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Monday, June 30, 2014

Catching up with the Lich House

I've been off the web for a couple of weeks.  Business travel, a major system outage back at headquarters, and then prep for a professional exam all conspired to give me more urgent things to attend than blogging - which, at the end of the day, is really just a vehicle for my musings and chronicles about games.

The Taenarum campaign is still moving forward; Taenarum is my classic megadungeon locale, a sprawling dungeon around the entrance to the Underworld and the vaults of Hades.  The monsters and  themes are heavily inspired by Greek myth and heroic fantasy. I'll need to do a recap of recent game sessions.  The first 16 dungeon areas are ready for play, so I'm moving on to the larger game world.  I've been working on the calendar and festivals, charts for generating annual campaign events, and maps.  I can't stress enough the importance of campaign events outside of the dungeon to help bring the rest of the world to life.  I've also started hex mapping the setting and have some interesting questions to answer - like, should I use characters from Greek legend in the game as kings and heroes?

I also had the chance to read GURPS Horror.  I'm not a GURPS player, but I've been hearing about the book for years as a general resource for horror gaming, and it's written by Kenneth Hite.  I was not disappointed.  I'll consider doing a review, but I couldn't really speak to any of the GURPS game rules or statistics.  My evergreen side project is developing a good approach to running a campaign that merges sandbox style D&D (or similar class and level-based gaming) with horror themes.  I've had some good megadungeon concepts that integrated the horror with a sandbox style of play, such as the Black City or Harrow Home Manor, but since Taenarum is an active (heroic fantasy) megadungeon, I'm looking to do something a little different.  Developing two megadungeons at once doesn't sound enjoyable, even if one is horror and awesome.  July is just about here, which means it's time for some summer Cthulhu.  Altair moves in the sky, and the stars are right.

So that's it for today - I'm back online.  For the readers - do any of the aforementioned topics sound particularly interesting to develop or share on the blog?  Otherwise I'll get caught up on game reports first.  I also need to get out there and see what I missed with other bloggers, too.  Have there been any OSR dramas or tempests in a teapot that are worth spectating?  I'm looking forward to seeing the Basic D&D PDF this week - WOTC is supposed to put it up July 3rd, right?

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