New Campaigns

 It has been a year since I posted. What happened.

I started a Shadowdark Campaign as I mentioned in my last post. But I did not want to post the sessions on this site. That is what this site had become during my Swords & Wizardry Campaign, and that was not the original intent. I kept making 3D renders in Blender after each session, but I did not post them.

The Shadowdark Campaign lasted only 21 sessions. After ten or twelve sessions, it became clear that the players were not enjoying the Campaign as much as our Swords & Wizardry Campaign. One player noted a lack of character choices. This was part of the problem. My wish as a Gamemaster for a story-driven Campaign did not fit well with my players' wishes. I had laid out a grand vision to follow the plot (roughly) of a science-fantasy novel. I had to modify that a little during play. One player had a motivation for his character to find the lost gods. I modified the Campaign so that the Great Computer sought in the novel became a computer worshipped as a god. This god computer was threatened by a second god, a mobile war machine from ancient times. The two computer gods locked in a final war for centuries. I got my players close to this, but the reveal never happened.

During the summer, we had several players away for overlapping session dates, so I suggested we play a fun, no-thought, dungeon crawl mega-dungeon with whoever could show up for a few sessions. I had the hard copy of Dungeon Full of Monsters and created some nice maps for Roll20. After looking at a few compatible rulesets available on Roll20, we settled on the Basic Fantasy Rules (basicfantasy.org).

The players enjoyed it. They each played 2 characters, and there were many deaths. When everyone was back, the players asked if we could just continue playing Dungeon Full of Monsters. It has spawned a campaign of sorts with new players joining. It is very episodic. The dungeon delvers return to a nearby village for recovery and supplies on average every session.

Shadowdark Campaign

While we were playing Shadowdark, I got to run some classic modules. The opening adventure was a significantly modified version of Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh. I set the adventure in a haunted guard tower in a desert city. The lower level map was similar, but the upper level of the house became a two-storey tower. I kept the smugglers but substituted deep ones for the hobgoblins.

I also got to use the classic B-Series adventure, The Lost City. I used maps purchased from DriveThru and modified them to add science-fantasy elements. The stairs between levels became elevators. The hook was a missing archaeological expedition to the Lost City. The adventurers were sent to rescue the missing expedition members, who were scattered throughout the pyramid. I only used the classic upper levels of the pyramid.

The adventurers could discover the lost city and Zargon. They found all of the missing people and rescued most of them before they had to journey down to the town.

They returned to their patron before encountering Zargon or the town.

The players then headed deep into the desert, following clues pointing to rumours of lost gods worshipped deep in the desert near the Ironfields. They came to the Oasis of the White Palm and were asked by the Sheik to find his missing daughter. I had all of the maps ready for a modified Oasis of the White Palm adventure. The players then decided they were not interested and journeyed deeper into he desert searching for the Lost Gods. 

I learned that setting up an adventure that interested me, with a lot of treasure and a setting-destroying efreeti, was not enough to interest players following their own story. They wandered off into the deep desert and forgot about the fate of one of the desert kingdoms they left in their wake. The Campaign lasted a few more sessions before ending as I described above.

Shadowdark Campaign

Time for a new campaign.

The Swords & Wizardry Campaign ended earlier than expected, but the timing was perfect. It ended the weekend before my three weeks of vacation. I finished the campaign with the classic Against the Giants series, played as written. I expected the third installment (Hall of the Fire Giant King) would take three sessions. Instead, it was over in half a session.

Everyone seemed ready to move on from Swords & Wizardry. We all enjoyed it, but after three years, we were ready for a change. So what is the new campaign…

This is a rule change, but we are still part of the D&D family. Shadowdark's roots in 5th Edition D&D are noticeable, but there are significant differences. Skills are gone and replaced with attribute checks. Experience is much more streamlined (10x level). Magic spells require a spellcasting check. Success means it can be cast, and failure causes spell loss until a complete rest. A wizard could cast a magic bolt every round until he fails a check.

We have played a few sessions, and I have found that the biggest challenge for me as a Game Master is the crawling initiative. Characters take turns to move as soon as they enter a dungeon. At first, I hated it, but now I appreciate it. It slows down the mad dash through a dungeon that players will do in a Roll20 map. I use dynamic lighting so players reveal the map on their own. They don’t need to wait for me to reveal the map. When we were playing Swords & Wizardry, I often had to stop them when they ran over a trap.

I have found that game preparation for Shadowdark is less stressful than for Swords & Wizardry. I am still figuring out the reason. I can be reasonably confident that one or two short encounters can provide a session of adventure. Writing Shadowdark adventures has proven to be very simple. Monsters are described in a few lines, and most do not have special abilities. Attribute checks can be used to figure out how characters will interact with the adventure. The monsters can be pretty deadly. I almost had a total party kill in the second session. Only one character survived. This is more indicative of the deadliness of OSR games to low-level characters. From what I have read on forums, Shadowdark has the same OSR issues with overly powerful characters when they reach higher levels.

I have yet to become an expert on the Shadowdark rules. I have read the rules three times and read some FAQs on the Discord. After 8-10 sessions, I will have a better handle on how it works.

The Campaign

I went back and forth on the setting for this campaign. I own a lot of published settings, and I wanted to save a lot of effort and use a published one. In the end, I went with a homebrew based on a novel. The book is “Guardian,” published in 1980 by Thomas F. Monteleone. I have always loved the prologue to the book, which is a travelogue of the World. Guardian is a science fantasy novel set in a world after an apocalypse destroyed a First Age. The implication is that this is Earth after a nuclear war. However, the map of the world does not look like the geography of Earth. I had to make changes to allow the standard Shadowdark ancestries (elves, goblins, half-orcs, dwarves). I do want to make it human-centric. I do not plan to include so many humanoid ancestries (hobgoblins, bugbears, etc.) Having orcs and kobolds is enough. Humans can sit in for most adversaries.

I have made the session reports quick summaries. The session reports in the previous campaign were growing into short stories that took a long time to write. I have also decided to use a more straightforward art style for the images to speed up the story art.

A First Age War Machine in the Ironfields