The Known World and Me

I know it's called Mystara but it was introduced in the 1981 Expert Set as "The Known World" and that's how I like to remember it. When I first saw it I thought it was awesome. I had seen Greyhawk and loved it and the Darlene map but this was a started-but-not-yet-finished map that spurred some creativity in different ways than GH. it was generic D&D but we didn't care back then because there weren't a dozen D&D worlds out there already. Much like the GH folio each nation had about a paragraph of information, then there was a more detailed map and description of Karameikos. Plus the Isle of Dread - don't underestimate the Isle of Dread's impact in making this world cooler because not only did you have this nifty map but you also had an adventure in the box that required you to do some traveling to get to it and a rulebook in the box that gave you rules for how to do it! It was a complete package and one that I am sure a lot of people used. 

Later sets expanded on this world and the gazeteer line gave it a realms-like treatment in regional detail and maps. I have some of these and they are very nice. The Companion Set gave us rules for ruling territory and fighting mass battles and I thought those were cool too. 

All that said and despite the long history of this world, I never really played or ran it very much.  I know we used it some back in our BECMI D&D days  but we didn't go into much detail with it as back in those days we made up some of our own worlds or just used the Greyhawk folio.  As we got a little bit older some of the names were a little too simple or obvious and the whole world seemed a little too kiddie for us teenagers.

There was a big overdone box set for it in the 2E era but I never had one or played/ran with it. as we had moved on to other worlds by then. The whole Immortals thing was a little weird to me then but I actually like it now and can see how it could be used for a pretty decent D&D 4E setting if WOTC decided to make it one or if a fan group really dug in and worked it up well.

 So my history with this one is...limited. I'd happily play in a campaign run by someone who was passionate about the setting, but otherwise it's not something that's really on my radar. I just thought it deserved mention since it was one of the early campaign worlds and had a lot of influence on how people built their own worlds, including myself.

Dark Sun and Me

Dark Sun launched as a boxed campaign in 1991 (a revised set was released in 1995) for AD&D 2E. I owned this set and liked it a lot. The world was very different, magic was tweaked, races were different, and even classes were modified somewhat, but it had a lot of possibility for traditional fD&D activities - looting, pillaging, fighting, and carving out your own place in the world. It was "Points of Light" (4E's catchphrase description) before PoL was conceived with a few scattered city-states (that were not bastions of good by any means) separated by a whole planet full of hostile deadly wilderness where even the halflings were nasty cannibals.

One of the reasons it clicked with me was that it felt like it was written for grownups, unlike Spelljammer's "Saturday Morning Cartoon" version of D&D or the PG rated Forgotten Realms this felt like it was the "rated R" version of D&D - more raw, more violent, less nice and not coddling new players. It touched buttons in me that covered everything from Road Warrior to Spartacus to some of the Conan stories to countless westerns.

Specifically, making psionics a major element distinguished it in a lot of ways both flavor-wise and mechanics-wise. Adding half-dwarves in any other setting would have been laughable but in this one they were bad-ass bald guys that were tougher than just about any other race. Half-giants (another questionable race that worked out OK) were even tougher. This world was so tough that you started at 3rd level and rolled up you backup characters as a standard part of character generation! I really liked it. I talked my players into trying it out, we made up characters, and I ran something like 4 sessions before it petered out - . 

To some degree it was too different with things like bone weapons, weird monsters no one knew anything about added on top of the magic and racial changes. Additionally, 2E psionics was a wildly unbalanced system more akin to Gamma World mutations than any coherent levelled sub-system and that didn't help. A lot of our vision of D&D was tied up in a Human Paladin, an Elf Wizard, a Dwarf Fighter, and a Halfling Thief gearing up in town then riding out to some ruin and that was tough to recreate in Dark Sun.

Timing was also an issue -1992 was a year with a lot of changes for people too - some of us were working our first jobs out of college, some of us were having babies, and our once-stable schedule for the groups I played in was a thing of the past. I brought it up a few more times over those next few years but I could never get more than one other person interested in it at a time.

One of the issues I've sort of retroactively discovered is that as we get older and we have less time to devote to games and other hobbies is that the interest in trying out Option Y decreases significantly, but not because we're older necessarily. It's more because if I have 4 hours on Friday night every week to play something and I know I like Option X, then when someone brings up Option Y I have to consider whether or not I will like it better than Option X. It's not that I think Y sucks or is an inferior thing. It's not that I would have to go buy a book for Option Y. It's not even that I think I won't have fun with Option Y - it might turn out to be a great way to spend that time. It's that I have Option X, I know I will have fun playing it, and that playing Option Y means I won't get to play Option X. this is known as "Opportunity Cost" in economics and it applies quite well to this problem. There's a cyclical element to it too - when I was in junior high to high school to college I had plenty of time for games but not a whole lot of money to spend on them. For the last 15 years or so money hasn't been a huge issue, but finding time to play has become harder.

Recruiting the kids now that they are old enough to play has broken this logjam to some degree as they are more available than my adult friends who have jobs and families of their own and they are enthusiastic about everything really - they don't have enough background to declare that  Option Y sucks or that Option Z had rules  issues that were never fixed or anything else (and I count myself among the guilty here) - they just think these games are cool and want to play more of them. 

