A cool bit of Erol Otus Art to set the mood.
So lately I have been running an Old
School Essentials (B/X) campaign centered around Stonehell Dungeon.
We're 10+ sessions in, have had several PC deaths along the way, and
about half finished with the dungeon's first level (the north half).
I created a pretty half baked new campaign world for it, just a
nearby town to rest and resupply at, with a steady flow of
Meatshields created help to hire on. Essentially dungeon/town. Kind
of Keep on the Borderlands inspired.
I am not going to lie, it's a tad
outside my comfort zone, and I keep forgetting to do some standard
megadungeon stuff, like track torch/oil use. I also need to start
restocking the dungeon some in the cleared areas. I have been running
overland/political adventures with smaller locations and dungeons,
mostly using AD&D for a long, long time now, and that's how I am
comfortable. I am still getting used to the more frail characters in
OSE (B/X), and the save or die poisons are somehow also a bit of a
shock to me (that's killed a few PCs and NPCs now), despite their use
in AD&D as well. Maybe I have been relying on using my own
material for too long, and subconsciously avoiding the use of
poisons?
I have traditionally preferred to use
my own settings and adventures to run games, so running any canned
adventure is going to be a bit of a challenge for me. They make me
less certain somehow, like I am always thinking I missed or forgot
something, and sometimes it's true. I have occasionally screwed up an
encounter, or missed a locked door (or added one) or any of a number
of other minor things here and there when running other people's
adventures over the years. The one page dungeon format works pretty
well for me, what with all the relevant information being right
there, and being pretty close to how I write stuff for myself to run.
That said, my stuff could never be run by anyone else, my adventures
are more like notes used to trigger my own memories, and I change
things on the fly to fit what we're doing or because I got a better
idea in the moment pretty often. Plus sometimes I just make stuff up
along the way, I have gotten pretty good at things like turning a
random encounter in to something that seems like an important planned
encounter, and random lair generation in my head on the fly.
Anyway, that's what I have been running
lately, Stonehell.
I do have a contest coming up here on
the blog though, and I am running a poll to see what the theme will
be. There's a poll in the Facebook Group running, if you don't have
FB just comment here on what you'd like to see and I'll add the votes
here to the poll tally. The poll choices are Celtic, Norse, Roman,
East Asian (China/Korea/Japan), Mongol, Norman/Crusader, Greek,
Egyptian, Gonzo D&D, and “Straight up D&D (No Theme)”.
You can also add a category to the poll if you like, suggest it here
and I'll add it there too, Voting through the weekend, I'll do the
final tally Monday morning; vote for your favorites, but no more than
three please!
Gonzo!
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