Campaign Countdown!

 This past weekend in our current weekly D&D 5e game that I am a player in we killed Strahd! This means the next campaign that I am DMing is upon us. So what the heck are we going to play?

I genuinely struggle pre-campaign as a DM. I have this problem with all forms of entertainment in my life where I have a very completionist view. I won't buy a game if I know it takes 60 hours to beat if I know I won't have the time to dedicate to it, even if the act of just playing it is fun. I do this with books, TV shows, and even my RPGs. I always look at "howlongtobeat.com" before buying a game to know if its "worth my time". But if its fun, and it takes a while, isn't it worth my time?

This becomes a problem with RPGs for me because I know I am about to commit to a game for the next 6 months-ish, and then my mind starts running the numbers.

6 months of gaming = 24 weekly sessions, but if we assume some cancelations = 18-20 3 hour sessions = about 60 hours of gaming. So then I start deep diving on Reddit about how long certain adventures take. From the jump, I am picking things for the entirely wrong reason. When I started DMing almost a decade ago I used to just google "Cool powerful fantasy monster", grab something from google images, make up a stat block (since I didn't have the Monster Manual yet) and just go play, and we had a blast!

I have also had this problem where I get into something and I get really into it, then when I am mentally done with it, I completely jump ship. There are a few media properties where this hasn't happened (i.e. Lord of the Rings, The First Law Series, Dark Souls, Naruto and a few others). But largely I get super inspired and deep dive for 2-3 months then jump onto something else. This is not advantageous for a future DM deciding on campaign ideas. As you've seen on the blog, I rapidly went through three (and I didn't even settle on one of those to run... lol). 

Don't even get me started on picking a system. I know I want to run an OSR game. But here is a brief list of every game I have read through and considered; Swords and Wizardry, Old School Essentials Classic, Old School Essentials Advanced, Chromatic Dungeons, Bugbears and Borderlands, Dungeon Crawl Classics, Shadowdark, and Worlds Without Number.

The problem is all of these games do essentially the same thing. They will largely feel the same. So why am I spending weeks and weeks pouring over them and picking? Because thats just how my brain works. I am currently between Chromatic Dungeons and Swords and Wizardry. I like Chromatic Dungeons because its AD&D with only 10 levels and pretty regular class progression and a cool roll under skill system. 

Decision paralysis to the max. If I am to commit to a game system, a setting and an adventure for the next 6 months it needs to be the best! What an enormous amount of unneeded pressure. Realistically, over the next 6-12 months my friends and I are going to hang out, roll dice, and have a good time. NONE of that actually matters. So, I went with the only thing that took the stress off of me. I found a handful of adventures and a little sandbox to throw them in and have forced myself to just prep week to week and let the adventure adventure. 

I found this cool book by Brad Kerr called Wyvern Songs. It is a collection of four adventures with a mini-setting in the back complete with a starting town, a hexmap and a list of adventures he likes and where to put them if you want! Perfect. This is my only pre-campaign set up now:

Map Key

0610: Sinister Secret of Peacock Point - Level 1

0808: Black Wyrm of Brandonsford - Levels 1-3

0306: Hideous Daylight - Low level characters

0306: Fabien's Atelier - Levels 2-4

0801: Slumbering Ursine Dunes - Levels 2-4

0608: Temple of 1000 Swords - Level 3

0704: Singing Stones - Levels 3-5

North of the Map: Isle of the Plangent Mage - Levels 3-5

Anywhere: Halls of the Blood King - Levels 3-5

1103: Dreaming Caldera - Levels 5-6

From here, we will just see where the dice and players take us!

Three cheers for self-reflection!

Third Times a Charm

 Welp, the group has settled on a different campaign, again (lol). However, its pretty much already all done for me as a DM!

Rule System: Swords and Wizardry Complete Revised - I backed the kickstarter last year and I put it up to the players whether they'd rather play this or OSE: Advanced, and they liked S&W better. No complaint from me!

