From Threshold to the ruins by the lake

There are 'ruins' marked on the map of Threshold, or, at least, indicated as being off the map to the north, and arguably, by the lake-shore. For those who have access to the Known World Gazetteers, this is probably Castle Mystamere or something. I don't have access to them, so I've never incorporated that info into 'my' Grand Duchy. I've just bolted on stuff as necessary. There's a very detailed map of the region at the Vaults of Pandius site, but I know nothing of the majority of places noted on it.

http://pandius.com/thrshld.html

The ruins near 'my' Threshold are a destroyed city that stood on the lakeside 50 or more years ago, at the time of an evil witch-queen who previously ruled these lands. She was defeated and killed (or, possibly, banished to some shadow-realm, no-one's very sure) by a young Halfling wizard and a good witch.

The Halfling wizard is a legend whose whereabouts are not known. But the retired Halfling adventurer who grows Wolfsbane in Threshold shares his family name of Ufgood, and if you ask around you can find out the Halfling's name is Ranon. Did I mention that the Halflings in these parts are known as Nelwyn (there are three kinds of Halfling in my campaign world - Hin, Kender and Nelwyn)? There used to be a small settlement of them downriver, and those that still live in the district tell crazy stories of how one of their number helped defeat the witch-queen. None of the humans believe it of course, they all know the witch-queen died in the battle that re-united the northern and southern halves of the Grand Duchy, that used to be known as Nockmaar and Galladoorn...

Anyway, the PCs are at it again. They've recruited two new members - Wiz Kalufa, a cleric from the Temple of the Mother in Threshold; and Josef, a thief who the party found tied up in the basement lair of the Snake-Cultists and their Bandit allies. They've cleared the tunnels under Beren's warehouse, by defeating the last Fire Beetle (they forgot to collect its glow-glands however so couldn't sell them to the Alchemists) and also killing three Bandits, as well as finding some of the loot and other goodies that the Bandits and Cultists had hidden down there - some +1 Leather Armour (which will look great on Josef if they ever work that out), a Wand (of Magic Detection), and a rather nice Ring (of Protection +1) - and they're frankly too grateful for the 20GPs Beren agreed to give them. Perhaps they need some real treasure.

Having finally run into the map-seller at the market, the PCs bought a map. An old one, to be sure, but it gave them the idea to go aventuring in the ruins north of town - even though (thanks to the Simple Weather Chart from The Clash of Spear on Shield) it was raining (lightly). Frankly, the Town Guard were glad to see the back of them. And what did they find in the ruins? Well, a few rolls on the Wandering Monster Charts, let me tell you! First up, a party of traders! Errm, presumably on their way to Threshold for the market. And for the number appearing... 1. So, a single trader wandering around the ruins. So, I decided the party encountered a single trader who was eating a late breakfast.

They chatted to him for a bit and made their way onwards. Next up, a party of ... Halflings. Damn that Wandering Monster table! 12 Halflings. Or, as they introduced themselves, Nelwyn. So the party joined them at their singing and dancing. Quickly deciding that a CHA roll would stand in for singing ability, Bjorn and Bromeen, the two Dwarves, attempted to join in with the Halflings' songs. Unfortunately, Bromeen has a CHA of 7 and Bjorn a CHA of 8. They're not very charismatic, and therefore they're not very goo at singing. "'Ere! You've got a 'orrible voice! Don't ever sing to anyone ever again Mister Dwarf!" as one of the Nelwyn said.

The dancing went a little better. Josef the Thief, who has the tolerably-good DEX of 12 (he really had terrible rolls, 12 is his highest stat), attempted to join in the dancing. Hey! A success! The Nelwyn were impressed and invited the party to sit and join them for a tale... the tale of the Wizard Ufgood who helped to defeat Bavmorda the witch-queen.

http://brandedinthe80s.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Map-of-Nockmaar-Willow.jpg

After a while, the party went on with the exploration. Hearing some screeching from behind some bushes, Josef crept forwards to take a look. Peering through the undergrowth, Josef saw some big white apes. Like, gorillas. Why? Well, tiring of the stupid results from the random monster tables, I consulted the list of prepared encounters I had. Hmm, acolytes, apes, bats, bandits, beetles... I hadn't gotten very far down the list I'll grant you, and the acolytes, bandits, bats and beetles had already been assigned to the cellars under Beren's warehouse. So apes it is then - six of them, approximately as powerful as Ogres.

