Happy New Year!
So, it’s a new year, and, to quote Bilbo Baggins, “I’m going on an adventure!”
The Borderlands
I started a ShadowDark campaign. We’re five sessions in using Gary Gygax’s The Keep on the Borderlands as the setting. Each session is on-line via my Discord for audio and my Foundry for virtual table top. I’ve got nine players, only a third of them being people I’ve met in person. The campaign is an open table game. I schedule the sessions when I’m available. Anyone who can show up for the session shows up for the session. Only one of the five adventures started with a mandatory DM plot hook. Otherwise, the players decide based on previous sessions, current rumors, et cetera, where their PCs go and what they want to accomplish when they get there.
I’m having so much fun with The Borderlands that I started up campaign site via a Scabard. Check it out if you want.
The picture below is a graph view of The Borderlands on Scabard with “The Heroes” in the center. This view shows many of the PCs (living and dead) and their connections to people, places, and events. Clicking the link in the Group box takes you to the displayed page. Clicking a picture circle on the graph shifts that picture circle to the center and displays relationships from the new perspective.
Good times!
Middangeard
with the help of my very own The Hero’s Journal (via www.TheHerosJournal.co), I’ve started an ambitious project. The Middangeard campaign setting has lurked around the peripheries of my gaming for decades. The earliest iterations used AD&D (first and second editions) back in the late 1980s to early 1990s. It popped up briefly with Third Edition. Elements of it have made cameos in other games with other systems.
The simple elegance of ShadowDark and Old-School Essentials have pushed me to break out several of my favorite non-D&D and D&D-adjacent games to mine for inspiration while writing my own old Old-School system set in Middangeard. Since 1 January, the very rough draft player’s guide has grown from 0 words and pages to just over 1,000 words stretched unevenly across seven pages. Another document discussing Middangeard’s theogony and history (influenced heavily by philosophy and theology largely Catholic in sensibility) includes a lot of previously blogged material. It’s about 5,800 words across 12 pages. Much of this will end up in the player’s guide.
My initial goal is to have enough of Middangeard completed so that I can start playtesting it by September 2025. After that will come more editing followed by formatting for publication via print on demand. If successful, Middangeard will be second actual book (the first being my superhero RPG The Four Color Hack).
Also!
If you’ve not backed James M. Spahn’s White Box Cyclopedia, you should. Check it out on Kickstarter. Two of James’s books are pictured above among my inspirational (and aspirational) materials. White Box Omnibus is an excellent expansion of Swords & Wizardy White Box(/strong> and The Hero’s Journey RPG is a masterpiece of writing and game design.
