| Home | FRP Gaming | Plague Devastation |
Campaign Journal
|
I started this campaign back in 1990 or so, and played it with my two housemates for maybe 18 months until they graduated from college. I'd introduced AD&D to one of my roomates and reintroduced it to the other after we'd played the whole Pool of Radiance saga on our PCs and convinced them that playing the AD&D RPG was hundreds of times better than playing the PC version.
BackgroundOne of my housemates had played AD&D when he was younger, but he'd done the dungeon-crawl thing, with characters simply ploughing through whatever modules the DM had available (like we all did when we started). The campaign itself being nothing more than a series of modules and the characters definded by nothing more than the "size of their plusses". I wanted to get a little more into the background story and flesh out the characters a bit more.
IntroductionI wanted the game to be a bit less class and alignment restrictive since I've always felt that the whole concept of "alignment" was rather simplistic. Plus the concept of speaking "Neutral Good" or "Chaotic Evil" was dumb. I had the players create basic AD&D characters but I threw in some house rule changes, namely, characters could be any race and class, or they could be multiclassed allowing for wierd class combinations (i.e. no paladin/thieves or druid/assassins) nor would there be any level restrictions for demi-human races. What we ended up with was a Human Figher/Assassin named Blackwolf and a half-Sylvan elf Ranger/Magic user named Kharash. The Setting The setting for the campaign was set in the Great Kingdom in the World of Greyhawk in the Adri Forest near Rauxes. I'm trying to recount the setting from memory and it's been ten years so forgive me if the information is a bit spotty.
Both characters were to start in the town of Charn, a sleepy mining town on the edge of the Adri Forest, located directly between Erianhrel and Dustbridge. The mine (I believe it might have been a coal mine, but I can't remember for sure) had all but run dry, and most of the inhabitants had left town for better futures. Blackwolf started the game at 17 years of age, being an orphaned urchin living by his wits and by his blade. He preyed off solitary travellers near the edge of the forest. His friend and sometimes partner, Kharash often visited the town of Charn from his own people the Sylvan Elves of the Adri Forest. Kharash was also a youth by Elvish standards being a mere 30 or so. Kharash's folk were leaving the forest in face of all the evil that was entering the Great Kingdom, but Kharash elected to stay behind with Blackwolf, who had nowhere else to go. |
The Great Kingdom at the time was ruled by the Invincible Overlord
(using the resource books of the same name by Judge's Guild). The
Kingdom has fallen into bad times, with roads and bridges falling
into disrepair and fell beasts encroaching into the edges of the
terretories.