Enter Wiz Kalufa. Taking a mace he had purloined during the clearing of Beren's cellars, he lobbed it over the bushes. For some reason, he had the idea that he could entice the apes out so that the Halflings would deal with them rather than getting the party to do it. But the apes didn't see where the mace had come from, they just picked it up. So Bjorn decided he would try a more direct method, of actually running into their midst and then running away again. The rest of the party, led by Wizard the cowardly Magic User, had already fled back towards the Nelwyn by this time. Bjorn gave chase, dressed in his plate-mail of course. The apes were in hot pursuit. As Bjorn was in plate mail, the apes were twice as fast as he was. They cought him, and ...a rum little encounter developed as the rest of the party attempted to grab Halflings and throw them towards the apes as a distraction. All of a sudden they were staring down a dozen Halfling archers. But Wizard, being diplomatic, talked everyone down and the party waited to see, with bated breath, what the gorillas would actually do with Bjorn. As I threw '12' for the reaction dice (as I hadn't decided yet what they actually wanted), they hauled him up in the air and carried him around on their shoulders for a bit. When Wiz (Kalufa, nor -ard) attempted to distract them with his rations, they dropped Bjorn and hauled Wiz onto their shoulders instead (somewhat luckily for the party, I threw 12 again for the apes' reaction).

That unfortunately was all we had time for that evening; if the party can get the apes to clear off long enough, they may find that there seems to have been some clandestine digging activity at the ruins of the city of Tir Asleen. If they do find such activity, it should let them into the secret of where 'the bad guys' have been trying to break into as-yet-uncleared cellars and undercrofts of the town. And perhaps, just perhaps, some monsters and treasures await...

DM maps and player maps

I've been thinking about maps this week. Not maps for me, but maps for the players. Handouts; treasure maps, maps they don't come across very often, maps of the continent or their planet, maps of other worlds that may or may not be accessible to them, maps of lairs or cities or citadels they may visit.

This was inspired by a post (really, just a wonderful list) over at Beyond the Black Gate (there are many inspiring posts over there to be fair). The table is a 'what's the stall at the market?' list.

I'd already decided that I was going to throw a little weirdness the party's way; the market-traders will include the denizens of 'the Itinerant Bazaar', a WotC 3.5Ed (I think) creation found round about here. I needed some other merchants; so I made 30 rolls on the table. Some would be locals bringing their wares (generally vegetables, booze of varying kinds, or wooden, leather and clay goods) and others would be the traders from the Itinerant Bazaar. So, a bunch of rolls to get the traders, and one of the stall-holders I rolled is a seller of maps.

The Itinerant Bazaar is basically a collection of teleporting merchants who travel around from world to world, plane to plane, trading and telling stories as they go. That's totally what my map-seller has been doing anyway. She has maps of the area round about - as it existed when the bazaar was last here, 50 or 60 years ago, when it was perhaps her grandparents who were running the stall - which may provide clues to possible adventures. She also has maps of star-empires, a desert planet in a galaxy far, far away, islands of pirates where iron is valued and gold scorned, a prosperous country of peaceful Halflings, a red planet where an accidental traveller from another land becomes a warlord by marrying a princess, and a world where a crazed albino prince talks to his black sword, among others. Somewhere, she may even have a map of a world carried by four elephants standing on the back of a giant turtle.

If they don't get my party's fingers itching (think of all the loot!) I really don't know what will.

Cults part II

This is a follow-up to 'How do you run your cults?', in which I outline different ways of getting to grips with religion, from taking deities from history, to getting them from literary sources, to using 'Official' D&D deities, to making them up, and also whether keeping the same name or changing them around or just giving them titles is the order of the day; so whether one prays to Zeus or Mörnir or Vondar or the Sky God might not matter, if all of these things are functionally the same thing.

