What are you playing?

[Harley Stroh]

Harley, if only Ragnar1965 & one other shows for part of this, we'll continue with Legacy of the Savage Kings. Of course I've got to get the module back from Jim who took it to GenCon for me. We've still not got together!

You're killing me. I need to know how it ends.

3-day gaming fest. I'm envious.

//H

[gideon_thorne]

I haven't kept up on Gygax after TSR did its thing. Can anyone recommend a good, recent Gygax work?

He's god emeritus and all, but is the newer work as cool as the old stuff?

You might check the Troll Lord Games (www.trolllord.com) website. There's a whole load of Gygax stuff there.

[Rick Maffei]

My main gang is gearing up for Gygax's Necropolis.

Brave folks! The end of Necropolis makes the Tomb of Horrors look like a day at the beach!

[JediOre]

They'll love it.

"Certainty of death; small chance off success...what are we waiting for?"
Although a quote from Gimli in the Return of the King movie, this is a great expression of the way my friend Trevor plays. He often suceeds.

To be honest, I'm not a killer DM. I'll not let them walk into a total death trap without it being an "informed decision."

[tacojohn4547]

Right now, I feel like I'm near the center of some kind of gravity well of old school gaming. Here is a quick rundown of the games I'm running or playing in.

Return to the Wilderlands -
My reunion tour 1E campaign with old friends from high school, using their actual characters from the early 1980's (some are their original characters). The party ranges from 6th level to 12th level, and has six player characters and two henchmen. The party is making its way slowly through Rappan Athuk.

Bradrealms -
A 1E Forgotten Realms campaign in which the DM is teaching his two kids (pre-teens) how to play D&D. I'm playing with them to flesh out the party's composition, and to help keep the game moving along. We've gone through Sunless Citidel and a couple of homebrew dungeons. We just started the Shackled City Adventure Path.

D&D Juniors -
A new OD&D campaign that I started to teach my 6 year old daughter, two other youngsters, and their parents how to play D&D. We're using a loose version of the Mentzer Basic rules and are about half-way through The Forgotten Sentinel from DCC #29 The Adventure Begins.

Tomhawk -
A quasi-homebrew AD&D campaign using several of the classic Greyhawk adventures and old school thinking. We started with T1 Village of Homlet, then got sidetracked. We hope to eventually get back to this campaign and head for the Temple of Elemental Evil.

New Wilderlands/Greyhawk campaign -
This is a new 1E AD&D campaign that we'll be starting this fall. The players will mostly be from the Return to the Wilderlands campaign, but will include a few newcomers to our gaming circle (including Grodog!!!). The player characters will start out at 3rd or 4th level, in my Wilderlands world. I'm going to take them through Caverns of Thracia, an adventure I've owned since it was released by Judges Guild but never ran. At the end of Thracia, the player characters should be 8th or 9th level, and will have discovered some means of travelling to another plane....................

..........which will happen to be Grodog's World of Greyhawk. From there, the player characters will get to explore Maure Castle's many levels. Grodog and I will be alternating between DMing and getting to play as players.

WrathofCon -
A monthly open gaming night where we've ran one- and two-session adventures with throw away characters. We've averaged 12 players for every session, and have gone to having two DM's run two separate game tables. We've done Secrets of Saltmarsh, Return to the Lost Temple (JG/NG), a couple of home brews, and of course done the 1E playtest for Iron Crypt of the Heretics (DCC #12.5) and the playtest for The Tower of Blood, Rob Kuntz's second release under the Pied Piper Publishing label.


Lots and Lots of AD&D goodness!

tacojohn4547

[jason.richardson]

It makes me happy to see all the AD&D campaigns you have going tacojohn4547! Very cool. I would love to find enough players to run an OD&D campaign. I’m jealous.

As for myself, about a month ago I dropped my long-running D&D v.3.5 campaign. As the player's characters starting reaching the 12th level mark, prep time became too much of a bear for me. I love to write plots and develop NPCs, not crunch numbers.

So, my players agreed to play some AD&D. I'm very excited as this is my fantasy game system of choice. So far everyone seems to be enjoying themselves. Tonight is our second session.

I'm using the world of Áereth as the setting.

You can visit my blog to read about our first session:

EDIT: I CANCELED THE BLOG; TOO MUCH TIME TO KEEP THAT UPDATED!

