That's right, been rolling a lot of dice, as in running my homebrew on a fairly regular basis since February of this year. It's drawn me back into feverish prep work and planning. We've already lost one player who moved but added a new player. We're currently on a two-week break while one of my players is out of town. The party consists of four players, each running a sidekick along with their main, so eight characters total. Surprisingly, two mains are Clerics! They actually chose to run 'em! Fairly uncommon in my long history of DM'ing. The original group didn't have a Dwarf but the new dude chose a Dwarf as his main.
The sidekick option definitely amps up the party's capabilities. Not sure I'd like it if we had five or more players but for four or fewer it's good.
I'm using much of the brew I shared all these years ago here on the old Grog 'n Blog. During my long hiatus from the blog I tweaked and toyed with game mechanics as I am wont to do. Now I'm able to playtest them with newbies who don't know they're roleplaying in a heavily tweaked version of the olden rules. The group includes two Gen-Xers, like yours truly, a Millennial and a Zoomer (Gen Z). The two younger players have little desire to read the rules I print and keep available at the table. One of the Gen-Xers pores over them, the other seems confused by much of it. There just happy running their characters while I referee. It's all good.
Early on I was maintaining detailed session notes, but that lapsed into simply keeping notes of important details to either be revisited later or fleshed out into plot lines. Right now the game has numerous potential plots, and the players have explored a particular one somewhat in depth. An earlier one petered out because the most interested player is the one who moved away. What I'm getting at is I've lost count of the exact number of sessions we've played. I'd guess 24 or so. In session zero the players created their mains and sidekicks and I introduced them to the Bleak Beyond. To jump start the game I involved an employer who paid them to, you know, go adventuring. The training wheels are off now and they're on their own.
They've had some good fortune along the way with their characters, who range from level 2 to level 5. I am a big fan of magical decks in the game, akin to the DoMT. I made up a toned down version for low-level play. Of course I had to hide it in the dungeon somewhere. They found it. None of them knew what to expect. After seeing the first player's incredible luck, no black cards at all, the second player opened with Fool, followed by Sun. Using this low-level version he netted 7K experience. That's the level five character. There was a Comet in there as well but other than that and the Fool the rest of the cards were red which yielded two Thrones and a Moon card. No Dungeon, no Void, no Talons. That's some luck there. Suffice to say they don't need to have an employer now.
Aside from two out of dungeon one-shots and one entire session in town, the group has been braving one of my old dungeons. They've managed to explore roughly 85% of one level. Sounds crazy but they are hunting for two more items to solve a riddle/puzzle, creating some back-tracking and lots of searching. They've discovered one passage to another level, but chose to finish the current level before moving on. There are over 60 rooms on this level so it's taking a long time. Technically the characters are too high for 1st level dungeoneering, however this old dungeon was written up primarily in an "archival" style; only a few specific rooms have monsters in the original text. The intent being that during session prep I can add whatever monsters and treasure I want to keep things interesting.
Forgot to mention, one of the cool things I used to start the campaign was to reveal to them that their employer had acquired an old partial map of the dungeon. I found a hand-drawn map, drawn by one of my players during a session in the same dungeon that I ran in 2008, made a copy of it, and off they went, tracing the footsteps of the players who explored before them 17 years ago. You can see that map in a post from Tuesday, July 1, 2008 called Session One Report.
Yep, ended up being a single day of gaming as there was never a session two! I didn't expect there would be, it was like herding cats getting my old high school buddies all on the same schedule back in '08.
In the current campaign I set the age of this rare map at roughly 100 years. During prep I made lots of changes to the dungeon in order to reflect the passage of time.
So there you have it. I'm rolling them dice again!
~Sham, Quixotic Referee
