Finally back to blogging with the start of new campaign or actually just restarting a campaign with new rules.
The new rule set is Mentzer’s Basic D&D, it used to be test drive of D&D 5th edition which turned out to have too much crunch in the character classes/races for the old school feel I was looking for. We did play couple of adventures and there was some unfinished business in them that will undoubtedly play some role in the campaign after the rule set change.
The campaign is set around Baltic Sea in 1450 with liberally added fantasy elements and disregard for historical timeline. The campaign starts in the Hanseatic city of Danzig. Danzig being a port city gives good access to whole Baltic Sea should the players want to go exploring to Scandinavia or some other exotic locale. On the other hand Danzig is right in middle of interesting political situation with Teutonic Order and Kingdom of Poland fighting for it and the lands around it. This gives opportunities to all sorts of high medieval political shenanigans should the players be interested in them and adventures take them into that direction.
I will be running a mixture of old classic (A)D&D modules, stuff from the internet like One Page Dungeons and what other people have created in current OSR fad and some of my own creations. I have started building a mega dungeon with the help of How to host a dungeon among other things. Of course the world is a living thing and simple things can escalate to mega adventures on their own if not dealt with. So every loose string the players leave behind can possibly come to bite them in the ass at later time. There’s couple of such things already running wild in the Prussian countryside.
My players are mix of new or newer acquaintances and couple of old faces from my table, also looking for couple of more so never know what turns up. One interesting thing to note is that there are two other guys who also runs games, especially old school D&D games so we have lot of game mastering know-how on the table.
We have strong hex crawl element as well in the game. One of my gm-player’s created a hex map of Prussia that I’m using as basis for the campaign and I have already put about half a dozen adventure locations on the map for players to find. People of Danzig and other cities/villages tell rumors to player characters and it is up to players to choose which ones they want to investigate. Once they have a destination they hex crawl to the location and then the game turns to normal dungeon crawl mode.
We as a gaming group are rather flexible with the rules. We take to heart the old school way of “rulings instead of rules” meaning that we take the rulebook as starting point an adapt the content to our game. I for example have converted Basic descendidng AC and table lookup THAC0 to 3.x esque rising AC an attack bonus. I’ll hopefully write about all house rules we come up with when I have time.
We have played one session an session report for that is coming shortly after this post. An that’s all this time.
Adder Manor 