As for other games I’m playing, I love to play Pirates of the Spanish Main and ZOMBIES!!!

-jason

[JediOre]

I'm very sorry for such a late reply to your question WarDuke.

E. G. Gygax's Necropolis published for 3.0 by Necromancer Games is great!

He has also working on Castle Zagig for Troll Lords using Castles & Crusades.

I recommend both of these hands down.

[tadk]

No real active games at this time
If I had my druthers though

Would be Etherscope
and my own homebrew fantasy / steampunkish like setting

Other than that not a lot of interest save in Iron Kingdoms on the d20 front for me.

I am like d20 Modern over 3.0/3.5 the more I use that book.

I would love some decent crunchy pretty realisitic SF someday though.

[Philotomy Jurament]

Just curious what sort of d20 stuff people are playing lately, in addition to our stuff.

I'm running C&C (some in Wilderlands, some with Yggsburgh). Other material I'm using includes:
OSRIC modules
Judges Guild material (from any source -- old JG, Necromancer Games material, your material, etc)
Old B/X and AD&D modules from TSR
Some Necromancer Games d20 material (e.g. Barakus, Rappan Athuk).

[Argamae]

I am currently running an DCC/Áereth campaign with 3.5.

Apart from that:
- a C&C campaign (on Mystara) with lots of D&D old school modules
- a Blue Planet (GURPS 4th) campaign
- a Bloodshadows campaign (using the D6 System from WEG)

In the planning stages: PTOLUS!

[Jengenritz]

Aside from playtests for forthcoming modules X and Y, that Mutants & Masterminds game we rolled up characters for a while back turned into a Heroes system game, so I'm playing that.
Man is THAT a change of gears from 3.5 - I keep expecting attacks of opportunity! - but it's a fun game.

[j_vedamuthu]

one group--the newbies--are working their way through WotC's Shattered Gates of Slaughtergarde. the body count has been high: they're at fourth level and four characters have bought it so far.

the grognards are going to be introduced to the Citadel of the Demon Prince (DCC 18) a week from Sunday. they think they're tough, but it'll be a grind.

[Philotomy Jurament]

I'm running C&C (some in Wilderlands, some with Yggsburgh).

I've also started running a Holmes-based B4 - The Lost City game.

[Hind]

I'm just starting a new campaign heavily-laden with horror undertones and set in a grim low-magic world. There's a lot of conan influence here, with magic the work of corrupted individuals and moreoften than not the gift of a demonic entity. It will be heavy sword-and-sorcery.

The initial adventure sees the characters starting in their hometown, an isolated whaling port with angry seas on one side and the forboding Howling Heaths on the other. The village is dying; its small whaling vessels are no match for better equipped competitors from the city of Bilgewater, and lately some vessels don't return at all.

The adventure begins with a whaling vessel gliding lifelessly into the inlet. PCs are asked to investigate, and find its crew slaughtered (gutted, skinned, and hung-up like whale carcasses) and the ship pillaged.

They will be asked to track down the culprits and will brave a sea voyage that includes a sea-battle against a viscera squid (an abyssal creature whose body is composed of whale guts, its tentacles the intestines). They track the killers to an isolated inlet and deal with the pirates.

Clues lead them back to their hometown and to the local church, decicated to the sea god. In the basement they find a shrine to the demon Farqu'ul, the bastard son of the god sea and an entity that endorses piracy against whalers. The village priest, a worshipper of Farqu'ul, has been aiding the pirates to keep himself well fed even as his congregants starve.

Of course, further clues might lead to a larger conspiracy in Bilgewater. But with their families and friends still struggling, will the PCs be able to resist the honeyed lures of Furu'ul or will they too embrace his tenets and become pirates? I know at least one player will be sorely tempted....

[Jengenritz]

^ that sounds like a ton of fun...I love horror-fantasy fusion.

[None the Wiser]

This year I decided to step up and DM a campaign, mostly to give my friend Matt a break from DMing, but also to try a non-WotC campaign setting for a change.