Of course, it could be that (either) Vondar (or the Sky God) is a laughing god who wields a spear and rides across the sky on the back of a blue dragon, singing songs, and his priests worship him in mountain caves where he brews storms with his laughter and singing. In other words, Vondar might not be like Zeus.

There's a sort of table that comes down to an axis in one direction - called 'nature' perhaps, or maybe 'powers' - with 'derived from sources' and 'made up' on it, and another - called 'name' - with 'derived from sources', 'made up' and 'title' on it. The example of Vondar above would get a 'made up' in both boxes, as both the name and theology of Vondar are different from Zeus. 'The Sky God' (who gets a check for 'Title' on the 'name' axis) could refer to a god like Zeus, or a god like Vondar. It would be perverse I feel to have a mythology of a dragon-riding god who brews storms by singing in mountain caves, and call him 'Zeus' though, unless I was planning on running a specifically Ancient Greek campaign, and wanted to show lots of different local theologies and legends for my gods (basically, each city or region having their own version of the gods).

Having looked at this excellent post on Beyond the Black Gate, in which Al simply puts down some features of the deities and cults in his campaign, I've been inspired to try to do the same with the gods of my campaign. Two of the gods of this area, Kos and Issek, come from the Nehwon mythos and I won't describe them here. One notable feature I suppose is that on reaching Second Level and actually gaining Clerical magic, in this campaign Clerics must take a weapon appropriate to their deity if there is one. This is, essentially, because it makes no sense to me that Clerics don't use their deity's 'sacred weapon'. So I've detailed the sacred weapons of the deities below and indicated when a Cleric needs to adopt one.

Isi (life & magic) – also known as The Great Mother and the Queen of the Stars. She usually appears as a queenly woman of middle years with a sceptre in one hand. She presides over many aspects of fertility of plants, animals and people, and is also connected with stars and the sky. Any may join her clergy, who wear scarlet kilts. There is a temple of the Great Mother in most settlements, and often some of the other gods have only shrines inside her temples, particularly Rosh, Nefu and Resek (see below).

Rosh (oaths, vengeance) – also know as The Avenger. Rosh is the son of Isi, and oversees the giving of oaths, which are often sworn before his altars. He appears in his depictions as a powerfully-built bare-chested young man who wields a sword in one hand and a wand in the other. He wears a kilt of bright blue; his clerics, who can be male or female but are always human, wear similar kilts, but clad themselves in leather armour and wear helms in the shape of hawks, Rosh’s sacred animal. Clerics of Rosh at Second Level and above must only use normal swords as weapons.

Nefu (water and weather) – also known as the Lady of the Waters. Nefu is the consort of Rosh, and the sister or cousin of Resek. She presides over rivers and streams, springs, rain and all falling or flowing water; when angered, she summons thunderstorms. Both the fish and the lioness are sacred to her. Her clerics wear rusty-red leather armour and helms that resemble fish-scales. In cities, they are particularly concerned with the provision of fountains of clear water, which they call ‘the blessings of Nefu’.

Resek (light) – also known as the Lord of Light. Resek is regarded as being a close kinsman of Nefu; as such he, Nefu, Rosh (Nefu’s consort) and Isi (Rosh’s mother) are regarded as being closely-linked. In smaller settlements, their cults will often all be found in the same temples, generally a temple to Isi with several shrines of the other gods. Resek seeks out evil everywhere and turns his searching light on it. His clerics wear white tunics, and helms with hawk-feathers attached to them. He wields a halberd and a mace in battle, and his clerics must pick one of these weapons to use on reaching Second Level.

Tas (cats, the household) – also known as the Lady of Cats. She protects the household from the evil powers of the underworld, particularly represented by snakes and rats, and is also regarded as being a goddess of luck and plenty due to protecting the grain harvest. She appears as a beautiful bare-breasted young woman wearing a cat-mask or helm with cat-ears. Her clergy (who may be of any race or sex) wear similar helms and grey kilts, and encourage the killing of snakes whenever they can. In smaller settlements she may have a shrine in the temple of Isi rather than a temple of her own.