With Dark Sun coming out now for 4E there's a pretty good chance I will pick up those books down the road and run at least a limited campaign at some point. This is sort of a drilling-down of the problem stated above - now beyond having more games than I have time to play, I have more campaign ideas for each game than I have time to run. For example, I have 3 or 4 good ideas for 4E D&D campaigns and I have only been able to sustain 1 and that one has been spotty lately. Rather than retro-gaming back to 2E I expect the 4E version will retain the same flavor and provide better mechanics which make it the version to run whether it's with my grognards or with my Apprentices and that's probably the next time I'll bring up Dark Sun, though it may be 2011 before it kicks off.

Birthright and Me

Since the theme of the week has kind of turned into campaign worlds, here's a post I wrote on EN World earlier this week as someone brought up Birthright, why it failed, and whether it would be worth bringing back today.

Birthright was published in 1995 during the 2E era when LOT of campaign worlds were supported with print products. There had already been Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, Planescape, Ravenloft, Dark Sun, and Dragonlance box sets. The production values were amazing - the boxed set came with nice rulebooks, a full color poster map or 3, army cards,, and a nice DM Screen with that full-color painting on the outside - it probably did lose money (many TSR products did as it turned out later)  but it was a very striking set and made a strong impression. Also 1995 wasn't right at the end of the TSR run, but looking back that might have been the last plateau for them.

The wikipedia entry describes the history well:

Cerilia was originally inhabited by the elves, dwarves, and goblins. Fleeing the corruption of Aduria by the dark god Azrai, human tribes settled Cerilia. At first contact between the elves and humans was peaceful, but conflict soon arose as the human population expanded into elven lands.

After years of manipulation and machination Azrai's armies marched on Cerilia. On his side were his Adurian minions, the Vos (a human tribe he had corrupted), and the elves, bitter from their wars with humanity. The human tribes and their patron gods met him in battle at Mount Deismaar, located on the landbridge between Aduria and Cerilia. The elves realized they had been tricked by Azrai and most switched sides. As their armies fought on the slopes of the mountain, the gods themselves met in battle. The other gods were only able to defeat Azrai by sacrificing themselves. In a colossal explosion, they destroyed themselves and Azrai. Mount Deismaar and the land bridge were destroyed.

The power of the gods was not wasted, however. It shot out and entered those present at the battle. The champions of the gods, those closest in ideal and virtue to their patron as well as physical proximity at the time of the cataclysm, received the most power. They became gods themselves, a new pantheon that would replace the old.

Other combatants also received some of the divine power of the gods. On the battlefield it did not take them long to realize that this power was in their blood, and could be stolen. A scion, as one of the divine blood is called, could have his blood strength stolen if killed by a blow piercing his heart.

The divine gifts of the scions make them able leaders. They form a connection to their people and land, drawing strength from them. And in times of need returning that strength and perform great deeds. They also can have a variety of other divine powers, such as long life, the ability to detect poison or project a divine aura, depending upon their bloodline strength and the god it was derived from.

Those who find themselves with the blood of Azrai often become powerful abominations, or awnsheghlien. Corrupted by their dark blood, their bodies twist to reflect their inner corruption. Many of the major villains and monsters are awnsheghlien. Examples include the Gorgon (stone-skinned with a petrifying gaze, perhaps the strongest creature in Cerilia), the Sphinx (an insane half-cat lover of riddles), the Spider (once a goblin-king who fought at Deismaar), and the Vampire (once a young hero who killed a blood abomination named the Sinister and thus became corrupted himself).

I liked the background for the most part - the "Archvillain" style monsters like the gorgon and the spider fit a lot of fantasy fiction very well - it's more high fantasy than sword and sorcery but it should work in D&D quite well. The destruction of the gods and the creation of the bloodlines gives a nice epic historical feel and then links it directly to the PC's. The emphasis on domains with actual mechanical support is a nice change and when added to the bloodlines and the big bads gives the world a unique feel. 

Now mechanically the bllodline powers were pretty simple to handle, but domains were an entirely separate system and didn't really interact a ton with the rest of D&D at the time. This made it easier in many cases to just ignore it which I think hurt the game. Better integration mechanically and even some simplification would have led to more use of the domains in actual campaigns. I think 4E could do this better with it's new design philosophy - maybe we'll get a chance to see down the road. My take is that although it may not apply in a realistic sense, in a D&D sense being "the king" should always be a benefit to your character, never a hindrance. Wealth, some kind of inherent bonuses, power boosts tied to paragon paths - there have to be some ways to do it.

Mass combat was done in kind of a clunky way - it was a sort of card game with stats for different units on cards which were positioned on a poster map / battle mat kind of thing - yet another new subsystem that looked complicated and played a little clunky which led to a lot of handwaving. If it had come back for 3E it would have been cool to see it supported with some kind of miniatures play but realistically you need a non-gadget way of handling mass combat for D&D to really integrate it and have people use it.

