Thread: Dungeons & Dragons

Tomb of Horrors is actually supposed to be metagamed, it's a tournament dungeon more so built to see how far you got before dying. Also bring along an army of henchmen to throw at traps. Now for DD, I cut my teeth learning 33.5 back in highschool by playing a half orc wizard that would do silly things like setting fires for the hell of it and collect trophies from all his kills, including once a drow snake whip that bit and poisoned him. After that I didn't play for a while as my DM, my physics teacher, moved away and I didn't come back to the hobby for a few years but when I did it was playing Pathfinder before it become the bloated mess it is. There I played a drunken barbarian hobgoblin that got eaten by a roper only to be killed when the party set it on fire and this after he had made a fairly epic standing jump across a twenty foot pit concealed in mist while being chased by a small troop of orcs. At least he got to shine for a little while. He got replaced by a rogue that didn't last long as a fellow PC grabbed an evil magic item and turned the rest of the party evil. So then we made up new characters, gunslinger for me, to hunt down the old characters. This we did mostly through guile and magical power because while touch AC might be nice for firearms you don't really do a lot of damage. After that campaign stalled due to out thinking the DM we tried a campaign where everyone was a caster and entered my Siege Mage half orc. Another campaign where my character didn't get to shine directly through their magic but just in the creativity of the players in taking out the bad guys. We would have entire sessions where it was pointless to rule dice as we had stacked the deck so in our favour and just out thought the DM again and again. That was a fairly common theme for the DM, even when we switched to Exalted 2nd briefly. About that time I began to run campaigns, first time lasted no more then a single session and resulted in a massive orgy of all my players save two who were staying in the next room over in an inn. Only reason they weren't involved was because the one was healing the other after harpooning them. I then tried my hand again and didn't get past the first session and honestly don't remember much but that was less my fault and the result of two of my players, one of them being the old DM, getting a divorce. It was then that I decided to run a smaller group and let my players go wild using templates and gestalt characters. This would be the last time I would run pathfinder as I had grown tired of it's bloated mess and stating up NPCs and monsters had become too much of a chore and there were just too many fiddly bits. It was still one of my more successful campaigns as it did reach a satisfactory conclusion. The players were travelling to the ruins of an old dwarven city that had been lost in jungles, of course the ruins were over run by the descendants of the original inhabitants of snakemen. Dwarves had simply killed them and taken their homes before being corrupted by what lay beneath and destroyed themselves. There was a race between the players and some crazy cult attempting to re-awaken an old one like god monster which almost came throw but they were able to defeat the main villain with heavy wounds. About that time I was searching for something new and came upon what is and will remain my favourite version of DD, Lamentations of the Flame Princess. Which is like a cleaned up BasicExpert DD with ascending AC, a really good encumbrance system, weird flavoured magic and a decent skill system. It turned me towards older editions of DD and I've just been kind of obsessively collecting older things since. My pride being a copy of Judge's Guild Ready Ref Sheets which is akin to the Dungeon Masters Guide book prior to it's original release for ADD. I also have the old Forgotten Realms grey box which would probably be the only version of FR that I would use for game purposes as it predates most if not all the novels. But going back to LotFP, the company had put out some of the best books, Vornheim is a perfect guide to running an urban campaign, Veins of the Earth is simply amazing for its art, layout and creative design for underdark campaigns, a fun bunch of adventures in Death Frost Doom where you can awaken a zombie horde that'll ravage the world if you're not careful, Tower of the Stargazer were you wander through a seemingly abandoned wizard's tower, Forgive Us which is a nice little urban dungeon, Scenic Dunnsmouth which has the most interesting village creator so that it's never the same small backwords place each time you visit, Towers Two written by former front man of Gwar Brockie, Broodmother Sky Fortress which will fuck your campaign world up with giant centaur hammerhead shark people, Qelong which is fantasy cambodia and a host of other stuff. The OSR and it's fan community keeps me coming back to DD and trying to expand and refine my world building in ways which pf never provoked. It got me to read the Appendix N books which lead me into following classic science fiction as I've developed an interest in Classic Traveller but I digress very much here. I've played and run a few LotFP campaigns. One where the players was a group of dwarven merchants that co-opted and took over a town in order to defend it against goblins. Another time while attempting to do a fantasy vietnam styled game they were wandering through jungles unsure of what to do while avoiding magic radiation and soldiers of a war poorly understood. That game group eventually died due to another divorce. My latest group has been the most stable where I started running them with 5e but converted them to LotFP as it's a system I can tinker with easier. Two of my players were black dragonborn who's acid damage inflicted hallucinations on it's victims and they worshiped Brohomet. There was a lot of dick sucking and fucking in that campaign, including the two dragonborn dating the same dwarf noble who didn't know he was dating two people. The game ended when the players achieved their goal of opening a brothelopium denfight club. I then got to play in a one shot campaign as a slime girl that hid out in a fellow player's character as they were playing animated armour. That was a lot of fun, confused the party as the armour never spoke so they just heard my character. Currently I play in a Dragon Age game while running a Dark Heresy game on alternating mondays and we're plotting to start up a tuesday group that'll meet so many times a month for 5e where I'll be a player. I hope to snag a tuesday to run some LotFP and try an actual dungeon crawl with the Maze of the Blue Medusa. Somewhere along the lines I also did some online gaming with roll20, a lot of failed games of trying to run LotFP but did have some fun with characters burning down bars due to random rolls on a carousing table. I have had entire adventures spun off from a few dice rolls on that table and my players have always loved the chance for their characters to get drunk and roll that giant d30. As a player I had a short lived buddy cop routine between my character a pysker and friend playing a tech priest in Dark Heresy, a heroin smuggler in Call of Cthulhu and a communist hoping to topple a kingdom in an evil pathfinder game. I love DD, I love designing worlds for it, most of them for LotFP but I've been developing a few thoughts for a 5e game. As an added bonus I am born to be the DM as those are my initials.