We played are first session of my darkest gaul campaign this past Saturday. Had 4 players 3 of them very experienced role-players and the 4th only had some experience with 3e d&d. All the players spent about an hour rolling up characters and asking questions about the setting etc. and came upon this party.
As an odd note i seem to have lost their character names.. but i will give you the run down none the less..
so we have a
Cleric- young priest who has come from the Vatican and has decided to leave the constraints of the church in favor of a life of wandering and ministering.
Specialist (rogue in this game)- A witch hunter or hunter of heretics. Does not have any official ties to the church just feels a strong pull to hunt heretics of any type.
Specialist- Romanian gypsy who is really quite literally off his rocker
Fighter-a generic soldier type.. this player has not really given me any character archetype yet or demonstrated any besides just a brute force soldier.
So the party started off as prisoners on board a British privateer/smuggling vessel. I let them come up with why they where captured. The only other on board was a infamous pirate that some of them recognized. Some of the players immediately tried to break free and the fighter did so with brute strength and started releasing the others. In the middle of their escape their ship was attacked by 2 pirate ships. They decided to free the pirate captain as well and made their way to the deck just as the pirates started to board. Before that they managed to get into the stores and found some hidden treasures along with their valuables.
After some brief skirmishes the pirate captain offered to bring them to safe port after helping him escape. After a few days of sea travel they ended up at the port of Nauntes. When they disembarked everyone went separate ways to do whatever they wanted. The priest went to the cathedral, the gypsy went to the nearest inn/tavern, the witch hunter went around looking for information and rumors, and the fighter went and had a drink.
The witch hunter discovered many rumors and happenings going on in and around the city but decided to lead up on one. That one being that apparently young women where being taken in the night for the past couple of weeks and strange robed men where seen taking them. After finding this info he went looking for the others. The fighter ended up getting drunk in an alley and arrested he resisted but got away without his weapons and ran into the witch hunter.
The gypsy meanwhile was doing all kinds of crazy scheming about trying to break into the duchesses palace...
The priest after praying and eating went and found the others. After the witch hunter related all his info to the others they decided to fallow up on it and went to see the captain of the duchess guards at the palace, (by this time the gypsy had joined them), after arriving at the inner walls to the palace the gypsy tried to carouse himself into the gates by saying he was a rather important someone but the guards had none of it and kicked him out.
The rest of the party was admitted after stating they wanted to help find the missing girls. They went to the captain and he told them most of the kidnappings was happening around the old roman ruins outside of town and that they had actually captured a cultist. They decided to go check out the captured cultist and question him. the gypsy on the other hand was arrested for trying to resist being kicked out and imprisoned. He did manage to escape.
The rest of the party went to the dungeons located on an island just off the coast of the main city and where escorted into the cell containing the cultist. Also i forgot to mention they did actually encounter one of the cultist on the way in an alley running from something. They hurried after him and after a vicious attack managed to subdue him but not before he melted away into a pile of ooze that in return attacked them as well. They managed to kill the ooze and took the robes and a dagger from the cultist. This was pretty much the end of the first session. Unfortunately the priest character can only make it to the game once or twice a month so we have decided to do another game on the off weeks that he is not there.
In the off weeks i will be running Vampire: The masquerade more details on that campaign soon enough..
Monday, January 30, 2017
Tuesday, January 24, 2017
Darkest Gaul
Darkest Gaul.. that is the working title for the new campaign I'm going to be running. I already mentioned in a previous post that i would be running my campaign in a pseudo historical France in the early half the 16th century. Why did i make the decision to base my campaign here?
1.I love history... enough said i suppose although the 16th century is not my area of expertise
2.I chose the early 16th century because i like the theme of the old and new coming together and this was a time when it was. The renaissance had just started picking up steam in Europe and new ideas in religion, politics, science, hell everything. I also like the idea of using early firearms. This is something i have always strayed away from in d&d type games but i think i finally want to use them and in the early 16th century most fighting men still resembled medieval fighting men. So i think it would be kind of cool to see a fighter with a arquebus in plate mail right next to the archer in chainmail. Also i think i might play up on the religion thing and bring back old pagain religions clashing with new and old Christianity.
3. I chose France because it is different. Most fantasy settings are based off some kind of pseudo England but i have yet to see a good one based in France.
Next i knew i needed to focus my attention on one particular region of France. My first thought was in eastern France or in the south which would be close to the wars that where currently going on and it is always good to have a war brewing somewhere. But then i started thinking about France's great enemy England i knew i had to include them some how. So Brittany seemed like a good choice to base the campaign.
Brittany also during this time had just been annexed by the French crown before it had been an independent providence so that alone makes good material. I can have a fictional war brewing against England, rebellion on the homefront, and a potential other war starting again in Italy or somewhere.