The marketing was strong at the start - Dragon had big foldout ads in full color and they talked about ruling a domain and all of the things that made it different. They did that part right. Later though...with 5 major nations, putting each one out as a boxed set was probably a mistake - I know I struggled to gather them back then as it seemed like they took forever to come out. In the meantime we were also buried under a seemingly endless set of "players secrets of x" supplements that were short on content and tough to distinguish from one another (wikipedia says there were only 15 of them but it seemed like more). I think this helped kill interest in the line too as it was too much detail too fast for a brand new setting.

Overall I think timing was a factor - if it had launched about 1990 and been handled as say 2nd edition's "Eberron" (as Eberron was to 3E) then I think it would have fared better although the mechanical complexity tied into Domains and Mass Combat would have impacted its popularity. There isn't anything inherently wrong or weak as far as the concepts behind it - big progenitor archviallian monsters who control chunks of the main continent (some of whom are fallen heroes), an emphasis on running nations controlled by semi-divine player characters , adventuring to further your nation's position in the world and possibly for political reasons - it can make for a really interesting campaign that runs a little deeper than our traditional looting games. It could have been positioned as truly "Advanced" D&D - bigger stakes, bigger responsibilities. more power - but it ended up positioned as "one more option among many" and as the youngest of the 2E worlds it never matured enough to deserve a revisit by the company.

Birthright was something I really liked when it came out but I only ran a few sessions of it as my players were already into Greyhawk and FR campaigns and weren't really looking to change. It sat on a shelf, asking to be played but it never really went anywhere and then once 3E came out we never looked back. 

Looking at it now I realize it's one of the directions D&D could have gone that was stifled mainly due to business problems, not flaws inherent to the concept. It's not a new or even an uncommon story in RPG's, but this one in particular bothers me as it had and still has potential untapped. Fans have made an effort to keep it alive but I admit I was not one of them. I held onto my stuff for about 10 years but I finally sold it a few years ago. I periodically feel the need to clear out some space and a half-shelf of campaign material for a game I only ran a few times about 1996 was pretty easy to shed. At some point I might look into picking it up again but it didn't take off here back when it was new so there's no nostalgia factor at work and it's not rally a major part of D&D history, so I'm not that keen on playing in it's original form. A new version would have potential though.

If WOTC sticks to the one campaign world per year plan they have followed for 4E (although 2011's announced schedule so far makes this a little murky) AND 4E has several more years left to run then I think Birthright is worth a revisit. One book or box on the world with paragon paths and epic destinies and maybe a domain system, one book of monsters detailing the big bads and some of the different Cerilia versions of regular monsters, plus an adventure and you're good. Make Heroic Tier = "you're one of the royal family", Paragon = "you're the heir apparent" and Epic = "you're the ruler". In this world you're not going to spend your Epic levels gallivanting off in the Nine Hells, you're going to spend them gathering your armies and meeting The Gorgon head on as he tries to invade your realm! There's a certain segment of the D&D crowd that that's going to appeal to. Whether that segment is enough to justify putting it out again, I can't say but I would play it and I would run it so there's one vote.

Here's a link to the Birthright Wiki that has a lot of 3E conversion material. 

Here's another link to a short article by someone who has a lot of love for the setting and talks about some of the more detailed changes from standard D&D.

Quag Keep

Since I noted I was reading it on the sidebar I figured I ought to put something up about it now that I am finished.

It's an interesting read. I had forgotten a lot of it since I read it many years ago so I really could not remember the resolution of the story. To summarize it's a fairly average quest story. A party gathers at an inn in the city of Greyhawk, discovers details about their quest, then heads out. They encounter danger and weirdness, get some further information along the way, then eventually reach their goal (I'm being fairly vague here but spoilers will be plentiful below). The initial difference here is that the main characters are from the real world and have been sucked into a proto-Greyhawk. This is a device that turns up quite a bit in early game-related fiction but it makes it's first appearance here. Also it is technically a Greyhawk novel but well...not really. more on that below.

-Is it a good fantasy novel? No. It's just not really all that fantastic, the characters are shallow, the world is very lightly described, and the quest takes about a week from what I can tell. Plus it has something of a science fiction feel to it - not a bad thing, and not unusual in a lot of older fantasy fiction, but it doesn't read like Tolkien or even Moorcock.

- Is it a good D&D novel? No. It feels somewhat old school as in the characters are really not superhuman but the plot of the quest is not something that would happen in a D&D game and the conceit of the merged players and characters is also not something that would come up in a game. Additionally there is no magic-user in the party but there is an elf ranger, a bard, a cleric, a female fighter who knows some kind of magic, a lizardman, male fighter who knows zero magic, and a wereboar with a pseudo-dragon pet. Not exactly a typical adventuring party.

-But it's a Greyhawk novel right? Sort of. It's set in Greyhawk but it's at best a proto-Greyhawk where the city and the Sea of Dust are the only anchors to the GH we know today and almost all of the country and regional names are different and the gods are unrecognizable. They run into some strange shadow creatures, some undead (confusingly referred to a Liches though they are clearly not the MM style Lich) and some human opponents. They do speak briefly to a Gold Dragon, so there's something familiar at least. 