Setting: Blackmarsh - Its free! Its only 25 pages and chock full of stuff to do. We will be starting just off the given hexmap to the West, then have already all agreed to head to Castle Blackmarsh. 

Starting Adventure: In the Shadow of Tower Silveraxe, for all the reasons stated in other posts, its just awesome. 

Other supplements I plan to use: Stonehell: This will be a megadungeon under Castle Blackmarsh. My players stated they like the idea of a megadungeon since we've never done one, but we didn't want to commit to something like the Halls of Arden Vul. So it will be there if they want to go into it.

All of these that I have picked are easy to use, easy to digest, and already ready to be used at the table with minimal work. 

Lastly, we are playing online so my digital tools are as follows.

Voice Chat/Group Chat: Discord

VTT: Owlbear Rodeo

Character Sheet: Online Google Sheet for S&W or Pen and Paper, whichever the player wants. 

Prep Notes: Notion.io - I follow along with Sly Flourish's prep every week and I love what he does in Notion.

This should be starting up in about 5-6 weeks. The plan is to write up a prep post as well as a recap post. 

Hype!

On "System Matters"

 So as I've been talking about, I am DMing a new campaign soon. I have been contemplating the setting, system, and adventure for a while and I've had some thoughts I'd like to share. 

I believe it is well-known that the system you choose to play matters. Pathfinder 2e plays much differently than Old School Essentials. However, the system matters to everyone, not just the DM. My players love heroics, they love super-heroics and character arcs and backstories and everything that has come out of a decade of playing 5e. They have fallen in love and, in a sense grown to expect and look forward to, the type of game the system encourages and reinforces. However, as a DM, I tire of tactical combat and skill checks surpassing actual engagement with the world. 

There are endless ways to hack the rules of 5e with Hardcore mode, or Into the Unknown or the alternate resting rules, but I don't really want to do much of that. Instead, I think I can do some of it, but change the DM side of things and make it run, on my side of the table, so that I can enjoy it. I have fallen in love with the OSR style of game on the DM and player side, but I think, if we do go 5e, I can still adopt the things I love into my prep. 

Character Options: PHB + Weird Wastelands

    This introduces enough subclasses without worrying about option bloat.

Setting: Weird Wastelands

    This introduces mechanics for tracking supply and resources, harsh travel conditions and exploration.

Adventure: In the Shadow of Tower Silveraxe + Locations from Weird Wastelands

    I already own and love Silveraxe and its made for OSE so running it in 5e will be easy. I will need to Weird-ify it, but that won't be hard and can be done session to session in my prep as I go.

Monsters: Weird Wastelands and Forge of Foes

    WW has some setting specific fully built monsters and they will be fun for big set-piece encounters, but my bread and butter are going to be the general-use stat blocks that are in Forge of Foes. Long ago I adopted the idea that everything was a bear and really only kept a handful of stat blocks in front of me anyway.

DM Prep: WW, Swords and Wizardry, Return of the Lazy DM, and Shadowdark

    Weird Wastelands has plenty of DM advice on running games using the book, Return of the Lazy DM keeps me from overpreparing, and Swords and Wizardy has simple practical advice. Lastly, Shadowdark has the best random encounter tables I have ever seen.

Procedure Changes: Dungeon Turns, Wandering Monster rolls, reaction/morale rolls, only rest in safe areas. 

    I am going to be adopting the 10-minute turn when exploring from OSR games as well as "always on initiative" from Shadowdark. The combination of these two will encourage players to actually talk through their searches, since your investigation check and you actually talking through your search will take the same amount of in-world time, and one might secure your success while the other leaves it up to a dice roll, and either way, after a few turns I will be rolling for random encounters so you want your actions to really count. Also, torches on one-hour timers will encourage a more engaging play style. Similarly, monster reaction/morale checks will provide a sense of realism so that every encounter isn't an automatic fight and every fight won't necessarily be to the death. I think the best way for me to do this is just to look at the OSE or S&W stat block on my end until fights break out, then I can just use whatever general-use stat block makes the most sense. Only resting in safe areas makes sense in the Weird Wastelands, It is a harsh environment and you can't long rest without your Dark Souls bonfire!

