Hey, I still do stuff!

I can never thank Mike enough for keeping the blog alive with his creative and hard work. If anyone ever wonders what I, Theodric, AKA Dr. Obscure am up to, I have still been gaming after my relocation to Appalachia. I was in a PF game online for somewhere between nine months and a year. I found playing a Magus fun (in spite of my ongoing objections to the class's name), and was reminded how much PF really depends on the GM to keep combat from lagging. For part of that same time, I got together a S&W game in my basement, but some of the players were less-than-committed, and when I got a job after six months or so, we couldn't work out the time for the remaining two players.

I pretty quickly got together an awesome group on campus, however (now moved into my new place because of scheduling and -- let's face it, who wants all the minis and other supporting paraphernalia to go to waste?) and now have one of the best groups I've ever had. The group is mixed faculty, staff, and students, and has the first female majority of any group I've ever been in. It also has the widest age range of any group I've ever been in outside of a convention.

I made a website specifically to support that group, and very cleverly chose to try out Weebly for the group's website. This of course means no one will ever find it using a search engine. But if you're interested in keeping up with my group's adventures, I update that blog regularly.

Presenting The Scar Barrow...

Swords & Wizardry: It's what I'm running.

HAPPY SWORDS & WIZARDRY APPRECIATION DAY FROM NORTHERN APPALACHIA!

Well, it's been more than a while since you've heard from your obscure, rambling host, and Mike Welham has thankfully kept MPR from falling into utter dereliction. It might have something to do with moving across the country and having a new baby, but even before that I was running on low. Out of the interstices I creep to update you on the state of my game, which happily, will also largely be a post of joining in communal OSRness of the S&W kind.

How I got to S&W
The past 10 months, I have been playing in a weekly PF game by Skype, which has just now gone on a hiatus (I leveled my magus up to 5th level, thank you very much). The year before that, I was in a 5e game in which part of the time I DMed Tyranny of Dragons and a part of the time another player DMed Princes of the Apocalypse. In the further past in San Antonio, I had run a S&W Complete game set in Waterdeep in which I relocated old modules to Undermountain -- we were having fun but I couldn't get the group together enough to really build the kind of campaign I wanted. North Texas RPG Con 2016 just whetted my appetite even more for a regular home campaign in which we would build an interesting setting, characters, and stories. Now that I have the kind of home base I want in the old butcher's shop beneath my house (complete with a massive table left by a short-lived textile business of some kind), I have started said game using S&W. 

The Players
I first found some experienced players among some of the college students of a nearby college town. As time progressed, they have proven to have a hard time continuing consistently because of their school and work loads, but I also have added two completely new players -- guys who always wanted to play but couldn't find people to teach them back in the day. Hey, scifi/fantasy reading clubs aren't a bad way to meet new players. I need to branch out again to find some more new players -- I'd like a bigger group and I miss the diversity that the college folks brought to the group. (Read: A group with gals is better.)

The Building Blocks
I started preparing the nascent setting by reading Hommlet and the original City State of the Invincible Overlord booklets. I decided Hommlet would be their home base and the province would belong to the City State. No Temple of Elemental Evil -- I would introduce another evil. The nearby town of Nulb? The characters original hometown, now in ruins thanks to an horrific event when they were children. Underneath the ruins? The Hall of Bones, adapted physically so that I could use the The Lost Catacombs pages for game mats.

I looked at the gods of the CSIO and decided that they were a bit of a mess -- both an inspiring mess (How do I explain this hodgepodge of deities as a historical development and how would they actually work as a society's pantheon?) and a mess that needed some straightening up (too many gods of the same basic kind and other types completely missing). Here are the gods in the original booklet:

Odin

Modron (“Great Mother”)

Brigid

Mabon (“Great Son”)

Thoth

Dagda

Harmakhis (Horus)

Teutates (=Toutatis)

Quetzalcoatl

Lugh

Apollo

Fenris Wolf

Nephthys (but misspelled, just as in DDG&H supplement)

(Spider God?)