-Sooooo...what's the point? Well if you're a longtime Greyhawk fan or want to read the first gaming novel ever, it's worth a read. If not, skip it - there's nothing precious here. I admit I was a little disappointed in the lack of Greyhawk here. I'm not sure if it's due to Andre Norton ignoring details from EGG, EGG not sharing much, or EGG not having a lot of the countryside nailed down (as we know much of the classic flanaess map was developed for publication, not in his home campaign) or what exactly influenced how this ended up but it's minimal at best. 

All that said this is the first D&D novel and a thumbs up to TSR for getting a real science fiction author to write it. It's not among her best work but at least they tried to get an experienced professional and not a game designer who just wanted to be a writer like so many later novels would feature.

At the time this was published (1978) fantasy was entering a new period of popularity and I'm sure that drove some of the effort to get this published. If you count the rediscovery of Conan and LOTR in the late 1960's and Frtz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories and Moorcock's Elric stories in the early 70's as a "first wave" of the modern era then you have a second wave of popular fantasy starting in the late 70's with books like the Sword of Shannara, Piers Anthony's Xanth stuff and then Thieves' World as a sort of "second wave". From what I can tell this novel did not do terribly well and there wasn't another D&D novel published until 1984 - Dragons of Autumn Twilight which you may have heard about sometime in the last 26 years. Fortunately that means we don't have to blame Andre Norton for the tide of crappy D&D books that washed over us in later years and that's good as I like a lot of her work. 

So anyway, Quag Keep - at this point it's really more of a historical curiosity for old-school gamers and fantasy fiction fans than an actual good read. I'll be keeping my copy, mainly for that reason. 

The Forgotten Realms and Me

After all of my talk about Greyhawk I though I should spend a little time with Brand X...

I remember reading Ed Greenwood's articles in Dragon in the early 80's and liking almost all of them. he had a very easy way of making it seem like all of this stuff was coming from a real place  - the seven swords article, Pages from the Mages, the ecology articles. There was one he wrote about building a campaign world that stuck with me for years because it was so good. So when the word came down that TSR was putting out a new campaign world and this guy was the driving force behind it I thought it would be pretty good. It was.

I have a friend that I've known since I was 13. We don't see each other much anymore but he got the FR boxed set when it first came out and when we DM'ed for each other (and others) we pretty much settled that he ran the Realms and I ran Greyhawk, and we kept that arrangement for more than 20 years. So I played 1st edition Realms but it really took off for us with 2nd edition.

The 2nd edition Realms boxed set was just pure gold - gods, monsters, lots of maps, some NPC's to place. At the end of the 80's and the early 90's, the Realms was the hot world to be in - everything from the gold box computer games to the Bloodstone adventures (Battlesystem!) were set in the Realms, and I had a blast. My friend was very much an old school DM with no fudging, wandering monsters, and a fairly strict adherence to the rules, so I can't tell you how many characters I buried there but it's in the double digits somewhere. I know that just counting clerics I was up to Brutallus Maximus III, priest of Tempus, before we wound down and moved to 3rd.

The thing I liked best about it conceptually was the maps - lots and lots of maps. Poster-sized maps. Faerun. Waterdeep. Undermountain. All of these came with lots of big huge maps just dripping with interesting places. The Hill of Lost Souls. The Halls of the Hammer. Dragonspear Castle. The Battle of the Bones. The Moonsea. All of these places make me want to gather a party and go exploring. 

The thing I liked best mechanically was Faiths and Avatars. Finally, clerics could belong to a specific god and play differently than each other mechanically. Once this came out I read my friend's copy, bought my own a week later and never looked back. I played specialty priests (usually of Tempus, the war god) from then on and that's how I finished out 2E Realms. 

The thing I liked the least about the realms was the novels - many of them were just bad, some terrible. They did little to enhance the world and a lot to cheapen it. Many of the concepts in the game - The Harpers, Evermeet, Dracoliches - were cool, but then the novels just destroyed whatever uniqueness or mystery there was to them. I'm pretty tolerant of game fiction, but these were the novels that showed me it could suck.

There's a lot of old-schooler hate for some aspects of the realms, but most of them never bothered me - Elminster, etc. but I was coming from Greyhawk where we had a bunch of named high-level NPC''s too so that didn't really seem all that different to me. Modenkainen, Bigby, Otto, Robilar and Tenser didn't come from Faerun. Seven Sisters? We had the Circle of Eight. Too many gods? Look at the list in the 3E Greyhawk Gazeteer and tell me that's a short list . It's compiled from all of the 1E and 2E published material, it's not just made up for 3rd.  Now I didn't care for Kara-Tur or Maztica (more bad novels - though the final Horde novel, "Crusade" was pretty cool )  but they've largely ignored those areas since 2nd edition anyway, and in 4th Maztica got replaced by a big chunk of Toril full of Dragons and Dragonborn, which is much cooler anyway. 

So once 3rd edition came along I kept running Greyhawk and playing in the Realms and it was good. My final character was a 3.5 human barbarian who took the shield-bashing feats and had a good time smashing things up. We saw the terror of Rappan Athuk and fought some giants in a conversion of G1. I discovered the fun of high level druids who could wild shape into a Dire Bear and have a Dire Bear as a companion, letting our party take 2 giant melee beasts into the oversized hallways of the Steading, where much butt was kicked. It was a good run and 3E fit the Realms just fine. The DM was great. He didn't care about the stupid novels or the metaplot, he just ran his adventures in the world and we liked it. 

