Without a doubt it has to be Cthulhu. I know it’s a bit of a contentious choice but according to the first printing of Deities and Demigods he’s a god and that’s good enough for me.
Despite me getting some new dice, my favourite dice are the ones I mention in this blog post.
The Forgotten Realms is by far my favourite because of the amount of detail that has been lavished upon it.
I remember seeing all the adverts in the comics I used to read advertising this wonderful new land to explore and play in. It was my friends who first got me interested in the realms as they were reading the novels and I thought it sounded a pretty neat place to run adventures in.
I remember that I was overcome with joy when I finally got the original grey box edition and poured over the books inside, it left me feeling ecstatic and determined even more to use this world for my campaigns. After that I bought each book I could and devoured the realms lore contained within; each volume adding more layers of detail that could be peeled back and digested at will. For the hard to get stuff I tracked down the miniature reprint editions and did my best to read them. Somewhere I have the Undermountain reprint boxed set signed by Ed Greenwood himself.
I really liked the Volo’s guides as they were written as a travel guide so I could hand that volume to my players and they could get a taste of what the area covered was like.
I even managed to get hold of the Forgotten Realms atlas and the CD-ROM with the Campaign Cartographer maps. Now I had the ability to print out the areas that the players would visit, going down to the smaller regions for the hamlets.
I was less enthused when the world was updated for 3e as the physical geography changed and so all the lovely maps I had were pretty useless if I wanted to keep using the setting as is for this edition.
For the last campaign I started I went back to Greyhawk as I knew very little about the realm and thought it would be a different change of pace.
I’ve always had a soft spot for the magic using classes, mainly the arcane not the divine wielder. That’s not to say that I haven’t played clerics or the like but I could never really plan ahead to master the strategy of spell selection. For the main part the cleric doesn’t get the respect they deserve; if there are no undead to be had then you get treated as a walking healing machine.
For a long time I played wizards, I could understand the spell strategy required and it was easier to select what spells to memorise for each day. When 3rd edition appeared I was still looking at wizards and the fact you got a familiar to start with.
It wasn’t until a short time later I decided to try the new sorcerer class and I’m glad I did. I felt that what you sacrificed in additional spells was compensated by the fact you could cast whatever one you needed at the time and the bloodlines gave you more definition of the sorcerers personality.
For me you can’t beat playing a human. Part of me could see the appeal of all the wonderful races but none of them really appealed to me; that’s not to say I haven’t played other races but I keep being drawn back to the human.
This was before the human was buffed up in 3rd edition or later volumes; once the new game hit the shelves I still played humans as there was more of a balanced reason to do so.
If push comes to shove I do like playing half-elves as I like any race that has some sort of magical aspect to it.
We make beautiful metal coins for tabletop games. Treasure worthy of your greatest adventures!
I’ve done all sorts of things to try and grab the attention of my players with props, I even tried using in game currency to add the extra dimension to the game but I ran into a major problem with coins; you couldn’t get enough of them to represent the vast wealth that certain OGL games require.
Now this project does look cool but since the coins are metal I suspect the shipping costs of the number of coins I would need to play with would be beyond prohibitive.
I apologise for those people who may be confused with the title of this post and came looking for rules on changing horses midstream.
What I really want to discuss is the possibility of changing my current campaign from an adventure path style game to a sandbox style campaign.
My players have mentioned to me about the Elder Scrolls style games they have played and I thought it would be interesting to see what happens if I give them an open ended environment in which to play. Luckily I have plenty of resources to draw upon and can use them to populate the region they will be exploring.
I should be able to generate quests for them to undertake and slowly tie the events together into a seamless puzzle for then to solve.
The last time I gave them something like this to play with was the Legend of the Five Rings supplement Mimura; I recognise where I went wrong there was bombarding the players with too much information in one go.
If I slowly add information to the campaign Wiki I should be able to refer them there and allow them to refresh their memories of past events.
Fingers crossed that I may have found a potentially winning game idea.
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The Lost City of Gaxmoor beckons brave adventurers to explore its ruins and crypts, to vanquish the chaos and evil that lies within.
I missed out on getting the original printed edition and to see it being offered once more as a pdf makes me pretty happy.
The project is already funded so any additional pledges are going towards the stretch goals!
Modular gaming mats that fit any size or shape table, work with any marker, and are super durable.
Like many gms when D&D 3 appeared and introduced the concept of using a battle grid I had to go and purchase a couple for use. It was then I discovered the main drawback of the maps I bought were that they didn’t fit the gaming table and would either hang over the edge or make battles a rather intimate encounter whenever I used the smaller one.
This looks like just the ticket for me, being able to lay a few down and clean them afterwards. The only concern I have is that the international shipping is going to be a very costly proposition and may push it outside of my price bracket.