Campaign Updates

Hello! It’s been awhile, I thought I would give updates on all my various campaigns.

Arden Vul

I’m starting an Arden Vul Adnd 1e campaign.

my short-lived zine idea cover

I finally am free from the burnout I felt after cramming 1e into my head to run a game for my dad’s birthday earlier in the year. I am now actually excited about running it again.

All my prep is done for the first session. We’re going to sit down and make characters together soon, since we have to all learn how to use thebluebard’s helpful but confusing automated character sheets.

We’re going to be running it pretty much by the book plus all of the blue bard’s input and changes. 

We’ll see how it goes! I’m hoping to be able to write session reports for it like Vivanter has been for his micro-campaigns. 

Phaedra

My main campaign is on hiatus. Two of the players weren’t able to commit any time recently and I really need a break from it. 

I loved running it since it’s mostly my siblings and it’s been great to see them regularly but god the scope of the campaign is too big. I added faction turns and complex relationship maps and a big hex crawl and it was too much. They do like the political stuff but I don’t know how much they loved the hex crawl. It made their last big adventure feel big but was it worth the hours and hours I spent writing it? Probably not. 

The last thing we did was a big non-lethal tournament and that was fun. It wasn’t perfect (I think the rules were too convoluted) but it was fun and I gave out a bunch of loot. We also stopped the campaign with the characters feeling like they are now major players with their faction, which is a fun place to be in.

I felt great relief at being done for now. I’m not sure what picking it back up in the future will look like. 

Shattered Horizons

Shattered Horizons is the big group open-table discord server shepherded by Hilander. It’s a reboot of Shattered Coast which eventually people lost interest in. 

It’s been fun, most gms (but not all) made hex crawls. I started a big dungeon. It’s the first dungeon I’ve made myself in a long time, definitely my first ‘OSR’ dungeon.

The dungeon is the Tower, an impossibly large tower that floated down from the heavens a few months ago in game time. I also wrote the Forest region that the Tower landed in. The Forest was pretty simple to write and it’s been used in games I’ve played in by Vivanter to great success. 

Also I created my favorite monster the Long Rat (it’s like a Giant Rat but it’s Long instead) for the dungeon and I love them. There’s now a breeding pair in the home village. 

My goal for The Tower was to make a big, interconnected dungeon one small area (8-10 rooms) at a time. All the areas I’ve worked on are all on level 1, which is connected by an underground river. There’s 3 completed areas right now (the Tainted Settlement, the Lower Catacombs, and the Goblin Warren). I’ve got a few more areas I want to complete before moving on to level 2.

I’m trying to use a few sources for each area to make mapping and stocking easy. I’m using the monster overhaul for creature and area ideas, plus a map or two. I used a dyson logos map for the Lower Catacombs and the Tome of Adventuring Design for the Goblin Warren and the next area (the Water Treatment Plant).

I’ve found with the Goblin Warren that I *love* drawing my own maps and will probably be doing that more. I can fit in a lot of detail in the maps that make running it a lot easier. It’s been much easier to describe rooms from a mix of my drawings and secondary text than text alone. I can also do things like draw a goblin-scale accurate trapeze that I would struggle to render with words.

Making the dungeon has been something I’ve been trying to work on a little bit everyday. I really don’t know if this pace works for me though, It’s something I’ve started dreading and avoiding in the last week. 

I’ve ran 3 sessions in the dungeon so far (2 with my playtest group and 1 in the actual server) and the slow pace of the games is not helping my interest.

Part of it is that I really don’t like main draw of the server, which is being able to play any ol’ glog class that’s been published on a blog. I bitch about this a lot but most classes aren’t playtested or balanced and some feel waaaay stronger than others in ways that makes my blood boil in games. Having no control on people bring to my table sucks. I dread doing combat encounters because there’s no set way people make monsters so I have no idea if what I am running is strong or weak or what. 

The general concept of the server is cool (a bunch of gms running games in a shared world) but it turns out that requires collaboration and I’m kind of a controlling bitch, you know?

Luckily I do like *playing* on the server, at least. 

Anyway, I think that’s enough bitching/reflecting for now.