This past weekend marked the beginning of our new campaign and a new game system. As I mentioned in my prior posting, we’re moving to a less “tactically challenging” game. The system I’ve selected is Myth & Magic from New Haven Games (aka M&M). The game isn’t officially released until late September but a pre-release is available. Myth & Magic started as a retro-clone of 2nd Edition AD&D but has become more than that. In a manner similar to Castles & Crusades, M&M looks something like a pre-3rd Edition D&D re-envisioned with modern sensibilities. I definitely prefer M&M’s BASE20 system over Castles & Crusades SEIGE Mechanic and over the d20 approach of ever escalating skills and difficulties. We’re going to be giving the pre-release a run until the September release. It is my understanding the upcoming release has a lot of things added to the game and some things reworked. We’ll re-evaluate if we’ll continue with Myth & Magic after that release.

We rolled up characters on Saturday. It took longer than I had hoped but that is largely because none of the players had ever seen Myth & Magic. I hadn’t shared what we would be playing until after we were into the character creation process. Two of the players also decided that they’d play two characters and that contributed to things taking a bit longer. The range of Ability Scores, as one might expect with 3d6, is pretty wide. Rachel got pretty lucky with her rolls while others did not.

The roster of PCs includes the following.

• Aram, a Dwarven Cleric (played by RJ)
• Eoin, a Human Barbarian (played by RJ)
• Finch, a Halfling Thief (played by Todd)
• Isabel, a Half-Elf Ranger (played by Rachel)
• Mookatel, a Half-Orc Fighter (played by Todd)
• Rithor, a Human Wizard (played by Franklin)

The campaign will be using the Vault of Larin Karr as the “base” upon which I’ll be adding a variety of different things. Some of these will be homebrewed but others will be a mix of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Edition published adventures. This mix is intentional…I want to see how easy it is to convert materials from the different editions to Myth & Magic. I was going to start with the 3.5 “classic” adventure, The Crucible of Freya and the lead-in, The Wizard’s Amulet. However, Franklin immediately recognized it because he has run both in the past…so I’ll be making some definite changes.

Each character received one or two rumors about Quail Valley or the village of Fairhill. These were basically reasons for them to be wanting to travel to Quail Valley and so when a wizard was looking for some traveling companions to head to Fairhill (a village just a day or two from Quail Valley), it was a good “in” for each character to agree to the trip.

Below is the session log from Rachel.

My GM comments are in [italics and brackets.]

Note: There are spoilers for The Wizard’s Amulet and possibly The Crucible of Freya below.

Read the rest of this entry

I’ll get to the post’s title in just a bit. First, an update.

Since I last posted, we’ve still been playing with different players taking turns running some one-shot or short adventures. After Todd’s turn running “A Keg for a Dragon,” RJ took a turn. He ran the nearly unpronounceable, “Well Met in Kith’takharos” from White Haired Man. It took us two sessions to finish it and I think we all enjoyed it. RJ did a job of going with the flow right at the beginning as my character basically picked a fight in a tavern before we really even got into the adventure. He really can’t complain as he gave me a character that was both overconfident, stubborn, and a gambler. I swear that I thought the little guy was cheating at dice!

I think that RJ was disappointed that he never really did any damage–in either session–to any of the characters. He even “cheated” at the end to try and kill one of us but with no success.

After we finished that up, Pat was visiting and volunteered to run Pinnacle’s offering for Free RPG Day this year…The Wyld Hunt. This marked quite a milestone for our group…it was the first time that we ever finished an adventure marketed as a “one-shot” in a single adventure! We did our best to drag it out but first not doing what the adventure expected but Pat got us back on the rails. Pat also succeeded in killing one of the characters.

That’s what we’ve been up to over the last few weeks.

Since we had been expecting Pat’s game to take two session, I had to find something to fill the following session since no one was going to be ready to run something then. I hit on doing a higher Rank fantasy adventure as most of our Savage Worlds games have been at Novice and Seasoned Rank. The biggest conclusion I came away with from that session is that our group is just not a tactically oriented group. We’ve joked (and lamented) the lack of a tactician in the group for most of our history playing together but it really hit home that night. A fight with some trolls turned into a long, dragged out fight that could easily have turned into a TPK.

As a result, I’ve decided that we’re not going to use Savage Worlds for our fantasy campaign. We need something that is bit more forgiving for a non-tactical group of players. I simply can’t go back to 4e or 3.5…the combats in both just take too long for my preference and I really want something fairly rules light and simple in mechanics. I also want something that doesn’t really require “rules mastery” to play well and doesn’t require the players to focus so much on character builds. I want something that is easy for me to prep (from a mechanics perspective), easy for the players to play (again, from a mechanics perspective), and just lets us get on with playing the game.

We’re going retro!!!

Tonight marks the beginning of our experiment with either one of the older editions of D&D, a retro-clone, or one of the “near-clones” that are inspired by the older editions (e.g., Castles & Crusades).

More to come…