A New Campaign Setting

I have been working on a new campaign setting, on and off, for much of the last year. I intended that it should be used for my Swords & Wizardry campaign that never quite got off the ground, before I moved across the state in July. I call it "Shattered Empire", and it's a setting that could easily be used for "Lamentations of the Flame Princess", due to it's human-centric nature and it's semi-Lovecraftian feel. I almost went with LotFP when we started play, but jumped back to S&W because that was my starting point when I began the design. I also made fairly extensive use of Delving Deeper in the design, especially with regard to the monster list. Some bits of Carcosa were an inspiration too. I guess this works pretty well with any iteration of (A)D&D, with an emphasis on the original edition; or any retroclone, with a minimum of refitting. Anyway, here's a bit from the gazetteer for the primary campaign area- the most fleshed out part.

The Empire-

Official Name: The Manifest Empire of Divine Providence

The Empire was, at one time, a vast continent spanning entity; at the time of the Apocalypse the Empire was essentially destroyed and devolved into numerous small successor states. The heir to the old Empire that is considered the most legitimate is the one that still bears it’s name and it’s original title; even the other"mini-empires" that make up the bulk of the continental land-mass will grudgingly admit that “The Empire” is the one with it’s capitol at Whitehall and controls the great city of Neopolis. The Empire, for it’s part, still puts on airs like it is an immense entity, but in it’s darkest moments will admit that it is a shabby version of it’s ancestral self, unable to exert real control any further than the reach of it’s armies.

Despite having once been a republic, most positions within the empire have become hereditary – at both ends of the socio-economic spectrum. The powerful have become Dukes, Counts and Imperial Electors, the peasantry are attempting, without much success, to stave off the steady encroachment of hereditary serfdom.

The society of the empire has evolved to have a distinct split between it’s urban and rural components, with power largely residing in the rural and prestige with the urban. The urban citizens of the empire consider their rural brethren to be uncultured, uneducated, rude hicks. The rural folk consider the urbanites to be effete, lazy, corrupt fools. They are both essentially right.

Think of it like a cross between the late Roman empire and any decadent bit of Hyboria, only with extra-dimensional and cross-time pockets leaking in and the elder gods starting to sleep less deeply. I also had recently supported the Kickstarter for Silent Legions just prior to starting on this and my wife was diagnosed with cancer, so it is a bit dark.

I have a lot more, I just thought I'd float this tiny bit to see if it was of any interest.

Which version of D&D do I like better? How about you?

     

 

I have consistently second guessed myself while I run (A)D&D games for my group about which version (or retroclone) I like better for play. I range between the simplicity and adaptability of S&W Whitebox and the complexity and completeness of 1^st edition AD&D (sometimes including “Unearthed Arcana”, but rarely anything later). Sometimes I decide a particular retroclone looks like it'll be good for what I want to play- I just started playing S&W Complete for instance, or I'd really like to play “Lamentations of the Flame Princess” (and so would a couple of my players) sometime soon.

I guess what it comes down to is that I like the adaptability of the early edition stuff based on OD&D and it's semi-gonzo SF additions to our standard fantasy fare. I like the simplicity and lower power level of OD&D, B/X and their clones. I have written a few rules sets now using S&W and B/X as a template. However, something in my head keeps dragging me back to 1^st edition AD&D (or Labyrinth Lord+ Advanced Edition Companion- more on this later). I suppose it's because that's my old default. When I was just starting to play AD&D was just arriving on the scene and B/X wasn't quite here yet (I actually started with Holmes Basic).

Now, the power creep/edition (larger HD, more powerful magic items, more special abilities) is what pulls me away from AD&D towards OD&D or B/X. The absolute familiarity with (and perhaps even mastery of) the rules set is what drags me back. My D&D formative years ran from 1980-85ish, AD&D OA makes it under the wire, and UA slips a bit in sometimes, but my core system has always been PH, DMG and MM.