So what does this actually change?

    Well, hopefully, the players can still feel heroic. They can write a simple backstory and have some character goals without it feeling a total waste since they won't die so easily. It gives procedures to exploration both on the micro-scale scene to scene and macro-scale when going through over-land travel (Weird Wastelands has procedures for this). It turns the DM prep and running of the game into something way more enjoyable for me than traditional 5e encounter building and adventure prep and puts the ownness on the players to survive, explore, and adventure.  

New Campaign, Again!

 So after I went all gung-ho after getting excited by my previous campaign idea, I pitched it to my players and they said they'd rather play a game using the recently fulfilled kickstarter Weird Wastelands from WebDM. So, that prep will go to the back burner and we shall adventure into the post-apocalypse. 

Luckily, the book has an excellent section on how to start a campaign, a starting town, and a few low-level adventuring sites. So I just took those, followed their wonderful procedure for creating a hex-map, and went to town. I also took some liberties and added in the Shadow of Tower Silveraxe locations since I already read it and liked it. I will just have to do some week-to-week prep of each dungeon to post-apocalypse-ify it. We are still using Old School Essentials: Advanced Fantasy as well as all of the alternative rules that were in the last blog post. I am excited to kick this off in the next few weeks!

New Campaign!

 Our current Curse of Strahd campaign is about halfway over, we expect 6ish more sessions before we wrap it up and that means it's time to start deciding on what to play next. I like to do this way ahead of time so that I can get excited about multiple things and see what really sticks with me or what potential campaign excitements come and go. I have a few bucket list campaigns that I want to get to eventually and this time I have decided on a campaign set in Mythic Britain heavily inspired by my love for the Last Kingdom TV show and the books that inspired it, the Saxon Stories.

It will be set during the time of Alfred the Great, before becoming England. The year is 890 AD, and the Danes have begun to journey into the various kingdoms of Britain to plunder for silver and Alfred has dreams of a unified England. The "mythic" part of this will come into play as I am adding in Elves, Dwarves, and Orcs (and not all Danes are Orcs. All races can be all cultures). We will be using Old School Essentials: Advanced Fantasy for our rule set and we will be starting with In the Shadow of Tower Silveraxe by Jacob Fleming as our starter adventure. 

We will begin in Hex 9.16 (30-mile hexes), on the border of Wales and Mercia. The entire starter adventure will take place in this hex and then from there, they can go wherever they want! I have obviously taken some creative liberties in the mapping of this fantasy version of England, but that's okay it is just to serve the game. 

We will be making some changes to the rules, we will be adding ideas from a previous post about character progression in OSR games and how you can get any "class power" you just need to quest for it as well as adding the following powers to the class groups

• Warriors get the Mighty Deed Die from Dungeon Crawl Classics
• Experts get Bonus Actions from 5e
• Priests always have access to all their spells, but they have to roll-to-cast like in Shadowdark/DCC
• Magic-Users cast spells like usual for their first casting of every spell slot but can attempt to cast spells of the same slot again by passing a roll-to-cast check similar to Priests, but only get access to the spells they prepare each day. 

I am aware that OSE:A doesn't have class groups, but I am going to let the players pick a class-group when they pick a class that best fits their play-style. A fighter might pick up the Expert class bonus to have a more quick and nimble play-style while a Magic User might pick up the Warrior class bonus because he knows he wants to train in the sword down the line. It's fluid, it's not balanced, similar to the map it is just to serve my group and have fun. 

We also will be using 3d6 Down the Line's Feats of Exploration XP rules and replacing the concept of XP with "Glory" inspired by Pendragon. Characters will gain glory in many of the ways they traditionally gain XP, but Glory will directly correlate to reputation in the game. They can gain glory through fighting valiantly in battle, amassing a horde of wealth, taking down a magical beast, exploring the ruins of Camelot, being a sword-warrior but gaining the ability to cast spells, forging a new spell that no one has ever seen before and so much more. 

