Figuring Out the Next Game - Fantasy Options

 

So I have two problems to solve: 

• What do I run for my reduced group of four in July while the Con Crew is busy?
• What do I run for the full group as the new Main Game after July?
• Is the bigger game a "next few months" kind of thing or an "into next year" kind of thing?

July might be a good time to test out a new system or refresh on an old one, especially if it's a candidate for the bigger game. The main issue there is that with only 4 players available it's fragile - one person cancelling means it starts getting tricky to run things in most systems. Not impossible but tricky. I pretty much consider 3 the minimum to run outside of some very specific games - usually superheroes of some sort. July might just turn into a month of board and card game nights if it leans this way. With July having holiday and vacation options built in attendance just may not be terribly reliable.

Beyond all that though I'm thinking it's time for some fantasy RPG options. Outside of one special D&D session in 2022 and a session of WFRP last year I haven't run or played anything fantasy since at least mid 2021 and that's a long break for our group. 

Considering the fantasy options I need to figure out system and setting. One easy option would be 5th Edition D&D. The top of the options list for 5E is this:

• The Temple of Elemental Evil - I have the Goodman Games double hardback edition (brief run through here) and I think it's a great adventure and a great way to jump back into Greyhawk which has been another itch of mine lately. Plus it might eventually lead into the G-Series and then the D-Series and eventually Q1 - a classic run of adventure modules that would certainly put a capstone on 5th edition for us.
  
  
• Dungeons of Drakkenheim - I need to do a writeup of this one here at some point but the short version is that it's a D&D-ification of the Mordheim game by Games Workshop from about 20 years ago. We have a fantasy city hit by a comet which is a pretty big disaster on its own but this comet also happens to be made of warpstone which is sort of solidified chaos and thus both very dangerous and very useful in casting and crafting magic. This draws all sorts to the smashed ruins of the city and exploring it for warpstone to become rich and powerful becomes the hot new thing.
  
  This was a great concept for a skirmishing miniatures campaign game - it was effectively a fantasy version of Necromunda if you know that one - and allowed for all kinds of weird factions and monsters and things. It should only work better for a D&D campaign and the thing seems to be fairly well-regarded online. I'm still working my way through it but I am very interested in seeing where it could go. There are some mechanics to the fog poisoning the ruins that mean the party cannot sleep "in the dungeon" and has to get out of the dangerous stuff which is very conducive to varying party configurations. There is a lot of potential here
  
  
• Published 5E Campaigns: I have most of them and have run very few of them. High on the list here would be finishing Storm King's Thunder, the Undermountain one, maybe Tomb of Annihilation (dinosaurs, ya know?). Baldur's Gate Goes to Hell might be fun but looks like it needs a lot of work. I also have the 3rd party Odyssey of the Dragonlords where we got about a third of the way through and there might be some interest in finishing that. Honestly the first two items in this list (above) interest me more but I might need to look a few of these over again to be sure. 
  
  
• As a kind of wild card here I've been struck lately by an interest in running the old Age of Worms campaign from Dungeon Magazine most of 20 years ago. It ends up traveling all across Greyhawk visting some iconic locations with some interesting opponents and an unusual major villain behind it all. It was written for 3.5 but I could fairly easily convert it to 5th and I know none of them have come anywhere close to it before. This one has a ton of potential too.

The biggest obstacle with 5th is that a lot of my players are tired of and bored with 5E D&D. They've played a bunch of it between me and other venues in the earlier years of the game and 5th alone is not going to get anyone too excited. There are other options though.

Besides 5th edition pure there are some variants. Kobold Press' Tales of the Valiant is out now and I did the Kickstarter so I have those rules. I also decided to look over ENP's Level Up Advanced 5th edition. More to come on those. There is also a Drakkenheim supplement that adds a lot of adventure-related character options that might liven up 5th for my players as well. I need to look some over and maybe try them out in July to make this work.

Beyond current D&D there are more options and this comes back to figuring out what kind of campaign I want to run and then figuring out which system I want to run.

Pathfinder 2nd Edition is one I'd like to spend more time with and it just got re-revised so why not? The goal a few years back was to run it set in Ptolus for a big fantasy city campaign (a non-comet-smacked city this time) and that's still a decent idea. I think that Age of Worms could be easily converted to this as well. I'm not terribly concerned with running PF2 published adventures with it but more using it to do my own thing.

I also might finally run some 13th Age both to try something different and as a warm up for the second edition and a possible campaign there. This would probably also be my own thing rather than published stuff.

There are some fantasy options for Savage Worlds as well but I don't think we are quite ready to jump back into that one just yet. 

There is of course a ton of OSR material out there and while it's fun for short runs I'm not sure I want to sign on for 6 months to a year of Labyrinth Lord or OSE or Dragonslayer etc. We could go megadungeon here but I think I'm more interested in one of the other options for now. 

As you can see I still have a lot of thinking to do but this is the start. More to come!