Along came 4E and I would say that a majority of the people who liked the Realms through 1-2-3E hated the changes for 4E. Gods died, nations and cities changed, NPC's died off or disappeared, continents were moved or reappeared or retconned...and I was fine with it. I wasn't sure what I was going to do with 4th, but when I finally got a look at the Realms campaign guide, well, the parts that changed I kind of like. It is a more modern cinematic style of high fantasy (floating chunks of rock in the sky, etc) and it does explain the mechanical differences with magic and the new races quite well. Plus the Realms has always been a kind of anything goes type of world so you can fit darn near anything in it and 4E finally gives us a system that supports the ridiculously high power levels seen in some of the older material, including being the chosen representative of a god on earth. One problem with older version of D&D vs. the novels written about D&D (yes Gord the Rogue included) is that the book characters would do crazy powerful things that could never happen in the game so they tended to be the Chosen of Mystra or the son of a deity or some other very special background. Now all that stuff can happen in the game  - between 20th and 30th level. If Greyhawk is a Heroic tier to Paragon tier kind of world, then the Realms is a Paragon to Epic kind of world and there's nothing wrong with that.

I haven't played any 4E in Faerun. My friend isn't running 4E as he hated the changes and there are other issues there too. 

I have however run 4E in the Realms. When I finally started looking at running a 4E game (after much resistance on my part) I didn't want to run a published module, I wanted to write my own stuff. I looked through my material and realized somewhere along the way that one of my favorite touchpoints with FR was the old computer game Pool of Radiance. It was a cool idea that was handled in a rather lackluster fashion for 1E as "Ruins of Adventure". The setup though was perfect for 4E's new "everything is leveled" approach. Once I grabbed onto this idea I pretty much had to set it in the Realms - like the Temple of Elemental Evil belongs in Greyhawk, Phlan belongs on the Moonsea in the Realms. It's not really a conversion - it just uses the same general layout of the city and has some of the high points I remember from the computer game and some of the same background. The encounters are my own creation. Many 4E books and sheets of graph paper later we're playing through it and the group is having a good time, including the DM. 

So much fun that when the time comes to start the apprentices on 4E I may place them in the Realms instead of Greyhawk as it opens up the possibility of their party meeting up with the Friday night party and teaming up for an adventure or two. Multiple parties sharing the same campaign world and crossing paths with them either as allies or rivals - now that is truly old school.  Greyhawk will be seeing some attention with the 1E campaign anyway, so I may delay its 4E time until later - I don't think it's feelings will be hurt. Down the road I can turn the Realms campaign over to another DM -maybe one of the apprentices - and actually get to play 4E - and the Realms - again.

Motivational Monday

New 1E Greyhawk Campaign House Rules

Looking at 1E again I do have some decisions to make about character generation, level limits, and combat. 

Character generation: 4d6 drop the lowest, in order - that should be forgiving enough but the in order part will feel very old school to my newbies. 

Max HP at 1st level - Yeah I'm a softie.

Races, Classes - right out of the PHB

Demi-Human level limits - I always thought they were too low so I'll probably use the limits in Unearthed Arcana or 2nd edition as my baseline. 

I'm not using the zero-level characters option - you spend enough time at low level as it is. I don;t think you benefit much from extending it more.

Combat - I've been running Basic D&D by the book and I like it, but AD&D is different , especially when it comes to initiative and I don't really like that part of it. I always liked how 2nd edition handled initiative (d10 -dex adj + weapon speed or casting time or a set number based on item/action, lowest goes first)  so I may use that. Or I may go with the very simple d6+dex adj highest wins. I'm not sure, but I'm not thrilled with it as written.

I'm not going to introduce UA at first, and I will probably never use the classes and races in it at all - I know how overpowered they are. I do like the spells, magic items, and equipment though so those may turn up along the way. 

I will use Dragon articles. The CD-archive from  a few years back is an old-schooler's dream and I love mine. There are a lot of good ideas in there if I run into problems. 

If all else fails and I run into something I just don't see a good answer for, I can always consult 2E and even Hackmaster. Lots of options with those as well.

The plan is to stick to the adventures I mentioned in the last post so I shouldn't need much more other than the occasional fill-in adventure or wandering encounter. Ebay has provided additional PHB's so everyone now has their own. Now I just need to find some decent character sheets and a good day to start running this and we're all set. 

A New 1E Greyhawk Campaign

So I've written all this stuff about adapting 4E to Greyhawk (see what I did there?) and now I turn around and start a 1st edition AD&D game in it instead? Why would someone do that? "Because he finally came to his senses" I hear some of you say  - no. I have several motivations:

1) These are my gaming roots. Granted, I started with Basic, but that $12 Player's handbook was an object of desire for well over a year and for most of the 1980's when someone said "role-playing game" that picture above is what was in my brain. AD&D was the center of that universe and even now it's the one that's burned into my brain - levels, weapon damages, spell effects, magic items, 88hp Huge Ancient Red Dragons - I still recall much of this as if it was yesterday. I don't expect to recapture the magic of being 13 and finally getting a +4 Defender for my ranger, but I do want to take a tour of it again and see how it works now. 