Huran (war) – also known as the Lord of War. Huran is the personification of the male warrior-ideal; he always appears as a very tall man, and wields a spear which flames with the light of the sun. He usually appears in his depictions armoured for war, and his clerics – who are always human males – wear leather armour and war-helms when they go forth from the temples, whether or not they are going to battle. From Second Level, clerics of Huran must use spears as weapons.

Ets (evil, the underworld, snakes) – also known as the Lord of Night. His cult is very secretive and will never share its temples with other gods of the pantheon. He is the implacable enemy of Rosh. Representations of the god show him with the scaly skin of a snake, which is a sacred animal to him. He uses a great black spear in combat. His clerics, who may be male or female and of any race, wear black helms and leather armour; his sign, a coiled serpent, is usually bright green and is prominent in his depictions and on the gear of his priests – when they are not hiding their true natures. Clerics of Second Level and above must use a spear as a weapon.

Alol (sun, archers, music) – also known as the Shining One. He is a complex deity with responsibility for the sun, music, archery and bears. He appears on all his depictions as a beautiful young man with a bow or carrying a harp. Sometimes he wears a bearskin around his shoulders, and in the stories of his cult can assume the form of a bear. His male priests wear gold or yellow tunics and leaf-crowns. They must use the bow as a weapon upon reaching Second Level. Alol is a fickle and jealous god; his clergy will not have friendly contact with any other cult. His temples usually stand in naturally-beautiful places such as by waterfalls or in groves.

Ras (war) – also known as the God of Battle and the Wolf-God. Ras is depicted as a powerfully-built older warrior, always wearing a helm, breastplate and crimson tunic. He is the lord of battle-lust, delighting in slaying. He carries both a sword and a spear; his clerics must pick one upon reaching Second Level and may from then only use that weapon. Non-humans may not join his clergy though they can make offerings to him before battle. Wolves are sacred to Ras and sometimes are trained to guard his temples. Like Alol, he is a jealous god and will not share his temples with others.

And now, with Orem-Thep added (I forgot about him as I was only looking at the temples in the PCs' town, and he doesn't have any temples)...

Orem-Thep (creation, benevolence) – also known as the Good Lord. Orem-Thep is, if the tellers of his tales be believed, the creator of the human race and the inventor of all civilised arts. He has no temples as such, but there are preachers who take to themselves an amber-coloured tunic and an iron ring as badges of his faith and preach his benevolence and wisdom, leading prayer-meetings in public places or at worshippers' houses. They also use a torch as a symbol of their devotion, signifying the illumination that Orem-Thep brings to the world through his benevolent wisdom. The cult of Orem-Thep hunts griffons whenever it can, as they hold them to be uniquely evil.

Giaks and Warhammer

It's a bit of a rarity at the moment to post about Warhammer, even though that was why I started this blog. I've been posting much more about D&D in recent months because that's what I've been doing most often, due to the campaign I'm running with my son's mates. I've not played any Warhammer or even Kings of War (which has actually been my default fantasy battlegame over the last couple of years) in ages.

Though I have an 'Oldhammer' logo on this page, I feel like a bit of an outsider on the Oldhammer forums sometimes - because the 'Oldhammer' that gets talked about mostly is 3rd Ed, and the Oldhammer I know is 2nd Ed. I know that Skaven are Ratmen, for instance, but I don't know why. I don't know when the Empire got so good at shooting, because according to the version I have it's the southern city-states (what would become Estalia and Tilea) that are the advanced human cultures in the NW of the Old World, and only they use black-powder weapons. Maybe I don't play 'Oldhammer' at all. Maybe it's 'Archaeohammer' (in which case, I guess 1st Ed would be 'Palaeohammer').

