Session 1 was Groovy!

Posted this to Google+ Saturday.

I kicked off my "away game" last night. A gentleman named John is coordinating things at his house. In his living room, one group played Call of Cthulhu. I had the dining room (I had forgotten how much I enjoy running at a large, dining room table) and I ran my OD&D/S&W old school franken-clone thing.

I had four players, two of whom had never played D&D. One fellow thought it was going to be a 4e game and I hope he wasn't too disappointed. He did say he would be playing again next week, so I hope he does and decides to really give old school a try.

Everyone seemed to have fun. There was a save or die character death, so I hope that doesn't scare anyone away. The party thief, who was the one guy at the table who had any experience with TSR era D&D AND, I could tell, has played a thief before, chose the wrong time to not take things seriously and got the fighter killed by not doing his job. He seemed much more sober afterwards so I think his head should be in the game now. And everyone picked up some "player experience," the most important kind.

I didn't feel I was ready for Greyhawk yet and I'm still planning on using it for my home campaign, when it picks back up. I revamped The Black Mete a little, transformed my LL frankenclone into a sort of OD&D/S&W/AD&D/OSR Retro-Golem and that's what I ran Friday.

After I play-test and no doubt further tweak, I'm gonna write up an introduction crediting everyone I yoinked ideas from, slap an ogl on it and release my house rules booklet for free download. It's 38 pages and if I added spells, would be a full players handbook. I'm not going to write, or rather re-write spells for it, as the ones Matt Finch wrote for S&W Core, suit me just fine! No need to clone monster's either.

You can click the map for a larger version.

Beedo had a good post with accompanying poll, about DIY D&D, frankenclones, etc. Some interesting results in the poll, so far. Austrodavicus had some thoughts on the subject, as well.

I'm using Akrasia's Class Based Weapon Damage rules.  Really, really digging em too!

Finding a good Public Domain picture of a Thief, is a pain in the ass!

Really Good News and an Unexpected DMing Gig

Sorry for the lack of posts. I've been busy on other things and that's likely to continue for the next few weeks.

I blogged some time ago about a second group of gamers I had been playing with. Rotating GM's. I was going to run OpenQuest for them, but dropped out before starting. My wife's doctor had determined that her thyroid cancer had returned, for the second time in the past five years and I decided to confine my gaming to the home front, while we prepared for another round of radiation treatments. There were other considerations, both related and unrelated.

Good news. My wife's current doctor, stymied, decided to send her to a specialist in Ohio. Who, being at the top of his field, has access to all sorts of new, state-of-the-art tech. We were very, very fortunate that this busy, highly in demand doctor agreed to see my wife.

After running some newfangled tests, the specialist informed her that her difficulties were being caused by the recent radiation treatments she's had and being prescribed too much artificial thyroid replacement hormone, which was done to try and suppress the cancer. Or, as he put it:

"You don't have cancer and probably haven't had it in twenty years."

We're very, very pleased by this. :)

Long story short, I'm picking up the away game again and have been asked to run this Friday. The group has gotten so large, 12 - 20 members, depending on if everyone shows up, that they're splitting it in two and are going to run two games at the same location, every other week.

I'm still working on the OSRIC/Greyhawk thing, but it's not ready for prime time yet. I'll probably save it for the home game, when it kicks off again.

So, I'm going to run my houseruled 0e/S&W. I've got a few things ready to use, but I'll spend the next day or two mulling that over and putting it together.