I guess the power creep is something I never noticed before the 3e era, probably because my default system was 1^st edition and I never really looked at it objectively compared to the Holmes Basic and Cook/Marsh Expert sets. 2^Nd edition was largely the same as 1^st, only with a lot of inconsistent or unused (I am looking at you weapon vs. AC) rules being either tossed or overhauled. With this in mind, perhaps I should be playing either LL-AEC or straight 2^nd edition AD&D, but I can't fully commit to either of those systems because I know 1^st edition, with all it's warts & weirdnesses, it's Gygaxian purple-prose (a feature, not a bug- it immeasurably increased the vocabulary of pretty much everyone I knew), I have it practically memorized, even after all these years and anything I don't have memorized I can find in seconds in the book- no lengthy searches or game stoppage, and I know how to house rule it without breaking it in any way. Plus, I own multiple copies of all the books (including the premium reprints I got cheap on Ebay). I have given away complete core sets to my players that don't have them (another feature of Ebay- when I feel I am running low on extras for my table, I can usually find them really cheap there), and each of my kids has gotten a complete core set+ OA. My wife came with her own set.

But then I think about sub-classes, particularly Fighter sub-classes, which irritate me; why should a Fighter not be the best at fighting? Every other sub-class loses something, or at least fundamentally changes something, from the core class to make up for gaining their new abilities, not Rangers or Paladins though, so what's up with that? It's not that I hate the idea of Rangers and Paladins, and I get that it's harder to get the stats to be one of them and that they level slightly slower, but they still make better fighters than Fighters do, and that's what irks me. I don't take issue with creating a new subclass for the purposes of playing exactly the character class that you want to play even, I've made them in the past and I probably will again in the future. I am pretty sure that was the impetus behind the design of every AD&D sub-class. Think of them as customized class options for your role-playing needs.

Now, Labyrinth Lord +Advanced Edition Companion is a game that plays functionally identical to my experience with 1^st edition AD&D, my only real problems with using it as a go-to system are that I already own multiple copies of AD&D and it's B/X based, which means that I need 2 rulebooks and have to ignore a bunch of stuff from the first.

I guess what was trying doing here was get all of these stray thoughts down where I can see them and mull over my options, what it has, apparently, done was talk myself into running 1^st edition AD&D again, with the option of using retroclone ideas as house rule options. Thanks for reading, I am still open to suggestions and differing opinions, because I will, most likely, go back and forth on this for the next day or so before I run something for my oldest daughter Ashli and her boyfriend Rae who are coming to visit this weekend.

Now some other stuff that's been on my mind- if you were going to run a single adventure for three to five players and had access to pretty much every adventure published by TSR for Holmes Basic, B/X, BECMI and 1^st edition AD&D what would you run? I am missing a few from the end of the era, but I have most of them. I was thinking something tournament style, that'll give the group focus and a sense of urgency, plus they won't have to worry about losing a beloved character because these types of modules usually have a bunch of pregens included. I was also thinking something a little higher level, because we never get there in campaign play and I think that they might enjoy playing characters at level 9+ for a change. Not The Tomb of Horrors though, that's a straight out meat-grinder and I've seen parties with all experienced players die in the entryway.

Also, I was thinking about other game systems recently, especially the ones like GURPS that pretty much mandate during character creation how you are going to role-play your character and that's one of those things I've never actually seen the need to have enshrined in rules. Some people think that alignment is unrealistic and too much of a straight-jacket to your role-playing, in my experience these are the same people that want to see at least part of your character creation include at least some options for deciding how you must role-play your character. GURPS has a bunch of these, off the top of my head I can recall codes and berserkerism and addiction as role-playing options that grant you some tangible character creation bonus with a few rules on how you must then play your character as a trade off. I am not a huge fan of point-buy systems in general anyway, I kind of like some randomness in character generation and I don't think all PCs should be created equal (but with the option for a master min-maxxer to really work the rules to make a Frankenstein's monster of a PC).