Also, we will shift the rarity of coins to reflect the time period, we will be on the silver standard. Many warrior types will actually wear their wealth as silver arm rings to show off their glory and battle prowess. Another topic I want to address is religion. None of my players are religious, so I won't be stepping on any toes with this, but in this version of fantasy history, the Christian Church has already split into those who believe Jesus rose again at midday and those who believe he rose again at midnight. The Church of the New Dawn is the source of all divine and clerical magic, while the Church of the Pale King is the source of all Arcane magic. The pagans worship the Court of Stars, which are the traditional Norse Gods, and they are actually the constellations that can be seen in the night sky. Everything revolves around the worship of the different celestial bodies.

Character Progression and OSR Games

 After recently finishing a 12-session Shadow Dark RPG campaign my players and I debriefed about what we liked and didn't like compared to our normal fantasy RPG of choice, D&D 5e. We came to the conclusion that we really liked the following:

• Because combat is so dangerous, just swinging your sword is not the first thing you think of when you get into conflict. The system inadvertently encouraged talking (even though there aren't social RP mechanics).
• Combat felt tactical. You actually had to worry about positioning, and taking actions in combat that would change the playing field and environment not just reduce HP.
• Exploring felt fun, because your resources mattered. It's almost a meta-combat against the environment. Instead of just tracking HP you had to track rations and torches and the risk-reward of adventuring felt real.
• They felt MORE attached to their characters than in the previous few 5e campaigns because they knew they had to work to keep them alive. 

However, there was one glaring dislike.

• There was no real character progression outside of numerical bits. They sorely missed getting new character powers to add to their character sheet.

This got me thinking ahead for the next game I DM. I want to square the circle of character progression in an OSR-style game (for my group). To do this, I think I will steal the Dungeon Crawl Classics philosophy of "quest for it". So I want to provide quest tables for potential "powers" that players want. Each is a reward for a task. What is nice about this is the non-linearity of character progression. A thief can quest for thief powers, wizard powers, or fighter powers. It would potentially enhance their current play style or let them lean into another. 

1. Spells: Search for a wizard who can train you/grant you this boon and complete a task that he needs a group of adventurers for.
1. The thief wants to be able to cast invisibility so they can go super-stealth. 
2. The cleric wants to harness the power of the Sun god by adding fireball to their spell list.
3. The warrior wants to be able to impress the court at the next feast, so he seeks charm person.
4. The wizard wants to be able to alter his magic formulas and change the elemental damage of any elemental spell as they prepare it.
2. Fighting Skills: Prove yourself in combat to the master-at-arms in a local militia or seek out a legendary warrior to train you on the top of a mountain.
1. The thief wants to be able to cross swords with the best of them, so he seeks out the swashbuckling pirate-king to train him.
2. The cleric wants to not only cast out demons but smite them back to hell, so they seek out the training of a legendary holy warrior or travel to the site of a holy warrior-saint and pray for the blessing.
3. The warrior wants to feel the battle fury that is sung about in the songs, so he seeks the blessing of the warrior gods or takes part in the rituals of the warrior culture.
4. The wizard has heard of those who can weave their spells with blades and seeks the blade-singing master to teach them these secrets.

The list could go on and on. I know that this is primarily the purpose of magic items in old-school games, but new-school players don't really know that, so I think this helps bridge that gap between "I want to add a new power to my character sheet" and "go find your powers in the world". I also don't think any of these should be a menu provided for the characters. It should be taken one at a time, and as the player wants it. These are also permeant in playtest, so feel free to adjust it since there really is no guidance on what some of these powers would look like translated. Lastly, don't try and port mechanics, port vibes, and use the mechanics of whatever game you are playing to elicit the vibe of the power the character wants. 

Planescape Redux - Through the first Planar Portal

 Last time, I decided that Theros would be the destination of the first Omenpath. This is fun for two reasons. There are many packs to crack to generate an adventure, but there is also a 5e book for Theros (Mythic Odysseys of Theros or MOoT) that we can mine for goodies!

So far our adventure has a few angles we could lean into. 

