Original Adventurers Reincarnated

[King of Elfland]

Okay, so I've been gaming since I got the Moldvay boxed set for Christmas in 1981. Among the things that finally drew me to DCC after playing the originals and retroclones like OSE are the cool 70s vibes and just the gonzo sense that anything can happen in the adventure, with random spells, crazy adventure locales, over the top villains, and the tweaks that imbue a fresh vitality to the classic 7 B/X character classes while keeping things fairly simple & streamlined in terms of the rules. I've even finally come to accept the notion of ascending armor class

Now with the Dying Earth KS, and picking up the Empire of the East & Purple Planet stuff I've been kicking around ideas for some kind of dimension/world/planet hopping campaign wherein our mighty heroes would have to travel to various places to acquire things needed to stop some great evil, (possibly Zuul, in a callback to the favorite movie of my youth) linked to my love of the original Star Wars trilogy. Then I realized what would make this even more epic: reviving the B/X characters we created back in 1981-82 as high level DCC characters and using them! As it turns out, I've found character sheets for most of the original PCs we created. So here are the original 10, created by me, my brother, and my best friend. We even created a couple for our moms, though they never really played beyond rolling a couple dice as they walked through the kitchen on a Friday night with Miami Vice in the background.

Persimmon the Elf
Kanda the Dwarf
Gorrdon the Warrior
Crom the Halfling
Rozemus the Cleric
Zircon the Wizard
Diende the Thief

plus
Clon the Wizard
Wisteria the Wizardess (My mom's character)
Magnolias the Cleric (My friend's mom's character)

So now I think I'll start with running a regular campaign that builds with growing signs of impending doom. When it finally becomes apparent that the PCs can't handle things themselves, they'll get a prophecy about a magical horn than can revive heroes of the past to save the world. (Okay, I stole this idea from Wheel of Time, which I'm currently slogging my way through). They find the horn, hopefully, and wham, here come the aforementioned PCs back from the great beyond to save the world one more time. We will proceed from there with the taking over the main quest. Hopefully, I'll get my brother & his daughter in on this campaign. We get together a few times a year. Maybe I'll even look up my old buddy and try to game online.

I went ahead and rolled up a random grimoire for my elf last night on the Purple Sorcerer website and it came out great so I'm excited to start doing the character conversions this weekend even if we won't play with these characters for another year-plus.

[Raven_Crowking]

That sounds like a blast!

All the best & keep us posted!

[Bobjester]

Sounds fun! Yes, keep us posted!

I started with Holmes Basic in 80-81, but soon moved to BX because there were no more Holmes Basic on the shelves in 82!

I've always played a mash-up of BX and AD&D, and DCC seems like the perfect segue up from that classic 80's combo.

We had hundreds of characters, as we'd play them for a few levels and then start new ones, just to see what we could do differently.

I've used a lot of my old PCs as NPCs in later games, updating them to later systems.

I'm still getting used to the DCC rules, and hope to complete my first DCC adventure "Beneath the Well of Brass" as DM at our next D&D session.

Dimension hopping sounds great, and would love to get my hands on Purple Planet and Empire of the East. I need to get off my @$$ and get onboard the Dying Earth kickstarter, but I am waiting on some real life commitment to resolve first.

[King of Elfland]

The old characters have been re-skinned for DCC. I've sketched out a broad campaign outline and decided to add Blackmoor to my dimensional hopping, especially since some of these PCs played the Blackmoor modules back in the 80s.

[King of Elfland]

The excitement surrounding the launch of "The Music of the Spheres" KS got me thinking about my campaign plans and how I could make it more DCC, especially in terms of the villains. My original concept was too close to something I've been doing for our Castles & Crusades game. So now, I've come up with the following, which I think really embodies the DCC spirit better.

The backstory is that in the elder days a mighty demon named Azgurbath (whose design is modeled after Gigan from the old Godzilla movies) rose to great influence across the realms of Krysonia & Leng (my campaign setting). He was a being associated with insects and plagues and they would be unleashed upon foes of his cult if proper tribute was not presented. Powerful priests could even summon mantis, fly, and wasp demons to due their bidding and they concluded foul pacts with evil mantis warriors, ant-men and scorpion folk. His cult was particularly strong amongst the peoples of the Karim Desert, situated along the trade routes between east & west. Finally, the dervishes of the desert rose in revolt, creating magic potions (bug spray) designed to be used against the cult and its giant insectoid allies. Working with the priesthood of Choranus, also known as Shangdi, the Lord God on High in Leng, they forged a magical artifact, the Jade Ruyi (sceptre) of Shangdi and used it to bind the Demon God in an extra-dimensional prison box via a powerful ritual. But a condition of the imprisonment was that the Ruyi was shattered into five pieces and scattered across the multiverse. If the Demon God's box prison was ever found and he was released, the Ruyi could only be reassembled and Azgurbath re-imprisoned by the "Heroes of Past, Present, & Future," luring him to another, even more powerful place of banishment.

About 50 years before the campaign itself starts, someone finds the box the demon was imprisoned in and of course they accidentally open it. Azgurbath re-emerges in the world and secretly starts rebuilding his cult. Things start out quite subtly. There are locust plagues, crop failures, etc., throughout the lands. These gradually increase in intensity over a couple decades. Then, there are reports of a new entity that has established itself on the outskirts of the Karim Desert, the sinister Eye in the Sky. People living in these areas report attacks by bizarre mantis warriors and ant-men. At first things are rather localized, but as time goes on, more places are affected by this new being and his cult. This is the big back story....

So, as I mentioned in another thread, once we get into the campaign itself, I think we'll start with Tower of the Black Pearl, using the ending whereby all the high level Lawful heroes are slain. So as matters intensify and the Cult of the Eye in the Sky starts spreading their influence through devastating plagues of insects and the like, the heroes will be led to recover the fabled Horn of Vinyamar, which they must use to summon the "Heroes of Past, Present, and Future," i.e. our original adventurers reincarnated. This in itself won't be easy, as they'll have to track down various clues leading them to an ancient monastery in Leng where the secrets of Shangdi are kept, battling the minions of Azgurbath in the process. And once the heroes themselves are summoned, the dimensional hopping will commence.