I am also not a big fan of skill systems, I never saw the point. The way I see it, if you want to do something, you ask your DM if it's possible and he figures out whether or not it's at all possible and then determines how it should work. I guess it helps if you have some sort of background, like the secondary skills in the DMG; although those work best for humans, those are some tables that could use a redesign based on a PC's race, the region they come from (or where the campaign starts) and maybe the general tech level. I guess they'd be best tailor made for every DM's campaign world. Not that I don't use skill systems where appropriate, just not a fan. This is likely because of 2^nd edition AD&D's poorly thought out and ill-named Non-Weapon Proficiency system, which, while optional, was both over used and miss-used in my experience, all the while being extremely unnecessary. Yes, I realize that the 2^nd edition system is a direct descendant of the 1^st edition system which premiered in my beloved Oriental Adventures book, it's just that I am that contrary. Also, I hate that system and have eliminated it in my upcoming retroclone Samurai!, wherein I replace them with a set of backgrounds that grant you the ability to do certain things. But generally speaking, if you can give me a halfway decent reason why you should be able to do something, I usually let you. I base this on the fact that I can speak, read and write English, and to a lesser extent, French and Spanish. I can swim pretty well, do math (even some higher math) and all the other stuff I learned in public schools and just living in rural upstate NY. Usually, no matter how well I min-max a character, there is no way I can come close to what I could do even when I was a teen-ager, much less as an adult, and on top of all that, I am a pretty decent fighter, both armed and unarmed, and an ordained clergyman. That's right folks, I am dual-classed...

What about Henchmen, Hirelings, and other Retainers? I swore by them in the early days of playing D&D, not so much for the extra swords in the fight, but for handling the mundane stuff like carrying the light sources or acting as bearers for the loot we found, but we usually had a couple of “special” guys too, usually a Thief hired on to open locks and search for traps- oddly enough, even when we had Thieves in the party. You can't be too careful in the dungeon. Later, as the games started having more overland and wilderness type adventures, we started having people just for helping out with the horses (and staying with them while we went into dungeons) and some extra muscle to help out with guarding our camp. Now it seems like even the people I played with back in the day avoid them like the plague. I can understand (although not agree with) the notion that Henchmen are experience point and treasure leeches, but what about the ones that only get paid a pittance and don't get a ½ share of experience points? Plus it makes Charisma less of a dump stat if they are included in the game.

What's the deal with people not liking (A)D&D for more pure role-playing type game sessions? There's nothing stopping you from going all thespian with a D&D character, as a DM I actually will give an XP award or some other type of bonus as a reward for good role-playing, it's within my purview as DM. But some players insist that there is something inherent about D&D in particular that stunts role-playing. I don't get it. Sure D&D evolved from wargaming, and there was a certain wargame mentality to the role-playing by association. I don't hate that to be truthful, but I think that it is making less of the game than it can be. That said, there are some things that I can't stand to role-play like, say, buying equipment or any other mundane, somewhat boring task. Who wants to role-play mucking out stables or brushing down their horse? I don't, not as a player and not as DM; some stuff can be glossed over pretty easily and we don't lose anything by doing so. You probably want some real interaction the first time you meet the duke though, and maybe a bit when you are invited back for dinner. These role-playing vignettes are a great opportunity for mini-information dumps as a DM and I think that players and DMs alike should grasp the opportunity to try their hand at being more of a thespian. The exchange between DM and players there can lead to some really cool ideas for your campaign heading down the road.

A new contest

First, I'd like to say that falling out of the habit of regularly blogging blows; it's like taking a break from college, or quitting exercising for a while- it is so very hard to get back into the habit. Second, yet another apology to David, my wife has been driving around with your loot from my contests in the back of her minivan for something like a month now. Mea culpa, I should have taken care of it myself.

Art by Todd Lockwood.



Now, on to the contest, generously sponsored by Warlord Games (so far), I have a box of their Celtic Warriors, from their Hail Caesar line of products ready to send to the winner. I'll also throw in a copy of the AD&D 2nd edition "Celts Campaign Sourcebook" for 2nd place and, I guess, a pdf of same for 3rd place.

The contest, since it is October, is to get something Celtic and/or Horror themed (better if it's both), short adventure, long adventure, monster(s), anything that fits the theme and is OSR related, anything from B/X to AD&D to Call of Cthulu will be welcomed. Adventures will be judged by my small, elite group of players and myself, anything that can't really be classified as an adventure will be judged by the Council of Central NY Game Masters.

All entries should be received by midnight EST,October 31st and the winner(s) shall be announced sometime in early November. Authors retain the rights to their work, so feel free to publish it on drivethru RPG/RPG Now, I also make no claim to any art created for or used in your contest entries. Enter as many times as you want, at the end of the contest I'll put all the files together in a zip file and upload it to Dropbox or some other storage site.