Donn (Celtic Death)

Gods of Pegana (the so-called “old gods”)

Toad God in Mermist Swamp (Obviously I'm going to make Tsathoggua)

Unnamed Sea Goddess

Balder

Varuna

Hanuman the Accursed

Idun

The Sea God Manannan

Arghrasmak (Temple of the Gargoyle) “living god”

Crimson Dragon

The historical key to this is that I decided the City State was a originally a colony found by a southern Rome analogue who hired Germanic/Nordic warriors to conquer a region peopled by monsters and Celt analogues. Their great, older rival was an Egypt analogue from whom they appropriated some deities -- all things Romans were wont to do. (Wikipedia has introductory entries on this process in the religious vein.) That allowed me to revise the list by identifying various gods with one another in the following way:

Odin the Dagda, Odin All-Father
Sol Odinsson, Sol Invictus, Sol of the City State, Sol-Horus, Sol-Harmakhis, the Eye of Odin

Modron the Great Mother, Brigid

Mabon the Great Son

Thoth the Terrible, God of Knowledge and Learning

Quetzalcoatl, He-of-the-Mithral-Feathers, 1st Serpent, Dragon King, God of Rivers & Mtns

Fenris Wolf, Lord of Ragnarok

Nephthys, Lady of the Holy Mortuary, Mistress of Wealth

Death (Donn)

Tsathoggua, the Toad God, God of Wetlands and Caverns

Kiopa’a, Star of the Seas, Polestar, Queen of Sea Fae

Arghrasmak the Living God, God of Gargoyles.

Balder, the Hidden Son, Hope of Mankind

Varuna All-Seeing, Lord of Rains, Arbiter of Oaths, Guardian of Cosmic Law

Hanuman the Accursed, God of Therianthropes

Idun, Lady of the Golden Orchard, Long of Time and Limb

Typhon the Two-Faced, Tyrant of All Oceans

The rebellious gods of Pegana I kept around and the god Teutates=Toutatis (thanks, Astrix comics!) became simply a title that a social group would add to the name of their patron deity. I'm still playing around with how I'm going to handle the spider god, though Wraith Overlord: Terror of the City State has a nice idea in it. (Where the heck did that title come from? Still haven't figured it out.) And I'm still playing with what exactly I'm going to do with the Crimson Dragon. Also, a few deities also indicate that the Rome analogue not only had the rivalry with an Egypt analogue, but also some sort of contact with an Indic analogue. (Meso-america is for dragons.)

Deities I added
First off, I needed a paladin patron to take the places of Muir (I don't care for the name) and Cuthbert (I wanted to cut the odd real-world tie here and have a Joan of Arc like feel to the figure, but germanified). Thus was born St. Ingaberht. She heads the following list:

Ingaberht, Patron Saint of Templars and Holy Knighthood

Orcus, Punisher of Broken Oaths, Demon Lord of the Undead

Frey, Lugh, Lord of the Elves

Circe, Witch Goddess
Morithal, Lord of Unceasing Hunger: Remember this little gem!?

This kind of top-down work gave me lots of ideas for the setting and hooks for potential stories, and allows the players to locate their characters within the setting. Less of them took me up on the idea of having their character being from Nulb, but they still came up with ideas for why they were in Hommlet and interested in Nulb and each other, so it worked out.

Now the question, Why and how does S&W provide the ruleset for this campaign? To be continued in a second posting!

Populating Undermountain with Old Modules

I assume you, like everybody else, have already picked this up.

I've been thinking about my new group's adventures in Waterdeep, and one thing I need to have ready is the possibility of their heading into Undermountain.  Almost all my resources are for Waterdeep itself, and I own nothing of Undermountain.  But then, its long and varied history in setting feel like permission to me to make it my own, putting almost any and everything in this sprawling megadungeon.  I'll start with In Search of the Unknown.  I really like module B1, and can easily imagine Zelligar and Roghann as heroic adventuring partners of Waterdeep who disappeared years ago, leaving behind their lost stronghold Quasqueton in Undermountain.

So, what would you adapt from old modules to put in Undermountain?  I'd love to hear.

Having a Gaming Group is Awesome

So, we've now had session number two.  Maybe it's too early to say, (how's that for being superstitious?), but having a regular gaming group again is Awesome.

A fun time was had as we got the S&W Waterdeep campaign from generation to action.  I decided that since Waterdeep is completely new to the guys, maybe it should be fairly new to their Elf Druid (home rule) and Human Monk as well.  These two devotees of Mielikki will be based in Our Lady's Hand's in Sea Ward, but how about a little backstory to explain how they got there and let the players identify with their characters' sense of discovering the City of Splendors?

