Take Me Back to Dillhonker City

In this venue I haven't talked about the Zoom game I have been running for a while. The game started as a little pick-up dungeoneering affair with Zak S. and James Raggi. The first batch of sessions focused on exploring the Halls of Tizun Thane, from White Dwarf #18 (1980), written by late great Albie Fiore.

I colored this illo to share with the group.

Zak had an existing goblin cleric/thief from some old game and another character I forget and James made a pair of LotFP characters, so we started very FLAILSNAILSy with a mishmosh of rules in play. It was during this phase of the campaign that I was relying heavily on my homemade Remedial Underworlds & Unicorns Dungeon Bastard's Quick Ref, though I didn't use all the charts in that booklet. Near the end of this adventure we gained our third player, a friend of Zak's also in LA.

Our second adventure was an obscure old dungeon from Judges Guild with three authors and not much going for it despite that fact. I ran Tizun Thane because I wanted to have a go at what is often considered a classic. This second adventure I ran for the opposite reason; sometimes I like to try to make the most of a dungeon that I find subpar. I think that went pretty well.

This second dungeon came to a conclusion a little early one session. Also, it was a successful enough outing that Zak was looking to start wrecking havoc on the campaign world status quo. The problem was, we didn't really have a campaign world up until this point, only a couple of dungeons.

Now, I had in my back pocket this clever/stupid scheme of dropping the PCs in a D&D-type conversion of The Court of Ardor, perhaps the least canonical of MERP setting books. The game had been bending towards LotFP style play and I thought secretly dropping Lamentations PCs into the super elf drama of a faux Tolkien setting would be hilarious. I had even gone so far as to prep an innocuous player handout to the setting.

But I hadn't counted on Zak asking me my own damn 20 questions. In the moment I couldn't resist just making up all sorts of stupid bullshit answers, so now the game is set in just about the stupidest campaign world I have ever seen. Judge for yourself. Here's the ongoing campaign world doc. So that's the world the players find themselves in now.

Along the way we picked up a couple of new players, Bec in Texas and Simon in Ukraine (as I understand it, he's located pretty far west in the country, relatively distant from the fighting). Bec's playing the first dwarf PC in my own games who made use of my How to Name a Dwarf charts. Simon is playing a LotFP specialist/bard with a penchant for perverse activities such as washing with soap. The main party are currently exploring a wizard's tower that has been engulfed by a very large, very slow slime monster (a One Page Dungeon I've been wanting to play for ever).

Last week only Bec and Jimbo could make the game, so James got out his back up PC and Bec whipped up a quick magic-user. They went on an adventure inside the mind of a madman, another One Page Dungeon. Bec's new MU was the first in the campaign, and we're using the MU rules in Vaginas are Magic!/James Raggi's Eldritch Cock. To make the campaign spell list, I started with my huge custom MU spell lists from the Vaults of Vyzor days and smooshed them together with the official LotFP spells and any other LotFP magic I had handy. I've been slowly adding other spells to my list, with the goal being to have every third party Old School MU spell on it. Or at least every spell appearing in everything I have a copy of. When Bec rolled her PC's three starting spells, there were 913 spells available. As of my last updating of the list, I now have 1,315 spells on it.

So that's my current game.