Happy October!

What I have been doing lately...

Since last year, I've picked up a ton of OSR stuff in print- ranging from Expeditious Retreat Press' "Malevolent and Benign" to Lamentations of the Flame Princess' "Player Core Book: Rules and Magic", I also bought a whole lot of miniatures, mostly WWII and Ancient Romans and Gauls/Britons, for use with my B/X WWII game (still in early development) and 43 AD respectively. I also did something I expressly stated I wouldn't do, I bought the new Players Handbook (and the starter set, but even at 1/2 price I think it was a waste of money).  Oh, and I completed my 3rd edition Legend of the Five Rings RPG collection, and started on the 4th edition with the core rulebook.

Now, the new D&D surprised me, after Gen Con everyone was all raving about it, so curiosity got the better of me and I order it on Amazon, I haven't had a chance to look at really yet, because my lovely wife Mona has been reading through it.  Oh, and I also bought a ton of Pendragon stuff, from 1st edition through 5.1, I kind of felt like I had to when I found "The Great Pendragon Campaign" for a mere $60.00US in a game store in Germany, 1st (only?) printing, mint condition. I actually want to run some Pendragon now, but I haven't figured out how to go about it. I am considering PBEM because my gaming group has grown up and gone to college and moved out of the house. I only have my youngest, Ember, left here now and she'll be gone in a couple of years.

I suppose I should have seen it coming, this isn't the first time I've lost pretty much my whole gaming group because they grew up and moved away. The last time it was my brother Jon's friends, he's nine and a half years younger than me, so I was in my mid-to-late twenties when I ran AD&D (2nd edition, they were oddly reticent to play 1st edition) for those lads. Eventually I switched to 3rd edition, but they were mostly gone by then. I ran Hackmaster (4th edition)  for a while after I gave up on D&D, really it's the first retroclone though, right? Anyway, my oldest two children have moved on, although John is forced out of the dorm for holidays and between semesters, so I see him then. Ashli calls a couple of times a week usually.

 In theory I am still working on a super-hero genre RPG based on Joshua Guess' book Next (and it's impending sequels), but I haven't really been doing much of anything but playing "Civilization 5", "Mount and Blade" and the "Panzer General" clone "Panzer Corps", and by playing Civ5, I really mean working on a mod. "Mount and Blade" is great, because it's a sandbox RPG, but I became mightily peeved with it on Sunday when my saved game corrupted, why didn't I think to do alternating save slots? I tried starting over, but that kind of blows. I am accustomed now to being the most powerful lord in my Kingdom, who single-handedly  brought the other four Kingdoms (OK, one is a Khanate) of Calradia to their knees, commanding armies of 4-500 elite troops. I was an axe-wielding god of death, now bandits can beat my ass and take me prisoner.

"Panzer Corps" continues to please though, it has all of the good turn based strategy of "Panzer General"- even the maps look the same and the controls are identical, but the scenarios in the Grand Campaign are different enough from PG to be fresh and challenging.

Anyway, it's late here and I am rambling, so I'll just mention that I also got a couple of different flavors of "Swords and Wizardry" and bought everything available for the "Basic Fantasy" RPG. I am going to sign off for tonight and I'll try to start posting more again. Before I was blogging about gaming almost every day, but when you take year off the habit gets broken, now I have to reinstate it.

It's been over a year...

It's been over a year since I wrote anything for this blog, and it was a sit spotty for about a year before that. I tried to keep things going for a while, but I was much more greatly affected by the death of my sister than I could have ever imagined. I've really screwed up my credibility by failing to deliver prizes to a bunch of contest winners, for which I have no excuse. I still have all of the prizes, and if I owe you one, and you are still reading my blog, contact me and I'll get them to you.

I haven't really gamed at all for roughly the same period of time, but now I am in a better place and want to DM again. I am thinking Lamentations of the Flame Princess, mostly because I want to step out of the generic quasi-western European fantasy D&D mold, while still actually using a game system I am familiar with. I picked up a couple of the modules for it, and I had a few more and a pdf of the Grindhouse edition (and Vornheim) but when my last computer finally died, at the age of eleven, I lost my LotFP stuff, but they have a free version available on RPG Now/Drive through RPG, so I guess I'll print that out. Anyone in the Northern Central NY area want to play?