Anyway, one of the things I've been interested in since about 1985 is the possibility of fielding an army of Giaks in Warhammer. For those who don't know, Giaks were a goblinoid race from the Lone Wolf books. They're described as greyish, militaristic (which I think means organised as well as nasty) and a bit bigger than the Common Goblins of Warhammer. GW had the licence to produce minis for them, and released a boxed-set and a few blisters in the mid-'80s. All told there were 7 Giak models, including a banner-bearer, none of which I own. They also printed two pages of rules in the Citadel Journal (1 & 2). The pages include enough rules for 2nd Ed to make an army of 324 Giaks, arranged in 9 infantry regiments of 36 each. There are also notes about support troops such as wolf-riders. For anyone interested in further research on the Giaks, there's also Project Aon here where among other things there's loads of information on the Giak language.

There's no way I'll ever get the Giak minis to make up this army, because apart from anything else there are several units for whom no Giak minis exist. The Giaks in the list are armed with a variety of weapons - two regiments with bows, one with slashing weapons, one with pole arms and one with bludgeoning weapons. The weapons of the other four units are not listed but cannot include bows (no more than 25% of Giak armies may be armed with bows). The breakdown of the existing models is one banner-bearer, 3 with sword & shield, 1 with a sword only, 1 with spear and shield, 1 with a bow.

Unfortunately, given that the current 'Goblin Regiment' from Citadel only comes with options for bow or spear/shield, that means that a load of the weapons options will be unavailable even if one uses Goblin minis instead of Giaks. No hand weapons for Goblins? C'mon Citadel, what do you think you're doing? Even taking spear as being an acceptable substitute for pole-arm, I'd still need (at the very least) to find enough Goblin-arms for a regiment of swords (or other slashing weapons), and a regiment of club- or mace-wielding Goblins too. That's assuming that I make an army in which 2 regiments have bows, 1 has spears instead of pole-arms, and every regiment not listed as having a particular weapon has spears. So 5 spear-armed regiments out of 9. That really isn't what I want to do.

I fear it will be a long and slow slog before I get to the 360-or-so Goblins I will need for this project, and how I get at least 160 of them with weapons that Goblins 'can't have' I'm really not sure. Ah well, we'll see...

On Treasure

I'm a big fan of not just giving the party sacks of gold. It seems a bit silly to be honest. Why would Orcs collect bags of gold, that are fairly useless to them and are an attractor of looters (ie, PCs)? OK, so in checking the archives at The Dragon's Flagon here in the article on 'Orconomics' there is the suggestion that the Orcs pay for things in coin to local bandits - and by extension, though this isn't mentioned in the post, barbarians, evil temples, anyone not that bothered about the existence of Orcs or too concerned to follow 'the Law'. It may be that the Temple in the Caves of Chaos is actually laundering money that the humanoids are taking from passing caravans, while at the same time supplying the humanoid tribes with some necessities that the priests are buying in the Keep. But even so, large chests of cash should I think be exceptional rather than the rule.

On the other hand, I'm a bit lazy about converting the gold into other things. There's a great article from an old WD about economics in RuneQuest that suggests that the majority of treasure should be made up of tapestries, goblets, necklaces, silks, spices, and other small and large tradeable goods. Seems like a great idea. Over at Land of Nod last year, John Matthew Stater was examining the question of treasure hordes in this post but no real conclusions were reached I don't think - other than that bags of gold are unrealistic but coming up with viable alternatives is hard. Though the 'bags of gold' idea is unsatisfactory, it beats thinking about every treasure you roll up and trying to make it interesting and different, if we just take the 'bag of gold' as being 'miscellaneous treasure'.

Another post on the Dragon's Flagon from quite a while ago is also looking at the same question. It seems it bothers a lot of us at some time or another - where does all this gold come from, why, and what are the implications and alternatives? This questioning - which leads to examining 'Storage Wars' as an inspiration - does produce a potential answer however, in the form of a link to the Hack & Slash blog which hosts something that might be considered a treasure in itself: this post links to a pdf entitled 'Treasure'. I haven't seen this before. I have now of course downloaded it and will be poring over its contents with great interest.