1. The Harpers are acting like the Planar Police and are gathering the keys to and researching more information about these Omenpaths.
2. Bane, the Lord of Darkness has an active cult in the Forgotten Realms that the players have already crossed once. For some reason, they too are interested in the Omenpaths. 

We don't need to get into #2 at the moment, luckily. I think it is best to let the campaign breathe for a while, no need to set up some end-game threat quite yet. But we can keep this cult in our back pocket for later. Let's start this Theros adventure by cracking a pack from the original Theros set.

This is a great pack. I think it would be great if the Omenpath the characters took opened up into a mountain range depicted in the land card. In these mountains lives an evil Gorgon, Hythonia the Cruel, and a Stoneshock Giant. 

When the characters are getting their bearings and journeying around the mountains the following encounters will be great to fill out a potential hex map around the mountains. The number of creatures per encounter totally depends on the level of the party you are running this for.

• Returned Phalanx - The Returned have four stat blocks in MOoT from CR 1/4 to 4. Lore-wise the Returned are quite literally people who have returned from the dead. The mask is left over from their funeral rites.
• Soldiers - Allied soldiers from the nearby town who are out hunting Hythonia.
• Led by a human named Elias who was sent on a scouting mission to find the cave of Hythonia.
• Blood-Toil Harpy - This is actually a CR 1/8 creature from MOoT.
• Two-Headed Cerberus - What better way to kick off a Greek-themed adventure than with an encounter with a Cerberus! It helps that it is also a CR 2 creature in MOoT.

I don't see any inspiration for villages or towns. But I'm sure we can turn to MOoT for that. After looking at the world map, I've settled on using Akros as the nearby town. I like it because it's basically Sparta, so it is easy to imagine. It's also geographically next to a mountain range which fits right in. 

So in summary, this is what this pack has given us for our next adventure:

    After the characters pass through the Omenpath, they come out on the other side deep within the mountains. They begin to get their bearings and some marching Returned come across their path. From here, you'd really only need 3 hexes of mountains, put a harpy nest in one, soldier camp in one, Hythonia's Cave in one, and have the Cerberus be a wandering monster they see off in the distance that is tracking them over time. Once they meet and hopefully offer to help the soldiers from Akros, they will lead them back to town once Hythonia is taken care of or scouted (the goal would depend on the level of the party if they could handle taking her down right now).

The only thing left to do is grab a map for Hythonia's Cave and put some encounters in it just in case the players decide to go head first. My favorite place to get maps is from Dyson Logos' blog Dyson's Dodecahedron. A quick Ctr+F and "cave" search led me to this beauty called "Gloomforge Caverns"

I typically don't do a lot of work when keying my dungeons but I do like to do the following:

• Sight: Dimly lit from sconces with a green flame.
• Smell: Mildew mixed with a harsh tinge of sulfur.
• Sound: Mostly silent, something sliding across a rock surface can be heard from all around. The faint echo of a snake's hiss can also be heard.

1. Entrance Room: Pharika's Mender from our pack is great here. This card tells me that she is going to be reanimating dead things and artifacts. Let's combine that, in this room, there will be statues of fallen warriors who succumbed to Hythonia's Gaze. The gorgon here, Pharika's Mender will reawaken them by weaving magic from the green flames around the room. 
2. The South Western Cavern: This could be a large snake nest similar to the ones shown in the card above named "Viper's Kiss".
3. The Central Chamber: This is where Hythonia is. This will be a shrine room to Pharika, the God of Affliction. 
4. The Eastern Chamber: Treasure Room: Have the northern entrance be a secret entrance but an obvious exit. For loot, we can add some gold based on the system you are using and the appropriate level, as for items I will open a few more packs and see what we get. 
   

              Prowler's Helm: A helm that casts Pass Without Trace once per day.

              God's Willing: Once per day, at dawn, you roll a d20 and store the number in the sword. As a reaction, you can replace the result on any d20 roll by you or against you in combat. 

This easily gives us 1 to 3 sessions worth of material. From here they will travel to Akros and go from there!

- Daniel