Here's a page with a neat little rules thingy that takes some of the cooler parts of HackMaster and injects them into Castles & Crusades. That's pretty darn cool. HackMaster is way too crunchy for me while C&C is a little too light. With this rules plug-in suddenly C&C looks like a very good option for a fantasy campaign. Yay, critical hit charts! I really think a lighter system than 3.5 could go a ways to help me put together a campaign that's a little bit more than a string of unrelated dungeoneering. Even with the CastleHack elements added in, C&C looks like a good candidate to be that system.
Of course I just made up my mind yesterday that my next fantasy campaign would use Arcana Evolved. I came to this conclusion after grappling with the issues regarding starting a new campaign in an unfamiliar setting. With straight D&D people already know the races and classes and most potential players have a PHB so they can make their character at home before the first session. With AE you encounter the twin problems of Explaining the Setting (including all the races and classes) and the dreaded Chargen Session of Doom. Few things kill my buzz harder than wasting the first session of a campaign on passing the book around while trying to build characters.
So I decided that I will short-circuit the process somehow for this theoretical campaign. The easiest way to pull that off would be with pre-gen characters. Anybody out there remember module N4 Treasure Hunt? An AD&D module written by Aaron Allston (author of Strike Force, one of best supplements every produced by the hobby) and published during the late 1st edition era, Treasure Hunt ain't exactly a classic of the genre but it does have a cute gimmick. The included pregen PCs are zero level characters. They have some stats and a race. They're each proficient with a dagger, a staff, or a club. Other than that these PCs are a blank slate. No character class. No alignment. Heck, they start out with a negative XP total. During the course of the adventure the DM tracks what the PCs do. There's a nifty little chart. Example: Attempt to use the dead hobgoblin's polearm? The DM marks a plus sign ('+') next to the classes that wield such things and a minus sign ('-') next to the classes that can't weild polearms. Everyone is allowed to try all the class abilities useable by a first level character. When a PC reaches 0 XP the DM assigns them a class (and alignment) based upon their prior activity. So the guy who put on the armor and swung the sword will probably end up a fighter. The PC who used the spellbook to cast sleep winds up being an magic-user, etc.
It's a cute little way to start out a campaign. Newbies don't have to know anything about the class system, they can just try to do stuff. I've seen veteran players enjoy the process, too. Module N4 is one of the handful of published adventures I've run more than once. Because of the differences in system and setting N4 isn't directly adaptable to Arcana Evolved, but I see it as inspiration for how to get an AE game off the ground. I'm not exactly sure yet how I'd implement the idea. One thought I had involved just whipping up one member of each PC races, each as a first level member of their respective racial paragon class.
Mince Pie Fest 2024: Waitrose No 1
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These often get picked as the best supermarket mince pies by the gutter
press, so let's see. The pastry has a good texture, firm but also soft, but
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Posts
How close are you to running AU?
ReplyDeleteGreat question. I'd say that 'closeness' in this case can be measured by two metrics, time and desire. The campaign isn't close in time because I don't have any plans to stop running my present D&D campaign. The shape of the campaign past the current adventure are a bit nebulous, but my intent is to continue forward up through at least level 20. That 30th level adventure published in Dungeon a ways back is still the unreachable star by which I navigate the campaign. Though now that I think about it, you gestalt freaks might be able to handle that adventure with 25th level PCs.
ReplyDeleteIn terms of desire, the selection of campaign-scope games I want to run next is down to two or three. The other main contender is Andy Hopp's Low Life, which might prove harder with regards to assembling a willing group of players.
I've toyed with a similar idea to that in Treasure Hunt for getting a HERO campaign started with inexperienced players. That is: starting everyone off with as few as 25pts to build PC's with. That way they wouldn't have to deal with lengthy character creation, and the rules they'd face in the first session or two would be pretty light too.
ReplyDeleteI thought this would be a nice way of knitting the characters together as well, sort of generating their background in play instead of just filling it in out of nowhere.
If I ever consider running HERO again I'll probably give this method a go. ;)
Many years ago I ran a 25/25 sci-fi microcampaign using the HERO system. It was very interesting to see how hard the players worked the system to preserve their 50 point wimps. In their first shoot-out they pulled nearly every maneuver in the combat chapter to try to give themselves a fighting chance against the cockroach-man space pirates.
ReplyDeleteDoing it as the 1st level racial paragon thing would be interesting. One possible concern is that everyone will focus on more-or-less the same thing based on what challenges the initial session poses.
ReplyDeleteAn alternative? Incorporate this into first session character generation and group-brainstorming about the campaign.
How's it work?
1. Give an overview of the races and classes for those who don't know them.
2. Have people pick their pre-gen racial paragon characters. Let them make minor tweaks to ability scores and skill points if they want. Let people chat about their eventual class preferences.
3. Run a short adventure that gives some setting-specific color and some hints about the campaign's direction.
4. Have a post-game discussion about players' interests for the campaign direction and elements they'd like to see. Steal heavily from this. Also, people will likely have more definition to their character at this point. You might want to offer bonus xp (enough to get their character to 2nd level) at this point to those who can come up with a good justification for their move to another character class based on their actions in the adventure.