Campaigns That Could Have Been

I guess I'm on a festival of remembering older stuff. There are a few campaigns that I was never able to do, or that just never got off the ground. Here is a bit about them.

2nd Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons

Unfortunately any records of what might have been in this era have been erased from the annals of time. I can't find anything on my laptop. Aside from always wanting to try out Dark Sun or Planescape, I don't know what might have been. There is a folder on my laptop titled Orsus. All I have is a paragraph in a file titled "Scenario 1" where the player's wake up in a tomb with gold coins on their tongues and feel their memories slip out of their grasp. They're covered in dust and know that one of the many doors around them is an exit and the others are armories and spell component closets and the like. I have no idea where that was going, but there is a companion file that has an alternate class system I was trying to finagle into 2nd Edition.

3.0/3.5 Edition Dungeons and Dragons

Heck If I Know

This is the one I am currently running in 4th Edition, but it would have been nice to play it in 3.5. I can't date when I first started working on it because all the files have a created date of March 2009, which was when I transferred all of my DnD stuff from my desktop to my laptop and the computer they were originally stored on has long since passed into ruin. There is a last modified date of February 2008, so they predate 2008. I had a good feel for 3.5 Edition, so I was pulling out all the stops and creating my own classes and a bizarre system of poisonous and unreliable magic that only partially translates into 4th Edition.

New

This one was slowly approaching the point of robustness that Heck If I Know was at, never quite got there though. There were a lot of maps and I had some ideas about a lot of things for it. The main unique point of it was that there were no humans in it.

Nosgoth

This was a world where everything had died, or was dying, and it was all undead except for a few enclaves of the living. I basically deconstructed every undead monster, then rebuilt it in a way that was based on feats that the players could take. We talked a little about it, but it never went anywhere. I think part of it was that we couldn't reach a consensus on whether the group should be living or dead.

Planescape

I tried to convert Planescape into 3.5 Edition. Huzzah for consensus reality! No interest from anyone but Tony and a little from Jeremy because of the philosopher clubs that can change reality motif.

Tony and I

Tony and I were going to create a campaign. I shit you not. We spent a lot of work time at computers bouncing emails back and forth at six am. He was working on a kingdom of Aasimar based on an image of an aasimar king brooding on a stone throne and I was working on a clan of swamp gnomes that rode dire wolverines into battle. It would have been epic. We both got lazy I guess. I like my current campaign, but I think that with Tony and I at the helm, this could have been something amazing.

Torem

This one was a result of reading a lot of Michael Moorcock, a love of the phrase "consensus reality", and my frustration that no one would choose an appropriate alignment. I actually tracked alignment points in d20 Modern Shadow Chasers, you know what alignment everyone was? Chaotic Neutral. They randomly followed rules and broke the law and basically did whatever they felt like doing at the time. I've since learned that alignment is a really stupid system for understanding the complexities of the human psyche. Anyway, the campaign centered on the balance between Law and Chaos and it had a few maps and a unique pantheon of gods and the like (many of which were divine incarnations of previously retired PCs). As far as robustness of the background material, it is somewhere between New and Heck If I Know.

4th Edition

The Nel

When we first got into 4th Edition and I hadn't discovered my niche or groove or whatever you want to call it when I decided to try and be a really good DM, I toyed with the idea of converting the Nel to 4th Edition and trying to run something in Grenaldeen in the era following the disappearance of Keroen Skathos. Eric is the only one that has read my story about Keroen Skathos, so everyone would kind of be more lost than they usually are when I throw them into a strange fantasy world. I managed to tamp down my urges to go converting, partly because it would be super easy in GURPs and ultra hard in 4th Edition, and in GURPs the Nel (or Fey if you want to think of them as that) would be balanced unlike if they were put into 4th Edition. Anyway, I still think it would be neat as Hell to run it, but I might just write about it instead when I get around to it.

So there it is. Lament for what could have been experienced. Imagine the laughter, loot, and licentious behavior that the world shall never see.