Campaigns That Were

Ok, so the previous two posts influenced this post a bit. I'm going to go back and as best as I recollect write down some previous campaigns I've attempted to run. It'll be broken down by edition or system. I forget things so feel free to offer insight if you're a former player. Not all of these are necessarily "campaigns" in the truest sense, some might more accurately be described as character creation trends.

2nd Edition AD&D

The Whatever Wars

-This was the name I just came up with for when we all played back at Handy. Eric, Jeremy, Mike, Shawn, and a few others that might have been Troy Histead and some dudes we knew from the Handy library got together during lunches and played DnD in the library or the science lab. There was no overarching plot, just sheets of college ruled notebook paper with stats and we'd slog it out. Good times.

The William Wallace Era

-Mike and I watched Braveheart and we thought it was glorious, so Mike decided to make a fighter named William Wallace that was attempting to recreate Scotland in an ocean by dumping dirt into it. He killed a lot of kobolds and got to level fifteen. I actually had a decent campaign written out where he recruited rangers and warriors and such to his banner. It was probably the first kernel of a campaign setting that I ever came up with. Wish I could find the notes for it somewhere.

Reboot

Summer happened and we all finished junior high and we kind of took a break from gaming for a while. I mentioned DnD to Jason in passing while he was getting me into Magic: The Gathering and he kind of thought it was goofy, later he expressed an interest in playing it so we broke out the old stuff, bought some books, and started gaming again. I recall him being a...wizard and us playing the silver anniversary edition of Keep on the Borderlands. I don't recall who all was playing, but I do remember giving Jason a real hard time for using thees and thous and attempting archaic speech patterns to fit the world. I probably should have let him roll with it. I don't recall how long this lasted but I do recall us also owning White Plume Mountain and Against the Giants and intermittently attempting to play those.

The Black Claw Clan Era

I started attempting a linked series of adventures that started in a town called Runegate (it was called such because it had a magic gate with runes on it). This first scenario was pretty standard fare, the guys were hired to destroy some bandits. At this point Jason was running his tigerman Kain and had decided to be evil. Long story short, they cleared out the bandit fort and took it over. Before they took over the territory I believe there were a few scenarios that Eric and Jeremy were around for (as...druids? rangers?) and I recall a bullywug scenario with an ambush scene that took a bunch of part members down and got them captured and no one really liked that, which was understandable. Anyway, the "arc" ended with the group sneaking into a dwarven city for unspecified reasons and killing everyone in it. For some reason the city was also above ground.

The Gauntlet

These were a series of random encounters designed to be really tough for players. We (Jason and I) had reams of paper dedicated to challenging fights of various kinds designed to brutalize your character. If you survived the...twelve rounds I think it was, you got to keep your character and any associated XP or loot. If you lost, I can't recall what happened.

The Drow Character Era

During the previous era of gaming the Drizzt Do'Urden books began circulating the group. Suddenly everyone (myself included) decided that they either a) needed to be a drow, b) needed to wield two melee weapons, or c) needed to be festooned with hand crossbows. Or they needed to do all three. With Jason's penchant for killing any PC that disagreed with him or Kain, there was a high turnover rate for non-Jason characters.

The Fey

I read this series by...her last name was Rusch. It was called The Fey and was like five or so books. I also read the trilogy of books that take place after the Willow movie by Chris Claremont. From both series I cobbled together a race of highly overpowered and magical immortals and those became what we played for a while. I think Dave Morgan joined us once as well. Later I began to write about "my" Fey, which were basically Rusch's Fey, plus the malevoiy or whatever they were called in the Willow trilogy. I also really needed to check the power of Jason's Black Claw Clan and stop him from using Kain to kill and control the group.

The Sokar Fey

Anti-heroes roxzor!!1! I liked the Fey, but they were too clean for my tastes at the time, so I wrote a plotline where they fled a world and became trapped in a lightless abyss and over time their society became darker and more evil. Then they found a way out and decided to reclaim the place they used to live. It was actually a little fun, it was two campaigns run at the same time and the players were actually hunting their alter egos in the other campaign. I know JP, Jason, Jason Knochel, and...James I think were involved. There were also some cybernetically inclined dwarves. I think we actually played like seven or so scenarios.

A Norse Story

A read a book series about an alternate Norse mythos. I say alternate because as far as I recollect it did not take place on Terra. Anyway, I took the world depicted in the books and converted it into AD&D and we played around with it a little bit.

The Kardia Campaign

My second edition epic. I threw everything I had previously created into one big pot and made a pretty robust world, there was also a story associated with it about my Cernunnos NPC, I was big into myth and legend and horned gods back then. The Fey were there, the Black Claw Clan was there, pretty much everything I could think of from mythology and contemporary fantasy fiction was in there as well. We had ten players as well as two DMs (Jason and I) running everything. It was a massive clusterfuck. We played once and didn't even finish the entire scenario. I honestly don't even recall the main plot or whatever of the campaign.

Spawning Time

I was reading some Age of Mortals or Fifth Age or whatever the Dragonlance stuff was called after Weis and Hickman killed off their most beloved characters. Kitaria's dragon Skie created something called a spawn, it was a rather powerful dragon humanoid. I rolled with it and statted them up for like every color, shade, or metal of dragon. So the spawn intermittently hopped into scenarios from time to time. I think Shawn played a mercury spawn one time. Eventually Mike, Jason, and Shawn played some platinum spawn working for Pyrite, the gold dragon that took the form of a ring on Fizban or Zifnab, whichever one was Paladine. They had disintegration breath weapons.