I am also working on another RPG based on Joshua Guess' Next with my long time collaborator Darryl Cook and my lovely wife Mona AKA Saint Mona the Patient, who keeps me out of jail. It's good to be working on projects again, but Darryl really has the lead on this one. Baby steps back out into the world. Speaking of Darryl and me working on RPG stuff together, 43 AD is now available in print on demand format on LULU, we play-tested it and edited it, the author is Paul Elliot, the man behind Zozer Games.

James Raggi- my wife would like to do some art for you.

I guess that's all I have to say for now. I know it's been a while, and you'd think I'd have more, but I've had a rough couple of years. Be well everyone, and I'll try to make this a regular thing again, but I am a little out of the loop right now, so I need to do some catching up on OSR related news (I could really not care less about the new edition of D&D)

As Requested, My Curriculum Vitae-

Pictured - Mona and I at our big SCA wedding with the kids, Ash was had turned 12 then and Em had just turned 7 earlier in the month, John was still 9.

My name is William Dowie. I am a 43 year old white man from the rural northern edge of central New York state, on Lake Ontario. I am a giant history nerd, in college I majored in history with a focus on Classical Antiquity and the European Middle Ages, I minored in Medieval and Renaissance Studies. I also took a bunch of Anthropology courses, but not enough to count as a second major. I am 6'6" tall and I have worked as a substitute teacher, short order cook, bouncer, machinist and convenience store clerk, just to name a few. I speak French passably well, Spanish slightly less so, and can usually guess my way through written Italian or Latin. I have tried to teach myself Scots Gaelic, much less successfully, but can pick out a number of written words on sight and sometimes recognize words when I hear them. Oddly enough I can pick out Welsh words now just as easily when they are cognates to the Scots Gaelic words I know, I see patterns in language easily.

I am married to a wonderful woman named Mona and we have three children; Ashli (19), John (17) and Ember (14), who were literally left on our doorstep when they were 11, 9 and 6 respectively. We live on a small, mostly forested plot of land in New Haven, New York - which is north of Syracuse and east of Rochester, nearest to the smaller city of Oswego, NY - where I continue to scheme ways to homestead and get off the grid, mostly because I hate the high cost of electricity in a county with three nuclear power plants, and I want healthier food than I can buy from the store, with the bonus that it'll be cheaper too. I have been frustrated in my attempts to clear my land because it's a lot harder to do than you would think, I have a lot more respect for pioneers now, especially since they did it with no power tools at all. I also have some valuable lumber that I can't seem to get anyone to harvest because my lot is too small and the presence of my house and the power lines along the edge of the road make it too difficult to be worth it, so apparently I need the price of Cherry to rise back to the level it was before our economic collapse to attract loggers.

I have been playing board wargames and D&D since 1980, when my friend Chris introduced me to both the week that we went to see Excalibur together with my dad. We played SPI's Sorcerer that weekend, because he had brought it over to my house and played D&D with him DMing before the week was out using the Holmes Basic rules. I went out and bought a set as soon as I could save up the money, maybe a month later. For a long time after that pretty much all of my money went into my D&D habit in some way or another, books, modules, Dragon Magazine, "official" Grenadier miniatures.

I found the SCA while the local group was doing a demo at the Sterling Renaissance Festival in Sterling, NY back in 1983 when I was 14, I have drifted in and out of the SCA ever since. I am currently missing Pennsic for my 41st time in a row. Something always comes up. Not that it matters anymore, I have passed my fighting prime and I don't think it's coming back no matter how hard I try. I keep resolving to make it to fighter practice more often and get back into my "Crown Tourney" rhythm, but that just isn't going to happen at my age anymore. I don't heal quick enough to fight six days a week anymore. That and I can't afford the gas money for the hundreds of extra miles per week I'd be putting on my minivan to go to all of the extra fighter practices and events. Still, I have made a lot of good friends in the SCA over the years and some great memories, I am happy to have been there for what I did and I wish I could do more still.

