Introductory Musings

So, I'm running a Pathfinder campaign.

Last year, I bought a ton of Goodman Games's Dungeon Crawl Classics modules for D&D 3rd Edition. They're focused on promoting their own RPG product, Dungeon Crawl Classics, these days, so the 3rd Edition product run is effectively dead, meaning you can really only find them at conventions or on eBay. Which is a shame, 'cause I still enjoy 3rd Edition, but capitalism and supply side demand and blah blah blah (Whatever Mr. Economics, nobody cares.)

Erol Otus, "Crypt of the Devil-Lich" front cover illustration.

Now, I'm normally a 'sandbox' DM - that is, I try to create consistent settings and populate them with interesting NPCs, then have my players blunder around killing trolls and wrecking things until a story emerges. It's a process refined through years of gaming, and I'm always getting better at it. But I rarely use mods.

So, that being said, once I got home from GenCon with a shitload of mods, all I wanted to do was run mods. I decided to to run a game that wasn't any of the aforementioned things: A campaign that was just one mod after the next, strung together with flavor text, and with little-to-no "out of dungeon" roleplaying to get in the way of looting kobolds.

And y'know what? It's going great!

It was cake to convert the 3rd Ed mods to Pathfinder and, while I'm not in love with Pathfinder, it's certainly a good enough rule set to handle everything I want to do with it. It has the added bonus of being a rule set that lots of people know and enjoy, too, so it wasn't hard to recruit a party.

I've run Legacy of the Savage Kings, Aerie of the Crow God, and I'm starting Assault on Castle Stormbringer this weekend. I've had two character deaths, a ton of close calls, and a lot of fun. My intention is to run The Stormbringer Juggernaut next, then cap it all off with a wild and fatal romp through the Crypt of the Devil-Lich.

That campaign is going to be the primary focus of this blog... until it concludes, and I start something different, anyway.