The DCC line appealed to me conceptually, but I knew that if my players started out at first level that they’d eventually want to take their characters all the way to epic level (most of them are power-gamers who are in it for the long haul). So I tried to string together a bunch of DCC titles that would take them as far as 16th level before I’d have to start designing my own adventures:

DCC#28 1-3 Into the Wilds
DCC#36 3-5 Talons of the Horned King
DCC#23 5-7 The Sunken Ziggurat
DCC#19 7-9 The Volcano Caves
DCC#12 9-11 The Blackguard’s Revenge
DCC#12.5 11-13 The Iron Crypt of the Heretics
DCC#31 14-16 Golden Palace of Zahadran

Matt had been DMing “Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil,” and we’d been walking around this immense caldera of caves and abandoned mines for months. So I wanted to mix it up a bit, try out some different terrains and environments. So I steered away from “Idylls of the Rat King” just because the cover blurb included the words “abandoned mines” on it. NO MORE MINES!

I had about 3 months to prepare, so I went the extra mile and created my own campaign setting called "The Temple of True North." It's geared to treat each DCC sort of like a Stargate SG-1 mission where a temple built by a forgotten race at the North Pole is basically Stargate Command. The underlying premise is that much of the world was depopulated by some sort of cataclysm and the Temple of True North has been taken over by a contingent of Lammasu trying to get to the bottom of what caused the “Great Catastrophe.” So they send out adventuring parties to remote locations of the world to explore, establish new trade routes, and search for clues as to what brought a former high-magic civilization to its knees. The Temple employs Divine Oracles (from the Complete Divine supplement) to go on vision quests for roads and rivers that might lead them to formerly inhabited areas.

I treated the Wildsgate adventure like a recon mission to discover the ultimate fate of a former adventuring party of the True North Trading Co. which had never returned from its initial expedition into the Wilds (eaten by cannibals, as it turned out). I like the idea of a largely unexplored world with very few large cities struggling to re-establish themselves. The True North Trading Company offers monetary rewards for completing successful missions, and sends along Divine Bards (Unearthed Arcana variation) to act as the party scribes (and to bring along free teleportation scrolls to help low level characters get back to the Temple after the adventure is over).

I just ordered the Aereth Gazetteer from Amazon.com, so maybe from now on the PC’s won’t have to guesstimate their proximity to the North Pole each time they teleport.

My game borrows heavily from WotC’s Unearthed Arcana supplement:

UA pages 18 thru 19 - Reducing Level Adjustments
UA pages 47 thru 64 - Variant Character Classes
UA pages 86 thru 91 - Character Traits / Character Flaws
UA pages 94 thru 97 - Weapon Group Feats (all)
UA pages 111 thru 112 - Armor as Damage Reduction
UA pages 115 thru 118 - Vitality and Wound Points
UA pages 152 thru 153 - Spontaneous Metamagic
UA page 40 - Skilled Half-Elves
UA page 64 - Spontaneous Domain Casting
UA page 153 - Daily Spell List
UA page 73 - Fractional Base Bonuses

We also started with these WotC books as core material for extra feats and prestige classes:

Complete Divine
Complete Arcane
Complete Warrior
Complete Adventurer

All Player Characters are limited to 3 total Character Classes until Epic Level (21st). The 2 point bonus on strongest base saves (Fort / Reflex / Will) granted at first level is only counted once per save. (i.e. - bonuses granted for the same save type at 1st lvl. via Multi-Classing will not stack). Without these limitations my power-gamers would go nuts and multi-class upwards of 6 prestige classes. I’ve seen them do it in Matt’s game. Also, no Bloodlines allowed.

After the end of each adventure, the party has a chance to nominate and vote in a new supplement. The first addition to the core book set was The Book of Exalted Deeds. The PCs also have their eyes set on the Complete Champion and the Magic Item Compendium.

We have embraced 3.5 wholeheartedly but have had a surprisingly difficult time finding adventures that aren’t set in some completely wacky campaign setting. Why doesn’t WotC release straight-up Greyhawk adventures like they did during the 3.0 release? Goodman Games has been a life-saver in that regard! My players really enjoyed the Wildsgate adventure and I even received compliments such as: “the most fun adventure I’ve played since 3.5 came out.” (though one should bear in mind that they could just be trying to butter me up so I’ll keep DMing for them. )

I started out with four players but now I have six loyal DCC fans who don’t show any signs of loosing interest any time soon. If GG keeps on releasing ‘em, I’ll keep on running ‘em! Cheers!