1985 was the year of the release of the 1st edition AD&D Oriental Adventures book, it's one of those books that you either love despite it's warts or you hate because of them. I love that book and it's probably because it's the only AD&D book I ever pre-ordered at Twilight Book & Game Emporium in Syracuse, NY - a sadly long gone FLGS. Despite the fact that the glue cracked on the binding causing several pages to become loose literally the first time I opened it, I was determined to get my money's worth out of it. Before my friend Tim left for Basic training in the US army the next year I took over DMing duties from him, which I had only rarely done before, and we played an epic OA campaign. I have played in one pretty epic OA campaign, as a Steppe Barbarian named Chanar Ilkhan, and DMed a few more since. One of my current projects is rewriting the OA book as I think it should have been.

As a side note, I was really anti-Rokugan because they changed the default setting in the 3e version of the Oriental Adventures book to Rokugan from Kara-Tur, and that made me, by default, anti-Legend of the Five Rings. I had been strongly attracted to the setting through AEG's Clan War miniature battle game prior to that, but hadn't bought into it at the time because I could not find at least one other person that was willing to also jump on board with me and had been burned by miniature games that way in the past. Now I am happy to say I have come full circle because I started buying old Clan War miniatures on EBay for my OA campaign and ended up getting the rules, which made me interested in the setting, which made me interested in the RPG, which got me to buy the new board game, which led me to buy some CCG cards too. I have even read through some of the published fiction, and, until it was shut down recently, was playing in a Facebook app version of the RPG called Emerald Empire. I really hated the 3e version of Oriental Adventures.

I played (A)D&D, tried out some other RPGs and wargamed a lot through the 1980s and into the 1990s. Wargaming kind of died in the 1990s (except on the PC, it boomed there), and I concentrated on just RPGs, then just D&D. Sometime after 3rd edition D&D came out, after the novelty wore off for me, I realized I disliked DMing it rather intensely. I was a little late coming to the 3rd edition party, because my D&D group was happy with 2nd edition and we didn't switch over until that campaign died. At the time, I had grown bored with 2nd edition AD&D and welcomed the change, although several things bothered me from the beginning; the faster rate of rising in level was a big one and I missed real multi-classing. I took me a while though, and DMing for several different groups, to realize the worst part was that it neutered the DM. My original AD&D groups, who were familiar with my fast and loose, shoot from the hip DMing style were OK with me making rules calls on the fly when none of us had any idea how something was supposed to work in the new system; we'd keep the game moving and I could look it up later. We might even like my way better. The other groups had people who STUDIED the rules though; at first, every time I made a ruling I'd see disapproving looks, eventually they got brave enough to start offering suggestions as to the right way to handle the situation.

So I quit DMing and let one of them DM in each group. Neither group lasted much longer. One started a new campaign and it was just too railroad-ey, I actually started stress testing that campaign to see what would happen if my character deliberately did things that were contrary to the predestined storyline. My character got punished, he made minor alterations to his storyline, but nothing seriously bad could ever happen to us, so, eventually, as a group we got bored and quit. The other guy just took over my game where I left off and had me make a character that would take his place. He had been unlucky in my game and died several times, but I assume that was because he kept making wuss characters, Rogues and Bards. I made a Barbarian, it was fun while it lasted, we went from 8th to 11th level with him at the helm, then he TPKed the party.

I took a break for a while, despaired over playing D&D again, then picked up Hackmaster. I ran a pretty fun Hackmaster game for a while and that was what led me to realize that I should just go back to playing 1st edition AD&D. That was the year we got the kids though, so I wasn't done with 3rd edition - when they decided they were interested in learning to play D&D, they wanted to play the newest version, 3.5 at the time. I gritted my teeth and went with it, anything to get kids into gaming. I have been walking them back in home games for years now, and have only recently discovered the Moldvay Basic half of B/X myself. Back in the day I bought the Expert Boxed Set when it came out, but I never got the Moldvay Basic Set that matched it because I already had a Basic Set, the Holmes Basic Set. So we've been playing that a bit lately, but my home games are pretty much at a stand-still right now, almost everyone that doesn't live here is too busy to come over and play, and everyone that does live here doesn't want to play with just their mom and dad, brother and/or sister. John is still gaming this summer, he's in a regular 4th edition D&D game with some guys he goes to school with and I am playing Dawn Patrol semi-regularly with Darryl & his dad, John and Dalton. We also recently tried out the Legend of the Five Rings 1st edition RPG here at the house. I am trying to start a game of 43 AD and it's supplement Warband, but the start has been plagued by bad luck and poor coordination of schedules.