How easy it will be to use these treasure tables in practice I don't know - but another shot in the arm of 'trying to find alternatives to bags of coin' is most welcome to be sure.

Not quite Fantasy, not quite Adventuring...

... but not entirely unrelated.

Some time ago, I started a project to design a boardgame. It was based on a specific historical setting and period - the Anglo-Scottish Border around 1500 - and would basically be a territory-conquest game. Somewhat like Risk, but with simpler rules for conquest and more resource management (and, at least in my head, a lot faster because the setup is simpler and the procurement stage is easier).

Like many such projects I guess, it started well. In a few days I had the basic concept down, and wrote a fairly simple ruleset. I had a look around to find places where I might be able to get some pieces. I thought about how the board- and card-design would work and worked on some simple artwork for playing pieces. I had a plan to source some temporary pieces for playtesting. I even had some thoughts about expansions, and ways to reskin the game for different periods (even a space-version). The background work was all done really.

Then... nothing. I think it's been ages now, and I haven't even playtested it.

Pretty sure that the mechanics are sound. Pretty sure that the gameplay will be relatively smooth, and that the concept is interesting enough that people will want to play it. And yet, development has stalled at a not-very-great hurdle. Basically, I need to put in a bit of effort to make the necessary bits for the playtesting stage.

Why can't I even take this to a simple round of playtesting? Is there something wrong with me?

My one-time 'Dark Age' campaign...

Jens D over at the Disoriented Ranger has been asking me about my Arthurian campaign that I never really ran but did a lot of work preparing. This is mostly because Jens is working on his 'Lost Songs of the Nibelungs' project, and his AD550 setting is conceptually pretty similar to my AD500 setting... his is focussed more on Germanic Europe (though not exclusively) and mine was focussed more on the ex-provinces of the Western Empire (particularly Britain, but extending into other areas, both in and without the Empire); but neither of these settings is considered to be exclusive an anyway, they're only 50 years and a few hundred miles apart - practically identical in gaming terms, no?

So what is there to say about my Arthurian setting that I haven't said already?

Well, first it's so old-school it barely exists electronically at all. I 'wrote' it - what I wrote at all, and didn't just imagine - using a curious system called 'pencil and paper'. I have some things, written and overwritten and scribbled out and recopied and changed on other bits of paper. That's going to make it difficult to actually stick up here.

Secondly, I never really ran it as such. It was just a structure to hold things together. The players would be operating in this world with big plots going on around them that they could interact with but the basic nitty-gritty of being murder-hobos would be... well, pretty much the same as most other D&D games. They'd still be going round taking rewards from villagers who needed saving from the Orcs who'd taken up residence in the caves north of town, or tracking down rumours as to where the Wizard Valerian had his tower so they could loot it. That sort of stuff. Only, conceptually, the Tower of Valerian might be an old Roman watch-tower, and the silver coins that the party got as a reward for killing the Orcs would be sesterces.

I started with a bunch of assumptions. Some were about the 'story' aspects and some were about gaming, how the rules would work. The two aren't separate of course, but teasing out the different aspects is probably easier if one assumes that they were. So I'm going to to describe the assumptions about the game-world first, and then specific rule-tweaks or interpretations that flow from that.

Firstly, that the earliest legendary or pseudo-historical sources for 'King Arthur' and the history of Britain were more-or-less accurate. So, in this conception, Arthur was a warleader who fought against both 'Saxons' and other British leaders, fighting a series of battles in various parts of Britain. These battles are numbered; these numbers would provide an approximate framework for the passage of 'campaign time' over several years (it became 9 years in the end). The locations would also pattern the geographical space of the campaign as well as the time. I fixed the locations and used these as the regions of Britain that the adventurers would be adventuring in. The assumption would be that the results of the PCs adventures would somehow affect the overall structure of the story in the campaign-world. For example, if the PCs were successful in disrupting the humanoids' plans in 'The Keep on the Borderlands' (in this instance, relocated to the East Midlands of England, near Peterborough if I recall correctly) then this would mean that at the subsequent 'Arthurian' battle in space & time (at the ford of the river Dubglas in Linnius, which I took as being in Lincolnshire), the humanoid enemies would not be able to send their full contingent to the battle. Of course, if the PCs failed to significantly disrupt the humanoids'/evil priests' plans, then the humanoids would march off to battle undisturbed, making the eventual victory of Arthur's forces less likely. In this way, the PCs would be acting as commandos or partisans, disrupting the enemy's supply lines and infrastructure, in order to make it more difficult for the forces of chaos to wage war.

