A combination of personal and professional circumstances over the past 8 months forced me to put blogging on hiatus back in the Spring, but I continued to game on a regular basis during that time. I hope to get back to posting regularly.
I failed the Dungeon23 challenge. It was purely a matter of time-availability and not a lack of creativity, which is comforting despite the disappointment. My chief problems were the scope of the project I laid out and my inability to keep things simple. As the ideas started to flow, I found myself building so many layers of complexity into the concept that I struggled under the challenge's daily demand, making it difficult to get things done in a timely manner.
Writing by hand was an obstacle as well, and I became frustrated at not being able to go back and edit in order to fix some of the complexity errors that crept in. Then, having to transcribe the daily hand-written installments into a weekly blog post just added to the load. I thought writing the daily posts by hand would take me back to the days when I filled notebooks with material, but it turned out to be a far-more time-consuming experience that wasn't worth the nostalgia (and cramped fingers).
As my freelance writing projects accelerated in April and other things in my personal life required attention, something had to give. The Dungeon23 challenge and this blog were the obvious "somethings."
Were I to do the challenge again, I would probably just draw some simple maps or adapt a few Dungeon Geomorphs, and then populate them according to stocking guidelines, adding my own personal flavor to the results. That sounds way more achievable than what I ended up doing. I have a ton of great notes, however, so Tunnels Beneath the Earth will live on in a more-manageable and less frustrating way.
I also brought Keep on the Badlands—my weekly 5e Roll20 campaign with my long-time gaming buddies—to a close. This was another major disappointment, as I did a ton of work on the campaign and frankly think it's some of the best material I've ever written in over 40 years of DMing. My players never quite grasped how a true sandbox campaign works and kept looking for me to drop obvious adventure hooks in their path, rather than develop their own ideas for what they wanted to do.
They also rejected the survival mode of the campaign, which was baked into every aspect of the setting. I really think a lot of it was laziness brought on by videogames, where they can just press a button or mouse-over a highlighted feature to "do the thing" necessary to advance. 5e also encourages this kind of behavior in the way that it has removed risk and complexity, and dumbed everything down to idiot-level gameplay.
Sessions would invariably boil down to conversations like (actual exchange)...
Player: "I want to capture that wild horse." (a random encounter)
Me: "Okay, sure...how do you want to go about doing it?"
Player: "I use Animal Handling."
Me: "Yes, but what do you do specifically?"
Player: "I handle the animal." [Clicks "Animal Handling" skill on character sheet.]
Me: *sigh*
We played 81 sessions of this nonsense and the party still had difficulty figuring out what to do or where to go, to the point that 7th and 8th level characters decided the best course of action was to continue plundering a nearby cairn field for loose coins and burial goods (an activity they began at level 2). They never even made it to the Caves of Chaos and I just couldn't take it anymore, so I ended things. I have not resumed running the Monday campaign (another player is trying their hand at being DM)—and I'm not sure I will.
If I do run for them again, it certainly won't be with 5e. During Covid, I dove into the OSR (10 years after the fact), and fell in love with Basic D&D (and 1e to a lesser extent) all over again. I think 5e's core game engine is good...it's fast, intuitive, and easy to explain to others. But the power creep and ever-stacking abilities create a lot of decision paralysis, even for experienced players. This tends to result in the same character "builds" appearing over and over again with the same set of optimal choices.
I enjoyed 5e when it first came out, but the longer I run it, the more the flaws keep appearing and the harder it is to ignore them. I won't even get into the problems I have with WotC adopting Forgotten Realms as the default setting for the rulebooks(!), or their constant editorializing and virtue signaling, or their pervasive efforts to make the game a "safe" and uniform experience for a category of player psychology I don't relate to at all.
I appreciate 5e for bringing me back into the game, and I think someone could take the core engine and skin it with an AD&D ethos, but man that seems like a lot of work.
On a positive note, I brought my 5e Heroes of Brackleborn campaign to a satisfying conclusion for my neophyte players. When I started it during the lockdowns, it was just to show a few friends what D&D was all about. I wasn't expecting them to fall in love with the game and turn a few sessions into a multi-year campaign. We concluded with the girls having reached 6th level and their characters becoming notable leaders in the town of Brackleborn.
We may return to this campaign in the future, as there were some loose-ends that could rear their ugly heads once more. For now, the girls were interested in my stories about Basic/AD&D and wanted to try it out, so I started a new campaign with them using Old School Essentials as the ruleset. I kitbashed three classic adventures, along with an OSR sequel to one of those classics and some personal modifications / additions.
I've named it The Sinister Secret of Zenopus' Tower, combining and adapting S1 The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh with the sample dungeon from Dr. Holmes' Basic D&D Rulebook (commonly referred to as The Tower of Zenopus), and inserting the superb Forgotten Smugglers' Caves by Zenopus Archives' Zach Howard and the dungeon portion of N1 Against the Cult of the Reptile God as additional levels.
We've played 3 sessions and, so far, there have been 5 character deaths among 4 players...it's glorious. The girls have had a great time dying, and I try to turn each death into an hilarious moment by cranking up the gruesome details. They also appreciate how streamlined and simple the rules are, given how often they struggled to cope with all the choices in mid-level 5e. I'm adjusting well to running OSE, I think, but realigning my brain to the different procedures in BX has been harder than I anticipated.
 |
Flipping through a copy of the tournament version of Lost Caverns of Tsojconth, and seeing Erol Otus' foundational artwork in actual copies of Booty and the Beasts and The Necronomican (among many other rare pieces) was a huge thrill.
I'm happy to start blogging again—something I've been shooting for since August. I intend to start posting material from all these campaigns and other adventures / settings I've created over the years.
I'll share pics and details of the vintage D&D collection in coming posts as well. In the meantime, here's a sneak peek at left (for you Batman fans, that's Dennis O'Neil's desk in the background).