3rd/3.5 Edition Dungeons and Dragons

The whole 3.0 and 3.5 Edition Dungeons and Dragons line is pretty damn blurry, so some of the stuff may be inaccurately placed.

The Tomb of Damara Revisited

Whenever the group rolled up a bunch of new characters we always ran the 2nd Edition Tomb of Damara that was included with a box set that I originally bought ages ago. It got to the point where everyone that gamed regularly with us knew precisely what was in each room even without my descriptions. As an homage to our roots I converted the tomb to third edition and made the monsters and loot random so we wouldn't grow to insanely knowledgeable about it in this edition. We never used the Tomb 2.0 again.

Orsus

I was at a loss for ideas, so I brought out the big guns: the Arthurian mythos, sort of. Armies of undead were storming across the world directed by an evil sorcerer so the players were going to try and break into Camelot and free Arthur from his slumber to save his people when their straits were most dire. Long story short, turns out the evil sorcerer is Merlin and Arthur was a Lawful Evil despot that brought peace and prosperity to the land via his iron fist and killing naysayers with his armies of undead. Player's were going to end up joining or fighting him once they woke him up.

Unspecified Revival

Like the Tomb of Damara, this was another homage to the past. I decided I wanted to try and run a free form campaign where I pulled shit out of my ass and rolled with the punches. As a twist I started everyone out at tenth level and created a stable of characters based on all our favorite 2nd Edition characters like Kain, Gherett, Shade, Algar, and two or three dual-wielding drow. All told, there were like twenty characters brought back to life. Nothing happened and the scenario was kind of lame because I didn't even have a bare bones plan, and Jason Knochel just wanted to go into the mountains away from everyone else.

The Fey

Brought the Fey up to speed for the new edition, still overpowered, still carbon copied from those books and Celtic myth. Everyone rolled characters, we even got Tony's friend Joe to roll a character. Never played it, I honestly don't even remember what the campaign was going to be, I was just excited to play the Fey again.

New Kardia

This is one that was actually long runningish, like seven or eight scenarios I think. Everyone was involved and I'm pretty sure it was definitely 3.5 D&D. The players were in the employ of a guy named Ardas who had a metal face and wore a cloak that was either red or composed of blades, I can't recall. Eric played a coked out wizard, Tony a psion, Jeremy a ranger with philosophy, John was a favored soul, and Dan was a dwarf. There was a demonic army invading this continent and Ardas wanted the guys to stop it. Eventually it would have involved journeying through the nine layers of The Nine Hells only to confront Asmodeous of the Ninth and have him step aside and show them a portal to the tenth layer, which was actually the continent they were from. Spoiler Alert! Ardas was the Lord of the Tenth and he was trying to make the Hells expel his layer so it could become its own plane. The player's were actually petitioners of the Hells before Ardas started doing stuff. If the players wanted to fight Ardas they could go to the upside down floating mountain city and turn it on so the robot inside it busted out and then they could fight Ardas physically. We did not get that far.

d20 Modern

Ambrosia Matrixes

This one was short and kind of odd. d20 Modern had just come out and I thought it was pretty neat, but I didn't quite know what to do with it. For some reason I decided to go the American Gods route and say that gods are real and like to bum around America, the player's were fledgling gods. Each player was granted something called an Ambrosia Matrix that accrued a special type of XP and gained special abilities as it levelled. Some dude named Atreus granted the PCs these matrixes and then I think they killed Tiamat because she was a computer...something. I was probably playing Final Fantasy 7 and reading American Gods around that time.

Shadow Chasers

I had just fucking ridiculous high hopes for this campaign. When I sold Jeremy and Dan on the Shadow Chasers concept I think it had kind of a noir/pulp/Lovecraftian feel to it. Monsters exist and you are the hard boiled detective types that peel away the layer of illusion and exposes the monstrousness beneath it. ...Didn't quite pan out like that. I ended up girding the setting in the same shiny bullshit exterior that DnD is always clad in and it lost the pulp and scariness, if it ever had that in the first place. Jason and James tried to play too, and they were not invited back after they basically tried blowing up everything in sight. It took about two seconds for the spookiness of Shadow to be worn away and it became hack and slash. It was also a sequel to the book Pages of Pain (in which Poseidon fucks with the Lady of Pain's mind to convince here that she is his daughter). Anyway, Ellen was the Lady and her mind had been so fucked with by the Trojan and his urn that she had turned Sigil into another plane (Earth), but one that bordered on all other realms of Shadow. I couldn't really make any of that come across because Tony was the only one that knew anything about Planescape (consensus reality for the win) and no one had read Pages of Pain, so the last few scenarios looked extra random to the guys I'm sure. Then I just quit and this thing ended up tying in with Hekinoe as previously mentioned.

4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons

Hekinoe

As long as I live, even if I live so long that time itself is slain upon the black blade of Entropy, I will remember this campaign. If I were some manner of delusional schizophrenic, this would be the place I live. Every little bit of fiction that I've written since I gained the ability to not steal every single little thing from other sources, has been written here in one way or another (except the James story and some GURPS stories). This campaign is glorious and I love every second I get to spend with the guys (and Martel) in it. I can't wait until we get into the rebellion plotline and I am super geeked about the heist scenario (even though I expect nine specific flavors of disaster to occur). Just as a little note, at this moment I am eleven minutes shy of eight hours of work on the heist.