For reasons already explained elsewhere, I identified the Angles with Orcs, and played many of the invasions of the lands of the Empire, and sometimes the races inhabiting it, as being by 'monsters' or demi-humans - apart from Angles = Orcs (also, Orkney ie the Orcades would be Orc-islands - it was much later and mainly for a joke that I decided that most of Northern Englland should be 'Orkshire'), Goths/Jutes = 'Giant races', Franks = werewolves, Irish (Gaels) = Ghouls, Greeks (Hellenes) = Elves and the Langobardi (Longbeards, Lombards) = Dwarves. Later I decided to assimilate the Burgundians to the Nebelungs and make them Dwarves too, and the Danes (and any other Dan- or Tan- names) Elves of the 'Tuatha De Danaan'. Mostly I was assuming that things would be set in Europe but I was also working on other areas being visited - in which case Uruk in Mesopotamia would be an Orc-city, the former kingdom of Elam would be a land of Elves and Judea, much like the land of the Eoten in Scandinavia, an abode of Giants. This is what is currently what is feeding into the idea behind the 'Observer's Book of Monsters' - monsters have particular distributions based on their legendary distributions.

Second, I assumed that some of the really fantastical sources had some validity in terms of quests and whatnot; the Quest for the Holy Grail, which in some ways is a retelling of a story about sailing (possibly to Ireland?) to find a magic cauldron (itself a theme of other Celtic legends) can be part of the overarching plot too. So, I knew I wanted a plot about a quest for a cauldron. Swords, too - the Sword in the Stone and Excalibur (AKA Caliburn or Caladvwlch), the finding and getting and losing of which play an important part in the stories of Arthur would be important. Celtic legends mention swords as well as cauldrons. In fact there is a quartet of treasures from Irish legend made up of a sword, cauldron, spear and stone. These are the four treasures that appear in Alan Garner's Elidor; and I wanted to take the idea from Elidor and such works as Song of the Dwarves (by Thorarinn Gunnarson, who it seems also wrote some Mystara-based fiction) the idea of linked adventuring worlds too.

The Four Treasures - two of which had become the direct objects of mythic quests already - would each be linked to an element in the classical system of elements (Earth, Air, Fire and Water). Each element would also be linked to a race. This goes back to a very early stratum of my campaign-design, the first campaign notes I ever wrote in about 1981. Back then, I assigned the elements on the following basis: Dwarves - Fire; Elves - Air; Halflings - Earth; Humans - Water. This time, I assigned them as Dwarves - Earth; Elves - Air; Humans - Water; Orcs - Fire. The four races in turn would each be properly linked to a home-world that the players would journey to. This world-element-treasure-race linking would then determine the character of that homeworld/adventure zone.

So, I had four linked worlds, each with its own special treasure, each the home-world of a particular race, and some idea that the point was that the players adventure through these worlds as part of their mystical questing. The overarching quest-thing (following the years of fighting in Britain with odd side quests) would be a sort of restoration - the idea would be to get rid of a treasure that didn't belong, and restore it to its rightful world. The first of these quests would be to take Arthur's air-sword (by a process of assimilation this I considered to be the Sword of Nuada Argetlam, AKA Nodens, AKA Ludd Ereint Llaw, formerly worshipped at Lydney in Gloustershire) to where it belonged - the next world along, which would be the world of Air/Elves.