I have always run my D&D games in my own "World of Garnia" fantasy setting as a default. It's my Greyhawk, my buddy Darryl and I have been working on this on and off for decades, we're doing a serious reboot of the entire setting and discussing it on my other blog. The primary idea for the campaign is that a group of Celts fled the Roman onslaught to this new world, the world of the Sidhe (Elves) where magic works. The main campaign area is one where their culture has flourished. I designed it originally using the core 1st edition AD&D rules, so there are a lot of 1st edition AD&D assumptions in the setting, but I am trying to make the setting system neutral so that it can be played with any FRPG system. When we have finished the maps and gazetteers they'll be released for use. Currently we're working on the whole world, then we plan to "drill down" and do specific regions. I will also most likely release the adventures that I have written for the setting over the years, it's just finding and transcribing all of the stuff, then updating it to match the current standard is going to be a chore.

By now you are probably wondering where all this "Great Khan" stuff comes from, right? Well back in 1996 my buddy Darryl and I were living most of a continent apart and wanted to play some D&D together. He had played a lot of the SSI Gold Box D&D games starting with "Pool of Radiance" when it came out and we were both new to the internet and on AOL at the time where they had a game called "Neverwinter Nights" that ran using the same engine, but was multi-player, up to 300 I think it was. I guess that makes it the first MMORPG, it was great fun anyway. Darryl was more savvy than me and figured out the best way to advance in the game was through guild membership, so we duly joined a guild together. ERS, the Explorers of the Rising Sun, who made us create new Screen Names, because that was your character's name in the game, and everyone in the guild was named ERS something. I was ERS Garn, Darryl was ERS Frodal, we were named after deities I had created for my Garnia campaign world.

But then we realized, being ambitious adventurers, that ERS was there to help newbies find their bearings and, in general, be nice; and we wanted to move up the food chain in NWN. So we decided to create our own guild, which would, even though it was a gamble, make us guild leaders and let us take charge of our destinies and how we wanted to play the game. We needed a hook though, and that's where our collective history nerdity took over, we decided to play as Mongols, because we wanted to send out a strong challenge to the status quo in all of the guilds and it was unique in NWN to play a culturally oriented guild, unless that culture was a fantasy one. Mostly I think we chose the Mongols though because I was playing them at the time in Civilization. Partly I think we picked them because we both loved the NES game Genghis Khan*, Darryl and I used to spend weekends playing that game together. We also both liked the Mongol reputation for ass-kickery and conquest. Then we studied and studied some more, at this point I think that our kids could hold their own at a conference of Mongol Medieval History scholars.

Anyway, the Steppe Warriors were born. Technically, since NWN is in the Forgotten Realms, we were members of the, at the time, recently defeated Tuigan Horde that decided to march west rather than return east. Darryl was our first Khakhan with his character SW Ogotai, named after one of the sons of Genghis Khan, the reasoning was that he could afford to be online more often (remember this was when you paid/minute of use) because I was in school at the time, and he was a better recruiter. My character was named SW Jagatai, also after a son of Genghis Khan. Ultimately Darryl resigned the position of Khakhan and I was elected to fill it. We've had our highs and lows as a group, and we're pretty dormant now, but I have been Jagatai, Khakhan of the Steppe Warriors since 1997 on the internet, so when I named the blog and when I created my initial Blogger account, I just naturally went with the same motif. My Yahoo email address is still SWJagatai at yahoo dot com, created in the same era. Back when I was sure we were going to leap from AOL's NWN into the expanding universe of MMOs I registered three domain names, steppewarriors.com, steppewarriors.org and steppewarriors.net; I used to joke that they would soon be followed by steppewarriors.edu and steppewarriors.gov. Clearly things didn't turn out as well for the Steppe Warriors as I had anticipated in the late 1990s.