[Harley Stroh]

Wise,

That is such a cool game. We'll try to get you some new level 17+ adventures out before your PCs get there.

//H

[None the Wiser]

Wise,

That is such a cool game. We'll try to get you some new level 17+ adventures out before your PCs get there.

//H

You better hurry, 'cause right now I plan to send the party back to a Drow-infested Wildsgate to "storm the castle" at near-epic level. Unfortunately (for them) an ambitious Drow priestess has discovered a Kra-Dhan artifact that can generate an anti-magic field with a 1000ft. radius, so they're going to have to storm the Great Gate without any spells or enchanted equipment unless Goodman Games can come up with an alternative adventure in the nick of time.

[Harley Stroh]

Sweet adventure!

... it is self-serving, but I can't wait to see the maps you do for a wicked drow citadel.

//H

[Mike_Ferguson]

Wise,

Sounds like you've got a phenomenal campaign going. Wish I could be a player in your group!!

Keep us posted as to how everything develops. I like how you're linking the various DCCs together.

-Mike

[SavageRobby]

Nowhere near as innovative as None the Wiser's, I'm getting ready to start a new C&C campaign, in the Wilderlands, using primarily DCC modules. I chose the Wilderlands because of its Sword and Sorcery feel (moreso than the Aereth, which I strongly considered), and will be making a few house rules to support the S&S feel.

The basic back story (very obviously stolen from many sources, as you'll see) is that every 500 years or so, the stars align just so, the Wild Hunt appears in various backwater locations, and the Hunt for the [some ancient relic, basically a metaplot mcguffin] begins. The Hunt lasts about 10 years, as adventurers seek out the [mcguffin relic]. No one is really sure of what the [mcguffin relic] does - it is said to have vast magical power, even perhaps make the [wielder/bearer/user/blower/whatever] into a god! But its been 4000 years since the last time it was found. Legend states the [mcguffin relic] is hidden somewhere in one of the many ruins/dungeons scattered across the landscape of the Wilderlands.

I'm not sure where in the Wilderlands they're going to start yet (lots of choices ... oh my goodness are there a lot of choices), but I do know the group is going to start with #35A Halls of the Minotaur (as 1st level C&C characters), and then go to #2 Lost Vault of Tsathzar Rho following that. I'm planning on mixing in the plot line of #14 Dungeon Interludes as well, and they are definitely going to have a trip to Wildsgate (#28 Into the Wilds - and we'll be using None the Wiser's fantastic art for that) and deal with the Rat King (#1 Idylls of the Rat King and later, #27 Revenge of the Rat King).

[Scottenkainen]

My last campaign was 1st ed. AD&D, ending in a heavily-modified Mordenkainen's Fantastic Adventure (better known as the first Dungeon installment of "Maure Castle" to newcomers) for 6 7th-9th level PCs.

My new campaign is going to be 2nd ed. AD&D, starting with the classic B1 Keep on the Borderlands (with additional material from Return to Keep on the Borderlands and Little Keep on the Borderlands).

~Scott "-enkainen" Casper

[Treebore]

one group--the newbies--are working their way through WotC's Shattered Gates of Slaughtergarde. the body count has been high: they're at fourth level and four characters have bought it so far.

the grognards are going to be introduced to the Citadel of the Demon Prince (DCC 18) a week from Sunday. they think they're tough, but it'll be a grind.

Hey, I am adapting this to C&C and running it this weekend until its over, one way or the other.

Any advice on what may be surprisingly tough encounters? Anything else to pay close attention to?

Edit: I'm referring to "Citadel of the Demon Prince".

[jason.richardson]

All the old-school talk in this thread makes me smile.

Have you guys seen the new Labyrinth Lord RPG? It is basically a reprint of Basic D&D using the OGL. I am so excited this game is back in print!

Here is the link: http://www.goblinoidgames.com/labyrinthlord.htm

Man, it would so rock if Goodman Games allowed writers to develop DCC with this rules set (hint, hint!).

cheers!

[CharginCrusader]

Been playing D&D 3.0, not even upgrading to 3.5. Also throwing in a lil Hackmaster and some C&C. Though an old friend is back in town so we will be dusting off our 1E Temple of Elemental Evil campaign.