The idea actually came from a random Dragon Magazine article that somebody had ripped out and put inside the City System boxed set I bought: Forest of Doom (Scott Butler, May 1983).  In it, there's a giant tree in the middle of an evil forest that is a fortress of drow and their quaggoth and bugbear minions.  I relocated the tree to a sacred grove in Ardeep and made it the home of Theophan the elf druid and Bro. Axthelm the human monk.



Mielikki's boys are sent on a mission to look for a missing member of their community.  They find his body strung up, flayed, and disemboweled outside of the ruin of an old mill.  Now, I didn't like the idea of drow having an army of bugbears, as I like the idea of bugbears being solitary, spooky murderers.  But in addition to a force of hobgoblins, I could see the drow having a bugbear or two tagging along to join in the mayhem.  I gave a 75% chance that it is was a single bugbear and a 25% that there were two.  And that's how there came to be two bugbears who took advantage of an experienced but incautious ranger who lived in forest that had not seen any such dangers in his lifetime.  The guys saw signs that the mill was occupied, but they could have tried to make up with the body without waking the nocturnal bugbears. Instead, they noticed the signs of occupation and decided to find out who was in the mill.  When their calls for the occupants to come out did not meet with success, they set the old mill on fire.  The fight that ensued was tough.  I decided that, given my portrayal of bugbears, I'd do a morale check for one of them to see if it fled, having been surprised in its sleep and trapped in a burning building.  One bugbear was plenty tough for a first level monk and first level druid.  ( I was using the stats from the original Monster Manual and the morale score from B/X.)  A series of great rolls from the druid who grappled the bugbear from behind and terrible rolls on the part of the bugbear who fell and then couldn't break the grapple allowed the monk to survive after a pummeling from the bugbear, and the two of them finally finished him off.  It was bloody and exciting.  The duo then headed back to the tree, arriving in time to discover witness the final scenes of its fall to the drow siege.  They began the long, hard trek to Waterdeep in their diminished state, setting the stage for the rest of the campaign.

Thus ends, I hope, my gaming drought.  And I got a guy in his forties who hadn't played since college back in the game and a new player inducted into our hobby.  I hope your rambles of late have been as good!

Extra-challenge: Any body have any suggestions more inspiring as a name for the campaign than "Swords & Wizardry in Waterdeep"?  Or am I over-thinking it?

The New Game is S&W in Waterdeep!

The Great Drought of Roleplaying that dominated the last half of 2012 seems to be coming to an end.  One former member of my college DM's group, who left school right before I came, finally got to together with me after moves on both our parts and a new player -- a new friend who's wanted to learn to play for years.  I chose Swords & Wizardry Complete as our rules and we spent our first session creating four characters.  We generated our characters using the manipulatives method of Rolling Lots of Dice.

My hard copies sport the very nice, more modern-looking Rick Sardinha cover.

I chose Waterdeep, the City of Splendors, as our setting.  The past six months of picking up lots of Waterdeep material, including novels, gave me an appreciation for a setting that provided both urban and dungeon adventuring and that packs more sand in the box than we could ever exhaust.  The main tweaks to the setting so far are that I'm making the Law-Chaos-Balance struggle* the main metaphysical struggle (hooray for alignment languages!) and leaving good and evil mostly to the human struggle.  I reset the monetary standard to silver to satisfy my desire to adhere more closely to historic coinage.  (Don't worry, those greedy for ahistorical wealth: beyond the extravagance of gold pieces there also awaits mithral!)

The only Realms they'll ever need to know.  (Mike Schley's beautiful map.)

What will Theophan the Elven Druid** and Axthelm the Human Monk get up to in their service to Mielikki in Sea Ward?  I imagine enough trouble that I'm making an NPC female (currently no-name) Half-Elf Ranger from the shrine of The Lady's Hands to add a little muscular support to their endeavors.  If the monsters get past her, maybe Theophan's ratter will buy them a little time.

And if one of them dies, who will be the first of the second string PCs to join the fray from the South Ward? Ragnar the Beard, Human Fighter or Beebo Lightfoot, Halfling Fighter?  I trust our bi-weekly game will reveal these mysteries in exciting ways in the weeks to come.  All of us are quite stoked.  Let the games begin!

* I'm not going with the Finchian interpretation of alignment presented in S&W:CR.

** Okay, I had to mess with the rules more than once.  I refrained the most I could!