2010-09-10

First post!

I have joined the limitless ranks of self-absorbed Internet authors, so now I too can ramble endlessly on about things that nobody but I care about.  Since you've shown the bad judgment to be reading this, let me explain a little about the purpose of this blog.

For the past 9 years or so my gaming was limited mostly to D&D 3E, on a monthly basis, as a henchman-abusing player (XP is hard to come by, I don't like sharing).  As levels increase, the proportion of time we spend juggling the little details of combat increases as well.  The irregularity of the sessions is also kind of annoying.  So I started a bi-weekly session where I run the show, at my house.  Mostly Call of Cthulhu & Delta Green.

Then I started reading Grognardia and Planet Algol, and light bulbs go off in my head - it's time to get back to the good old days, when you could slog through a few dozen monsters in an hour no problem.  Not only that, but I'm going to run it hardcore, you roll your 3d6 in order and that's the stats you get.  No re-rolls, live with it, Mr. Fancy-Pants-PC!  Yeah, that's the stuff... A trial run of Keep on the Borderlands proves to be a blast, so once the Delta Green campaign has its inevitable total-party-kill, I let everyone know that the next session is D&D, Basic/Expert.

I'm actually going to use Labyrinth Lord, but the rules aren't here yet, so we started out Moldvay B/X (with its cheaper plate mail and 3d6 starting money).  But next session, it's all Labyrinth Lord.  Which is almost exactly the same as Moldvay, so no real issues there... the reason for this is simple, my little red Basic book and little blue Expert book are falling apart from heavy use back in the day.  Time to get some rulebooks that can withstand actual play.

I love the simplicity of the rules after 9 years of 3rd edition.  It still feels like D&D, there are no skill rules, no real need for thieves actually, as I'm describing each trap in detail as necessary.  Players can use their brains to get by.  Ahh it's all been written before and by better writers than I, so I'll stop praising the old ways now.

The day of the big adventure comes around, and I've got a vague notion of running a megadungeon, but beyond that no clue what I'm going to do.  Never mind, extemporizing is the hallmark of a good DM, so I'll just make things up once my players get here.  It worked out wildly good.  As the players rolled up characters, I sketched up the initial little dungeon (not part of the megadungeon, I'll work up to that, assuming the players don't go off in a different direction entirely), added some humanoids, traps, and a spiffy radioactive surprise.

Ahh yes, the campaign world, I'm thinking, roughly Thundarr the Barbarian meets Gene Wolfe's Long Sun.  Plus Nyarlathotep, because what's a fantasy world without the Crawling Chaos?

I'll be using this blog to post the session recaps that I do for the players after each session (keeps people fresh on what happened), and to toss out some of the campaign ideas I've got squirming around in my head, both to give back to the community that I'm shamelessly stealing from, and to get feedback (that I will also shamelessly steal from).

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