...I wanna be a gamer!

Let's talk D&D

In a previous post, I talked a bit about how my lack of a current roleplaying gaming group hasn't slowed down my plans for gaming.  In the years since my last regular group, I've continued to accumulate a large library of gaming material, and, volume-wise, nothing matches my collection of Dungeons & Dragons books.

While I have more complete collections of Shadowrun, Champions and Deadlands (all to be addressed in some future posts), none ever equaled the output of D&D over 30 years, four editions, and two publishing companies.  It's a sad truth that a period of poverty saw me selling a lot of my classic RPG books, but I've since been able to reacquire most of those at least in pdf form.

Despite learning to game with Basic D&D and 2nd Edition, it's 3rd Ed that I have the most experience with and am the most comfortable running.  While I never bought too much into the rules expansions, I was a sucker for adventures and campaign settings, especially through Paizo Publishing's Dungeon Magazine, Necromancer Games' module series, and Sword & Sorcery Studio's Scarred Lands setting.  

But a hobby that stretches across three decades can't be limited to just one edition, and my D&D shelf holds stuff from all versions of the game.  It's hard to say which is my first pick would be, because that feeling changes from time-to-time. So in no particular order, I'll call out some of my favorites.

Age of Worms

Published by Paizo as their second Adventure Path, Age of Worms sees the PCs coming in on the opening chapters of a prophecy which would doom the world and ultimately sees them battling a would-be god.  Although it tried to keep the illusion of setting-neutrality, it's no secret it was written with Greyhawk in mind.  A number of classic Greyhawk locations are highlighted, such as the City of Greyhawk and Great Rift, as well as Greyhawk personalities, like Tenser and Dragotha.  Despite the richness of the setting, though, I fear most of those Easter eggs would be lost on my hypothetical gaming group, because none of the groups I've gamed with have ever been that into the setting.  But what really stands out with this Adventure Path is how well it translates to the Eberron setting.

If you're at all familiar with that world, you'll know that ancient prophecies and globe-trotting adventures are assumed.  While Dungeon Magazine did release some adaptation notes to place the AP in Eberron, I don't necessarily agree with all of them.  For example, they had Kyuss translated as a fiend, whereas I feel he should be a Daelkyr, and they placed their giant fortress up north rather than on Xen'drik (home of the giants).

The only negative to Age of Worms is that it's really only the second best AP published in Dungeon.  The next AP, Savage Tide, is better in every way.  The only reason I'd rather run AoW is that it plays better before ST than after and my fantasy gaming dreams have me running both one right after the other.

The Wizard's Amulet

Necromancer Games came onto the scene in the first few days of 3rd Edition with a freely downloadable 1st-level adventure. It was a very successful gamble on their part as I totally fell for the old-school mentality of their adventure design, as well as the way it placed the PCs as leaders of their own destiny.

See, even in 2nd Edition, published adventures usually placed the PCs as heroes, rescuing villagers and defeating villains.  Here, the party is assembled by one of their own who has a key which will presumably let them into a vacated wizard's tower.  It's just the kind of money-grubbing dungeon delving I love, and Necromancer Games produced those kinds of adventures in spades.

The free download lead directly into the Crucible of Freya, and from there branched into such dungeon delves as Tomb of Abysthor, sandbox adventures like Vault of Larin Karr, and the deadly dungeoncrawl Rappun Athuk.  For as much as I love a campaign metaplot, I also appreciate a product that lets me indulge my players in an open world. I love the idea of placing clues, selling maps and otherwise giving the PCs all the leeway they need to choose which death they'll face.

As for campaign setting, NG's adventures don't exactly puzzle-piece together, but they can be shoved together enough to describe a general region.  On a global scale, their adventures fit almost (but not quite) perfectly in Sword & Sorcery's Scarred Lands setting.  Some adjustments have to be made to one or the other (such as NG's focus on demonic threats, which SL mostly glosses over in favor of titans), but it's worth the time.

Given the chance to run this campaign, I'd definitely place it in the Scarred Lands, somewhere south of Mithril with Larrin Karr's Quail Valley existing in northern Vesh.  From there my players could follow whatever lead they wanted, and NG's library of adventures makes me pretty confident that I'll have something to meet their needs.

Nentir Vale

I waffle a lot on how I feel about 4th Edition D&D.  At times it ranges from my all-time favorite and most playable version down to "too gamey"  But regardless of how I feel about the rules at the moment, the assumed setting of the Nentir Vale, it's implied cosmology and gods, and the adventures set there especially toward the end of the edition's publishing life make it a place I really want to adventure in.

