, and the types of adventures had changed.

As my main city, Tanmoor, become more detailed and more adventures took place there, it became the place where most things happened. The city was about to enter a time of Renaissance. Characters went up in level and became famous, hobnobbing with the royalty and other famous personages and NPC’s that were around. There were quests, errands, and sometimes even wars that characters took part in, almost all of it in one way or another connected to Tanmoor and the crown. I didn’t really mean to go the “high adventure” route that newer editions of D&D was shooting for. It’s just that characters being more heroic and epic in scope, beyond dungeon crawls, had become more appealing to me.

In many ways I was running these campaigns like superhero games, with characters swiftly going from 1st level noobs to major, world altering adventurers. As I’ve said before, I think that a combination of girls being in my games in the past, plus my comic book collecting background and love of superhero level antics, led away from the maiming and crippling death dungeons and into a world or more derring-do.

So, as it turns out I’m going to be running a bit of OD&D soon. Not just at the “Minicon” event next month, but it looks like I’ll be getting some practice with it tomorrow night. We need an alternate with Ben still out of town (and the 1st ed. game right now needs it’s resident MU), and Mutant Future is supposed to be for when Terry can’t make it on game night. At the last game Terry and Paul were interested in my tales of good ol’ White Box D&D, so I’m going to try out a session of nice simple “Elmer Fuddist” D&D on them.

Although I really only need a village and a nearby dungeon, I gave some thought to the world this would take place in, and decided to make it Acheron, my long running game world, but set about 200 years in the past of the current time period in games. That would put the new OD&D setting at about 70 years prior to my first Acheron sessions as a kid when I first got D&D. As it turns out, this is pretty perfect. As a kid all we did were dungeons. Nice, nonsensical “mythic underworlds” that PC’s trudged through Fudd-style. So I started to think of a time period when there were more weird dungeons in Acheron. A time when the lands were strewn with them. Money grubbing wannabe adventurers in the lands had their choice of deathtrap dungeons to delve into. That was D&Ding to us when we were kids, so what better time period than the period of my first games?

The current decades are known as a time of great heroes and epic adventures, and I have often described to my players a time period 500-600 years ago that was another epic time, when many of the current gods of my world were still mortal warriors and magic-users. So I decided that the time about 200 years ago was sandwiched in between these more heroic times, and itself was known as “The Age of Dungeons.” Rather than heroic figures, adventurers were more born of a time of greed and lust, when tales of great treasures and glorious magic seeped out of the mythic underworld places. The sons and daughters of farmers, blacksmiths, and even scholars set out with dreams of schlepping out cartloads of gold from the underplaces. Not all of them returned, but enough did to inspire others to delve.

Don’t get me wrong, every now and again in my games there have been and still are weirdo dungeons. They are just rare. Hell, when I started my current group and the current 1st ed Campaign almost two years ago, the whole plan was to get them up a level or two and get them to a dungeon. But, typically, things went to a more epic, politically relevant direction and they ended up in The Night Below setting. Still there. But there are a couple of other dungeons I have that are a permanent fixture In the city of Tanmoor, and will be encountered again no doubt. Both of these city dungeons are based on old Flying Buffalo Tunnels and Trolls solo adventures; Mirror World (a mirror with a dungeon in it), and Naked Doom – not so much a magical dungeon like Mirror World, but a sort of dungeon obstacle course (that you of course start out naked in). But like I said, visits to these places were rare.

Regardless of recent and distant past, I seem to be going through a “dungeon phase” like I haven’t since I was pretty much a kid. I’m gonna ride this pony while I can.

Next: The Economy of the Dungeon Age

Sticks & Stones

OK, it wasn’t my most played microgame of the late 70’s. That distinction probably went to Rivets. Hell, I think I only managed a couple of games with one of my buddies. It was a fun little game, with 10,000 BC dudes slugging it out with Mammoths, and each other, for supremacy of their area. You could choose for your session a hunting expedition, or maybe an attack on the opposing tribe across the valley. You could steal their goods, and their women. Good times, all played out in classic Microgame style.

I mainly mention the game because it inspired one of my many homebrew ideas to never reach fruition, namely, to do an entire campaign of my own design based on the time period. PC’s would be Cro-Magnon men, doing the type of thing Cro-Mags do. Just like in Sticks & Stones.

The system was a no-brainer. I would use a version of my Road Warrior rules, a set of rules I came up with for a short campaign that I ran in the early 80’s.

I think the thing that held me back and ultimately kept me from going ahead with a game was the fact that I could not decide between realism and fantasy. Should I do this straight, with no magic or fanciful creatures? Or maybe something close to it, but with perhaps with a touch of the supernatural. Shamans and perhaps solitary, primitive wizards came to mind. Maybe light touches of magic, or even a clerical or wizard type class players could play as.

I even considered a full on fantasy take, with dinosaurs alongside man, but supernatural monsters and demons, dragons and perhaps even Gods walking the earth. I even thought of having aliens in a spaceship get encountered at some point (The Barrier Peaks?). Yeah, obviously Land of the Lost had a lot of influence on me there, along with a certain amount of Edgar Rice Burroughs and the Marvel comic Devil Dinosaur.

By the late 80’s, I was running plenty in my D&D world Acheron, and also putting in lot of GM duty with Champions and Call of Cthulhu. Really, with these three games going as successful campaigns that went from the 80’s and well into the 90’s, I just didn’t have time to introduce another game genre to my players. Hell, it had been hard enough to sell my regular D&D folk on Champs and CoC (which they loved once they experienced them).

With all the great shows on Discovery and History Channels in the last decade or so, and movies like the recent 10,000 B.C. (I actually liked it for what it was), I still get stirred to try to get a “Sticks and Stones” type role-playing game going now and again. But if my group plays anything else but D&D for a break, it’s probably going to be CoC or Champs again. But a GM can day dream, can’t he?