This was going to be the world of Warhammer. Yes, each world would have its own rule-set. The world of the Elves would be governed by the rules of WHFRP, and completing quests there would lead to the next world; the world of Orcs. This would be accessed from Warhammer World by finding the Fire-Spear, would be governed by a mish-mash of the Runequest and Stormbringer rules, and would feature a geography that was substantially the Young Kingdoms with as much of Glorantha as I knew about mushed into it, up in the north-east corner. Restoring the Fire-spear to the Kingdom of Org (a realm of degenerate ab-humans in the Young Kingdoms, located in the Forest of Troos, which with the addition of Trolls from the Runequest setting became an ancient Orkish kingdom in my conception), the next bit of the journey through the worlds would see the PCs finding the Earth-stone and taking it to the next world, that of the Dwarves, where they would find that they were in Middle-Earth.

Now, I know the Tolkien's Middle-Earth is also our Middle-Earth. But then, the world of the Young Kingdoms is also our Earth, as Elric proves when he summons the soul of Roland. It doesn't matter. In this campaign, they're all linked parallel worlds. Anyway, in Middle-Earth, the PCs would restore the Stone (of Destiny) to the Dwarves, and then find the final treasure, the Cauldron that they were after all along, and return to our world with it, thus restoring the cosmic balance and all that jazz.

That then was the overarching conceit of it all. Pretty much every bit of D&D stuff I owned, as well as all the Warhammer, MERP and RQ/Stormbringer stuff I had, was going to be shoe-horned in somehow. There would be about 9 years of battles and adventuring in our world - which I more or less assume would mean that in the first year, they'd be First Level, and in the ninth year, they'd be Ninth Level - and then instead of settling down to build a lordship and a dynasty, I thought I'd send them on a weird dimension-spanning quest. In each world they visited, they'd have to translate that character into a functional equivalent in the new system. It never reached that point, but I'd have been perfectly OK with them leaving that character in that campaign world and bringing another character along to the next world, should they decide to do that (or you know, if someone died).

As for assumptions about rules, the most important was that - as I outlined in a post the other day - what was in the books was assumed to map onto reality as it was perceived by the people involved. Armour, for instance. I assumed that 'plate mail' in the rules meant 'the best armour you could get'. Therefore, the best armour in the late C5th arguably being old Roman armour, I reasoned that this must be functionally equivalent to plate. Everyone wearing 'plate mail' in the sources I had must logically have been wearing lorica segmentata, as there was no such thing as 'plate mail' in AD495. I did wonder about cross-bows - as far as I knew at the time (pre-internet days!), though the Romans had ballistae, they didn't have personal hand-held cross-bows. But for the most part, I used the weapon- and armour-lists as written.

One major change that I decided on was to scrap the Experience rules. Character advancement is painfully slow in OD&D, as John Arendt points out in this very cromulent post from Dreams in the Lich House. If it takes a First Level Fighter the same amount of combat as embodied in 200 Orcs to reach Second Level, whereas in modern games it takes the combat necessary to defeat 3 Orcs, this explains two things: why my current party spends so much time complaining that they're never going to reach Second Level and if this were Skyrim they'd all be 3rd Level by now (they've defeated 3 Fire Beetles, 3 Robber Flies, 1 Giant Centipede, 4 Acolytes and a L3 Cleric), and also, why I never managed as a player to take a character past 3rd Level. My revised conception (as these events were all going to take a long time, ie several years) would be that each year would constitute a Level. The first year of the campaign would be AD487; this would be the year of a lot of First Level adventuring round the East Midlands and the Battle of the River Glein (the Lincolnshire Glen); the second year of the campaign and Second Level aventuring would also mostly happen in the East Midlands, culminating in the battles of the River Dubglas in Linnuis (also Lincolnshire - I don't want to get into arguments about 'actual' sites, I picked some that made some sense to me). Eventually, after 9 years of adventuring, the last battle would be Badon Hill in AD495. Jens D is currently examining some other aspects of the question of time over at Disorientated Ranger in this post.

Otherwise, everything was pretty much as written, I didn't have to change very much. I wasn't overly concerned about the vast amount of gold in D&D for example, I really don't care if the economy is inflationary, though at various times I've tinkered with reforming the coinage. But it isn't all that important in the scheme of things.