Truth be told, though, any run with 4th Edition would feature a fair number of houserules to take it farther away from gamist homogeneity and give it some old school grit.  I'm going to imagine my pretend gaming group loves those changes.


The Essentials rules releases went a long way toward making 4th Edition something I'd want to play, and the adventures released after that, Reavers of Harkenwold and Madness at Gardmore Abbey, fer instance, are examples of excellent game design in any edition.  Along with some side-quests, these adventures are enough to take the players through the heroic tier of play and establish them as movers and shakers in Nentir Vale's politics.  

The downside is that's sort of where it peters out.  I'd be unhappy if my imaginary players didn't claim Gardmore to rule as the Vale's newest city-state, but 4e has no rules for kingdom management.  And any campaign after that would have to be drawn from other, older published adventures.  The second 2/3 of the Scales of War Adventure Path in Dungeon Magazine could be re-purposed for my newly political PCs, as they unite the Vale to fend off a Githyanki invasion and later battle god-like dragons.  That campaign plan suffers a bit from the lack of a world to place the Vale in (as the scope expands beyond what a single valley can contain), with only the ill-fitting map from a board game to give guidance to what the world looks like.

There's also the possibility of using the 4e Tomb of Horrors campaign to add some spice to the upper level adventuring, but as interesting as those adventures are, I'm not sure how they'll be received by players who have no experience with the actual Tomb.

Return to the Tomb of Horrors

See what I did there?  I just used that title to be cheeky, but the old Tomb of Horrors 2nd Edition boxed set is the end to my ideal old-school campaign which would start with Night Below and pass through Rod of Seven Parts before reaching Asherak's skull hill.

Like most gamers my age, I've been feeling the Old School Urge lately, and pulling out the ol' 2e books again would really scratch that itch.  I have a lot of fond memories of gaming in a time before it was really important that all classes be balanced against each other, and players understood that the thief was most useful out of combat and the magic-user was likely to die. These 2nd Ed. fantasies always include revisits to the boxed sets I mentioned above. The idea is always to start the PCs in the backwoods of Furyondy in the World of Greyhawk setting to delve into the Night Below and then use the Greyhawk Wars timeline as a backdrop for the global quest for the Rod of Seven Parts.  If possible, I'd like to find a way to get the PCs in charge of a barony or something, 'cause I also have the Birthright domain rules standing by for just such an occurrence.

I wonder if there's a way to include Spelljammer or Planescape into this.  Both of those are high points of 2e, but all the published adventures for those settings are comparatively low level, especially since the PCs will be around level 10 by the time they finish Night Below.  

Dark Sun War of the Lance

While we're talking 2nd Edition, let me tell you of an absolute fantasy campaign of mine.

If I asked you to name a setting where the gods abandoned mankind and dragons are just creature's of ancient legend, what would you say?  Most might say "Dragonlance," but a few of you might point to "Dark Sun."

And that's the magic.  Imagine a Dark Sun campaign where the PCs encounter evidence of the gods in the form of metal disks (an unimaginable treasure to start with), and their quest to reclaim clerical magic reveals the return of dragons as draconian armies form to wage war on the region.  I think the War of the Lance would play amazingly with the evocative Dark Sun setting.  I'm not super-familiar enough with either setting or adventures to make an easy conversion, but I think it's something worth doing.

The MEGA-Campaign

As long as we're talking hypothetical campaigns, let me pitch an idea of an uber-campaign. Basically, the idea is to use an "all of the above" option to trace a multi-generational campaign and watch how a campaign setting (in this case, Greyhawk) changes over time.

Here, we'd start with the 2nd Edition campaign described above which will give the players some experience with the Rod of Seven Parts as well as the Tomb of Horrors.  Fifty years later, a new generation of heroes will find themselves in a world more aligned with 3rd Edition rules. Dwarves have learned arcane magic, fer instance, and magic research has uncovered new ways for mortals to craft magic items.  These characters adventure through the Age of Worms path.  After this, another 50 years go by and the world has changed even more.  Empires have fallen, and a war in the heavens has restructured the divine hierarchy of gods.  In the end, the world looks a lot like how presented in 4th Edition D&D.  Running through this campaign will give the players a chance to revisit the Tomb of Horrors among other locations.

We're talking years of gaming life here, but it sounds pretty awesome to me...