Redbeard's Ravings

"Specials" aka "Saturday Night Specials" are one of the fascinating set pieces of old school play, whether they're in a megadungeon or a location in a hex crawl.  By definition they are "unbalanced" and potentially either capricious or magnanimous. Sometimes they are adventure goals and occasionally they are obstacles.  Often they are the focus of megadungeon faction conflict , and they frequently are listed on your rumor tables.  They should be in some way enigmatic, unstandard but definitely memorable. One common old school standard recommends that 5% of megadungeon encounters be "specials", but I've been upping the percent in my recent level creations.  I like'm too much as a DM, even if I could be accused of being too cautious with them as a player (well, with some of my characters.) If you like these, pester me and I'll put up more of them. Statue of Prophetic Doom This statue of golden stone is of the goddess...

James of Grognardia posted his campaign's take on demihumans and how they are different than humans with different stats and an ego problem. Below is my own take that we've used in our Greyhawk/Yggsburgh/Zagyg campaign. I surrendered to how players would play elves et al as humans with different stat bonuses, but wanted a rational for why demihuman communities and npcs would be different and separate from the mostly human setting, for tension to exist between isolationist elves and expansionist human nations. Each player with an elf or gnome would get a copy of this although it is written from the elf perspective. If I was to rewrite it I would make it more concise. If DM prepared setting material is over a page you run risks of making the campaign for the DM's self indulgence and not about the player's actions. Players won't read or remember more than a page anyway. A player's advice to me some campaigns ago: 'you've got a great campaign, but you...

As I've posted before , I've been disappointed with how ordinary the Wychwood encounters seemed as depicted in the Yggsburgh hardback. I've tried to flavor it more with fey quality ala Midsummer Night's Dream. For players in Yggsburgh, there is a one very big unstated spoiler from the Yggsburgh hardback. Nearly all the rest of the adventure is my own creation or my own import from other sources. The players seemed to enjoy the puzzle solving and negotiation challenges that the evening entailed. Having had bad experiences on both sides of riddle situations, I picked a riddle that was hopefully easy to solve for the six players; the alternative would be that a party of level 2-4 would have to fight an ettin. They did have the idea from the ettin's size and description that they didn't really want to fight the ettin, but they had alternatives besides the riddle; getting the heads to argue and running away. Fighting was certainly a choice - one that surely woul...

Below after my comments is a session report written by one of the players in our Castle Zagyg sandbox campaign. I placed the Matt Finch's Pod Caverns in the Little Hillwood, a side trek away from the Castle, and I've talked about how I've adapted it before in the changing sandbox world. It's acquired quite the reputation for toughness from the players. The session report and my comments contain spoilers. They've really explored very little of the caverns, which has been personally disappointing. There's some old school goodness there that they've missed. In their first expedition they blithely found themselves on the 2nd level in the prison chamber/mulching room. After wards they took that same path - and further right to the Shroom's complex of rooms... skipping floating heads, glowing fungus and other such oddities. They may yet go back since they realize they've missed treasure. The other entrance to the pod caverns, which they've not ...

Matt and I are co-DMing a campaign of Castle Zagyg. It is set in Greyhawk, using Yggsburgh as another independent city in the area. The wiki for the campaign is at Obsidian Portal . We started it by taking over DMing duties in a 1E AD&D campaign of which we were 2 of 8 players. The whys and whynots of switching to Castles and Crusades are worth post that I may yet write. I was inspired by The West Marches Campaign and memories of my first experiences playing Dungeons and Dragons in a sprawling sandbox campaign also co-DMed. Having players that were turned away from the initial campaign because of a lack of table space, we expanded the campaign to a second session. Each are played every other week. So far we have 13 players, one more to start. Some have multiple characters, and the DMs also play when they aren't DMing, for a total of 20 characters.