2) The next generation is here and learning about everything from Atari and Intellivision to Warhammer 40,000 to D&D. I have kids who are interested in these things to differing degrees and in different ways and I want them to feel like they know about as much of this stuff as they care to learn. I have a vision of taking them to Gen Con and entering in an AD&D game one day and a 4E game the next and having them able to talk Keep on the Borderlands, slaying Snurre, fighting the crab in White Plume Mountain and dying in Tomb of Horrors with the greybeards like me, while still being able to talk to kids their own age about laser cleric builds and fighting the kobolds in Keep on the Shadowfell. My interest in games and my interest in history are combining here in a powerful way and I can't really resist it. 

3) (Combo special) It's fun, it's easy to run, and I have a ton of material for it, much of which I have never run all the way through. All of the classic modules - A series, C Series, D Series, G series, S Series, U series - I have all of those! And I have people to play them! Living in my house! It's awesome!

Besides these my wife started late in 3rd edition and a couple of my players started with 2nd and never got to do some of those touchpoint adventures from 1st, so I'd like to let them experience them in their "original language".

Some of this interest sprang from a blog entry by Bullgrit here  where he analyzes the old adventures and figures out that hey, they actually did work pretty well mechanically as far as treasure and advancement.

So how will this work? The 83 boxed set will be my primary reference for world material. The current plan is to start with the Temple of Elemental Evil. I've never run the original and I want to try, and I don't want to do it via conversion. It's a classic, and I want to give it a shot. That should end at roughly 8th level and will lead into...

...Against the Giants, another classic. I plan to run them in order as written, which I have never gotten to do past the second one. Once this is finished they should be around 12th level and ready for the D series.

D1-2-3 in order, as written, is another set that I never ran. I played through D1& D2 and into D3, but never went beyond. I know they are fun and I still have stories today of some of the stuff that happened in those things. 

Then finally, Q1 to wrap up the whole thing. Never played, never ran it, know it's a little weird compared to a traditional dungeon module but by this time they should be up to it. They should finish up around 15th level which is pretty damn high in AD&D. 

There are other modules I would like to use - N1, the Saltmarsh series, the Slavers series, and the S modules - and I will if I get the chance, but this is the core path I have chosen for the backbone of the campaign.

 Now the continuity part - some of these have already been done in my Greyhawk campaign. Should I start over? Should I change it? Should I even care? I have several thoughts:

1) Stat over with a clean slate, CY 576 welcome to Greyhawk hope you enjoy your stay. This is pretty easy to do and the kids won't know the difference. 

2) Rewrite - just replace the old limited notes and memories I have of these ancient occurrences with the new ones as they happen. Not a big deal.

I'm not totally satisfied with either of these so I'm leaning towards option 3: Timejump/Retcon

Greyhawk was created in the 1970's and the campaign dates in the booklets go up to the 570's with most campaigns taking place in the 570-580's game time and the 1970's-1980's real time. 

So...

What if 1980's = 580's, 1990's = 590's, and 2010 = 610? Now when I say "that happened 25 years ago" I mean it in both senses - real time and game time. I think it has a lot of possibilities. Old characters largely aren't adventuring any more because it's been 20 years. Old threats creep back in as people forget and new generations arise. Maybe the Hill Giant chief isn't the one my ranger killed, but there would be a new one and if the drow are up to their old tricks again then who's to say the same plot is being attempted? We ransacked the spaceship in Barrier Peaks but what if more than one section of the ship fell to Greyhawk? I never ran or really even played much of the TOEE so I don't have a problem there (except that TOEE will be following the RttTOEE in my Greyhawk - oh well, it still works) and the rest of my planned adventures are reasonably likely to reoccur so this works pretty well. The famous (in my Greyhawk) "Dyvers Thieves' War" now happened 15 years ago, avoiding all kinds of weird conflicts since one of my current players in my 4E game helped start it!

I actually experimented with a smaller scale version of this during a 3rd edition campaign. In 3E the PC's need time to craft magic items if they choose to do so as it can take days to weeks to craft things. I ruled that whenever we stopped in a town or other safe base type area that real time between sessions = game time passed in town. This allowed them to use some of those crafting feats without slowing down the game for everyone, and it stretched out the campaign time too as I had a problem with someone going from level 1 to level 10 in three months which is how it was going at that point. I like it better when it's more like a year of game time, even if the number of actual sessions stays the same. It also helps with the role play opportunities as even if you only met this NPC bartender 3 sessions ago, if it's been a month of real time then you've known him for a month and he might let you in on something  he wouldn't tell a stranger. It worked well in that campaign so I will use it in this one too.

 Next: The Rules

Greyhawk, Campaigns, New Editions, and Continuity

So I have multiple problems. I have a fairly good run of continuity over about 30 years in Greyhawk. I have a new edition of D&D that really doesn't fit with the world as we know it. I am also looking at a "Return to 1st Edition" campaign that I want to run in Greyhawk.

