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!