Ostschild is done. It's
actually been done for a few months now. A second TPK in as many
weeks did it in for good, right before our Christmas holidays hiatus
from gaming. I am a little sad that it's over, and maybe I'll revisit
it later. Ostschild came close to being what I wanted in a D&D
game; it was set in a realistic medieval milieu; it built on actual,
real world history, folklore, and mythology; and it drew all of that
into a coherent fantasy setting. Some concessions were made for D&D,
for the feel, or the rules, or the expectations of D&D gamers.
The only difference I might make is to change the rules set to
something like Lion & Dragon, although it's explicitly British
setting would require some retooling to make it fit the Holy Roman
Empire. Alternately I might consider running a very similar set up in
the British isles, I did lament a bit the choice of central European
location making the names of people and places a bit difficult for
both my gamers and myself to pronounce, given our American English
speaking backgrounds.
I have been running a new
AD&D game set in my old Garnia setting. I did TPK the party once
there already, maybe three sessions in, but they dusted themselves
off like troopers, made new characters and we're on our 5th
session with new new PCs now. I adapted “Horror on the Hill” for
play in my campaign world, and it's been fun so far (despite the
TPK).
I do have some more
campaign specific stuff to hand out to them, currently they are aware
of the Celtic theme of the setting, and it's set in my
“post-apocalyptic” timeline, where all of the old kingdoms were
overrun and destroyed by the forces of evil. Their characters are
descendants of the refugees that fled the main continent to the
relative safety of an isolated island I am calling Avalon in the
eastern ocean. Now their people are seeking to explore and resettle
the ancient lands of their ancestors. The biggest surprise is that
not all of the humans, elves, etc. were wiped out completely, so
there are pockets of pretty hardy survivors there, although they have
often descended into barbarism due to the circumstances of their own
ancestors survival.
The humanoids and other
evil forces have become extremely disunited in the centuries
following their victory, and have squabbled greatly over the spoils
amongst themselves, which is probably why there are pockets of
survivors.
Anyway, we've been doing
this since January, and it's April now, so I thought I'd blog about
it. I still need to put together a list of Celtic names, they
actually requested it. I need to write up documents for Elves,
Halflings and Gnomes. I already had one I made last year for Dwarves
when I was running my “Lost Atlantis” campaign online, it needed
just a bit of editing to remove the Roman stuff, it's still the same
campaign world, but the other side of the main continent. Atlantis
was kind of an inspiration for Avalon in this campaign, an island
appearing where none was before and all, only with Avalon it was
placed there when the forces of good needed a place to retreat to.