Now I've talked about one way to use 4E with Greyhawk here. I still like that idea and I may still use it., but I've thought of another since then: Instead of trying to make Greyhawk fit 4E, make 4E fit Greyhawk. Cut ruthlessly from the available races and consider cutting the available classes. 

Race-wise the Dragonborn and everything from PHB 3 are out. I would consider leaving Tieflings in due to GH's history of demons & devils mixing it up with humans -see Iuz, see Alu-Demons, see Iggwilv/Grazzt, etc. I would change Goliaths to half-ogres. I would probably dump Devas but I could be talked into leaving them if someone really wanted to play one. Eladrin might have to go or maybe leave them in as Gray Elves, I'm not sure. Shifters might be OK to keep but they are not a major race in any world anyway and I kind of like the idea of the Rhennee having a bunch of shifters in their ranks as a kind of racial secret. Otherwise, Dwarves, Elves, Halflings, Humans, Gnomes, and Half-Orcs are the available races, period. 

Class-wise the proliferation of classes might be alright. I would probably ban the PHB3 psionic classes but then again, there is a precedent for psionics in GH so maybe it's OK after all. Having a lot more class options (PHB1 + PHB2 + Power books) and 4E's multiclassing, Paragon Paths, and Epic Destinies does make it easier to explain some of the wilder NPC writeups like Murlynd and Kelanen and some of the entries in the Rogue's gallery. 

Even power sources can be a factor here: Dwarves in 1E can really only be Fighters, Thieves, and Clerics. To replicate this in 4E, just make it a campaign rule that dwarves can't take any class with an arcane power source. You could make up a nice little chart with races down one side and power sources across the top like this:

Source   Arcane Divine Martial Primal  Psionic Race

Dwarf

X X X Elf X X X Half-Elf X X X X Half-Orc X X X X Half-Ogre X X X Halfling X X X

Human

X X X X

X

Gnome     X                             X                             X

X=AVAILABLE TO THAT RACE

Humans are the most versatile, Half-Elves and Half-Orcs are almost there, and everyone else gets to pick from 3 of the 5 sources. If you included Tieflings I would give them Arcane/Divine/Martial and if you used Drow I would probably give them the same as Elves. If you aren't using the psionic source I would probably switch Elves & Drow to Arcane/Divine/Martial because hey, you need those Drow Clerics right?

Now unlike the Time of Legends idea this is definitely going to be a subset of 4E and may not be "fun" for hardcore 4E players, but I suspect older D&D players would like it just fine. I know I would be willing to give it a try. We also now have a WOTC precedent for it as the new Dark Sun campaign pretty much eliminates the Divine power source altogether and no one seems terribly upset by this. 

For the gods I would use the standard Greyhawk deities. Your divine players should be able to adapt pretty easily. 

Magic items: This could be a problem as 4E assumes a fairly high rate of magic item acquisition and disposal, higher than some may like. I don't have a huge problem with it because I can tell you that my 7th level fighter in 1E wasn't running around with a +1 sword, so I would probably just use the standard 4E approach and control the flavor of what items I included. For others though, the DMG2 has a good section on page 138 that describes how to go with a low-magic game and not wreck the mechanics. I like it and when I eventually run a 4E Greyhawk game  I may go with it just for the novelty to make sure GH feels different than the Realms.

For monsters, well between the 3 monster manuals out as I write this, you should have no problem recreating old favorite adventures. 

The only tricky area is almost a metagame one and that is planar cosmology. The new game has a simpler layout for the planes and it eliminates the Ethereal, Elemental (and para-elemental), Positive, and Negative material planes. However, this is not as drastic as it might seem.  We may have lost the + & - but we have gained the Feywild, a place where life is abundant, and the Shadowfell, the dark place that powers undead - sound familiar? The Astral plane is still the cosmic sea that everyone uses to get to the homes of the gods, and it's still patrolled by Githyanki and Astral Dreadnaughts. There is still an Abyss and a Nine Hells. Instead of distinct elemental planes there is the Elemental Chaos which is a mix of all of them - perhaps mortals have had an imperfect understanding of how these things are laid out all along. I don't see this as a real problem once you take a look at it and dig in a bit. If it helps a bit then just use the traditional names from 1E and the descriptions and mechanics from 4E and you should be fine.

Continuity - how would I handle this? Probably with a small timeline jump. Campaign currently in the 580's? Well after the events of Vecna Lives, it turns out the super-lich demi-god has been interfering with the normal flow of magic in the world for quite some time. After his defeat (not a bad way to close out a 1E or 2E campaign) magic gets a little stronger which explains where some of the new classes come from. I'd start things up 10 years after that and let your players move forward. Maybe just jump it up to CY 600, say the Great Kingdom is reunited and call it The New Era. Heck, start a new calendar and make it Year 1 of the new Era.

So there it is - after looking through some of the old-school material as I prep for a 1E game and having a lot more 4E experience and resources than when I started, I now think it's possible to run a good, fun, 4E game in the traditional Greyhawk time period. With a little editing of the options, you can make the rules fit the world you want to use rather than trying to shoehorn it in the other way around.