Ultimately, I am pretty pleased with my alternate persona. In doing the research to properly play a Mongol character I have learned a great many things about the Mongols and other steppe peoples. I have eaten a bunch of Mongol food, drank Kumiss, shot arrows from a composite bow (not while mounted though), been in a yurt and made friends with a bunch of people that I otherwise probably never would have met. When I think about how it could have gone another way, if I'd been playing a different Civilization that day when Darryl and I were talking on the phone, or if he and I hadn't played so much of Koei's Genghis Khan together and he hadn't been as receptive to the idea, or maybe it was the fact that he had played in one of my epic Oriental Adventures campaigns that made him cool with the idea. If Darryl hadn't signed on for Mongols, we might have been a Samurai guild or a Viking guild or a Celt guild, they were all infinitely more familiar to both of us at the time; or maybe we'd have gone with something lame like a Dark Elf Ranger guild, who knows?

At any given time I usually have more irons in the fire than is wise, so many of my projects get back-burnered until I get back around to them. Currently I have on hold an Oriental Adventures campaign that just kind of fizzled when it was starting to get good, I had converted the Temple of Elemental Evil for OA and made it the Black Temple from OA1. I have a B/X Viking campaign that stopped when two of my regular adult players got new jobs. I have a B/X conversion for WW II that I spent a lot of time working on last summer, but my regular group, which is mostly my wife and kids and family friends, was lukewarm about play-testing it. I'd say it's an early alpha level right now. I am working on a total rewrite of the 1st edition OA book, kind of recasting it in a form I find more desirable. I just started learning the L5R RPG, I am GMing and the party is about 1/2 way through the adventure in the back of the book, I still haven't found the fumble rule. I have announced several times, prematurely, the start of my 43 AD campaign, so while that should be starting soon, I am going to not say when just in case something happens again. Mostly though, right now, getting a lot of my time behind the scenes, is the reworking of my old Garnia campaign world. We've made some interesting progress on it. I also have a bunch of OSR stuff piling up on my to read list, making me wish I had bought hard copies rather than pdfs because I mostly hate reading off my monitor, but that's where my copies of "Lamentations of the Flame Princess", "Carcosa", "Vornheim", "Adventurer, Conqueror, King", and several other major releases are sitting waiting to be read.

*Out of all of Koei's strategy games for the NES, Genghis Khan had the best multi-player play, Nobunaga's Ambition and Romance of the Three Kingdoms were too slow, and Nobunaga's Ambition II had the annoying "siege mode" in battle.

Not for nothing...

...But when I showed this picture to my youngest daughter Ember, we both agreed that it kind of reminded us of her. It looks like her a bit and has her attitude. Lamentations of the Flame Princess has certainly been an interesting look at old school gaming, and it's had a pretty good effect on my blog, I get a lot of hits from Finland. But I think it's starting to seep into my daughter's brains, or maybe it's just that Raggi and I are a little too alike and they'd be what his daughters would be like?

Next Question- If you had to pick an old school Star Trek game to play, would you go with FASA's Star Trek RPG and it's associated Starship Tactical Combat Simulator or Task Force Games/Amarillo Design Bureau's Federation & Empire/Star Fleet Battles/Prime Directive? I know that Prime Directive made it on to the scene a little late, but I also know that the Tactical Combat Simulator was a later add-on. Both games suffer from having to make up a lot of new Star Trek material and extrapolate from what they had available at the time, SFB/PD is still in print, although PD has undergone numerous rules changes from d20 to GURPS to the upcoming Traveler,they are still restricted by their license to ONLY use elements of Star Trek from the original series, the animated series and what they snuck in from some of the original series cast movies; everything elsethey were forced to make up as they went along. FASA did the same thing, only with a better, but more restrictive license until they got smacked down for assuming that Star Trek: The Next Generation was covered by the same license. So which old school Star Trek game do you prefer and why?

I only ask because I already had this.

But this came in the mail today.

And so did this.

All of these miniatures came today too, a good many Celts, always good for my Garnia campaign; and some Norse and Normans, which should be handy in most other cases, as well as in Garnia.