Then i had to choose a starting city. I knew i wanted a port city as the home base and Nauntes,France is the perfect location. Nauntes at the time was one of the largest ports in France or Europe and big port cities always seem to make me think of plenty of adventures!
Next time i will detail my alternate vision of Naunte....
1.I love history... enough said i suppose although the 16th century is not my area of expertise
2.I chose the early 16th century because i like the theme of the old and new coming together and this was a time when it was. The renaissance had just started picking up steam in Europe and new ideas in religion, politics, science, hell everything. I also like the idea of using early firearms. This is something i have always strayed away from in d&d type games but i think i finally want to use them and in the early 16th century most fighting men still resembled medieval fighting men. So i think it would be kind of cool to see a fighter with a arquebus in plate mail right next to the archer in chainmail. Also i think i might play up on the religion thing and bring back old pagain religions clashing with new and old Christianity.
3. I chose France because it is different. Most fantasy settings are based off some kind of pseudo England but i have yet to see a good one based in France.
Next i knew i needed to focus my attention on one particular region of France. My first thought was in eastern France or in the south which would be close to the wars that where currently going on and it is always good to have a war brewing somewhere. But then i started thinking about France's great enemy England i knew i had to include them some how. So Brittany seemed like a good choice to base the campaign.
Brittany also during this time had just been annexed by the French crown before it had been an independent providence so that alone makes good material. I can have a fictional war brewing against England, rebellion on the homefront, and a potential other war starting again in Italy or somewhere.
Then i had to choose a starting city. I knew i wanted a port city as the home base and Nauntes,France is the perfect location. Nauntes at the time was one of the largest ports in France or Europe and big port cities always seem to make me think of plenty of adventures!
Sunday, January 22, 2017
New D&D campaign
1. I hate a lot of rules... old d&d and ad&d are very rules light and leave a lot of the rules up to the DM. As opposed to modern d&d 3e and up they are filled with all kinds of rules for everything.
2.I don't like the play style encouraged by modern d&d. It encourages a lot of power gaming and personal player control. Everyone is bad ass at everything it seems and it is easy to lose control for a DM and really takes away good role playing and cooperation from the players.
3. I hate the aesthetic. This may seem trivial to most but i really cannot stand the art approach and overall tone and aesthetic of modern d&d. I am big on aesthetics and atmosphere and when i look at those modern books it looks like disney made them as opposed to the old books with all those great illustrations and paintings that with one look fire up my imagination and invoke a certain style that i love.
So whenever i start a new d&d campaign i always start shuffling through my mountains of rules to see what i want to use. I feel like each version of d&d encourages a certain style of play
OD&D (1974 whitebox)- This is the original it is a great toolkit even for the modern gamer. It is very very loose and i love the style. In the three little brown books the overall feel here is for dungeon crawling though in a modern approach anything is possible. I have run many one shots and a few sandbox/hexcrawl campaigns with the white box and variants such as Swords and wizardry.
B/X Moldvay/Cook/Mentzer- This was a reworking and clean up of the original white box and i think the most elegant of all the d&d editions. Many reworkings have been made of these rules because of how good they are. They encourage more of a basic framework of d&d with dungeon crawling inner mixed with wilderness exploration but again many people have approached the style to many ways it is very adaptable.
AD&D 1e/2e- I feel like ad&d 1e and 2e both introduced the more epic heroic adventure especially 2e. These are the rules i usually turn to if i want to run a epic quest campaign PC's are more varied and have lots of options and are alot more survivable it seems.
So for this game i started pondering what i wanted to do.. well at the beginning i was leaning more toward a sandbox approach with a very generic setting and was thinking swords and wizardy or b/x d&d. So i started looking at b/x d&d clones. I like the clones because everyone can get a copy of the rules easily if they want and i like supporting indy productions. One that caught my eye was lamentations of the flame princess. I loved the flavor and the rules are basically b/x d&d with some modern tweaks that i appreciate.
When i started looking more into lotfp i also starting looking at the supplemental material and really loved it. This is where lotfp really shines in my opinion. It also got me thinking more about my setting. James Raggi's modules and campaign is based in historical england in the 17th century and this is something i have always wanted to do. So i decided to base my campaign in early 16th century france. I like the idea of a real world place and time it gives a solid framework the players can relate to but a DM can also go wild with it. Which
is exactly what i'm going to do.. more to come..
New blog
New Blog
Starting a new blog to chronicle the nerdy side of my life. Within i will post the details and ramblings of my many nerdy hobbies and other things such as table-top rpgs,miniatures games,movies,music,reviews,and what the hell ever else i want to.
I quick intoduction My name is Cody i live in the suburbs of Nashville,TN and i'm a carpenter. I have many interest but gaming be it rpgs,miniatures, or board games have been a long time hobby of mine since i was about 8 years old. Other interests of mine include music, (i play drums and guitar), reading especially history, old pulp fantasy and comics, movies, and anything creative.
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