Next: Now how do I fit a 1E campaign in at roughly the same time?

Greyhawk, Campaigns, Game-Time, TPK's, and 30 Years of Rough Continuity

A while back I looked over some of my notes and did some rough estimating and figured out that all of my campaigns in Greyhawk since 1st edition only add up to about 5 years of elapsed game time. It struck me as a little odd that if everything had unfolded in linear fashion the calendar would only be at CY 581 or so. Of course this isn't the case exactly as there were some timeline jumps in there, particularly with 3rd edition. A quick run-through:

My early AD&D games were mostly one-shot run-throughs of the TSR modules and some of the adventures from Dragon. These were the days when a coherent, serial campaign was just not going to happen as I played with at least 4 different DM's across 3 states, none of whom really cared about making a cohesive world. Back then the DM said "I got Bone Hill and it's for levels 2-4 so bring a character for it on Saturday" and that's what we did. Even then though, my guys were based in Greyhawk.

Once I started DM-ing part of the time, I set everything in Greyhawk, even if it wasn't originally set there in the module - Isle of Dread, "Chagmat" and "Quest for the Midas Orb" from Dragon - all of these went somewhere on that Darlene Map. Even if the PC's weren't all placed in my campaign, the history of those modules became the early history of MY Greyhawk. Altogether it only covered about 2 years of game time (I made my own calendar and made notes on when things happened) even though it was played out over almost 10 years.

For 2nd edition I ran PC's through the different parts of Fate of Istus. I didn't have a lot of Assassins or Monks in my game so it didn't matter so much that they were going away, but I thought it was a cool idea to have a world-hopping adventure like that. Not all of it was great, but I liked it at the time. Coherency didn't really matter either as the characters changed almost every session anyway, but the players knew it was part of a big storyline at least. 

I prety much ignored the Greyhawk Wars, and I didn't own From the Ashes during this time, so I just let rumors of impending war fly in the background (using some of the old Events from the World of Greyhawk column in Dragon) and continued with the looting and slaying.

Unlike 1st edition, most of my 2nd edition adventures were homebrew affairs. I used Dyvers a lot as it was the undetailed city that was a rival of sorts to Greyhawk in my mind. I had it splintered by rival thieves' guilds and had PC's choosing sides and going to work for the guilds or the city government. I suspect a little Shadowrun was rubbing off on my D&D game  but the players' liked it. There was also a trip to the Bright Desert to capture a blue dragon hatchling with a set of Iron Bands of Bilarro that my players still talk about to this day. All of that covered only about 2 years of game time even though it also happened over almost 10 years of real time. We did trade off games a lot - I played a fair amount of 2nd edition in the Forgotten Realms while running exclusively in Greyhawk - so maybe that's what spread it out so much. 

For 3rd edition, I started it off by running it in Greyhawk (Sunless Citadel) and ran 3E from the fall of 2000 right after the books came out until the fall of 2009. Now during this run I did not stay exclusive to Greyhawk. Kalamar and the Scarred Lands were other campaign worlds I ran for big chunks of that time but We made 2 big runs through GH during that time. Both involved Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil, so I retroactively jumped the campaign forward about 10 years into the 580's to put an appropriate distance between TOEE and the Return. We played for 18 months in the first stretch, which was only about 6 months of game time, and ended up with a TPK in the Crater Ridge Mines. We took a break for a while, then the Players wanted to come back to finish the job. I decided a month of game time had passed and various powers wanted to know what had happened to the first group, so they sent a second band of adventurers (some of whom were related to the members of the first bunch like Party #2's half-orc brother of Party #1's elven cleric - it's a long story) in to find out what happened to the first.  I partially restocked the emptied section of the mines and we picked up back in good old Verbobonc. This ran for about 6 months of real time, only about another 2 months of game time, and ended with another TPK. Sigh. RttTOEE can be a very unforgiving adventure in places.

At this point they decided they didn't care about finishing the adventure, they just wanted to move on. Now this is a problem because the adventure deals with a world-spanning threat and if no one does anything then the multiverse is destroyed. I couldn't have this loose end hanging out there...if nothing is handled then GH ends in the 590's and I wasn't ready for that. I liked my rag-tag continuity.

I had been reading another group's log of their handling of the adventure on EN World or some similar site so when they finished the adventure I noted the highlights of their campaign and used it for my own - this 3rd party had finally managed to end the threat of the Elemental Evil and I added their names to tavern talk notes for that time, in case we started up another GH campaign - there would be no more Returning, we were past that one. New campaign = new adventures. Plus I thought it was a little funny that there were players who were part of my campaign who didn't know it and whom I had never met. 

So now we come to 4th edition. I've been running my first 4E campaign in the Forgotten Realms (yes I know but it works well and I had a solid concept that fit there the best) and my Greyhawk game has been dormant for about 4 years, but I like the idea of using it for the new version in some fashion. .I am also planning to start up a 1st edition AD&D game soon and run through a bunch of old classics in their original flavor, so of course Greyhawk must be the setting. How to handle both of these and still keep some kind of continuity? More tomorrow.