Following a comment from Charles, I thought it might be a good idea to bring you up to date on where the World of Mykenia project is heading.
Although I’ve been spending most of my week off work writing, and creating the first small slice of Mykenia in playable detail, I’ve also decided how I’m going to get this new world into actual play.
In short, it’s heading towards some online adventuring first.
SPOILER ALERT! This post contains details of the setting which players might prefer to avoid seeing.
Regular readers will know that I have been enjoying some online Dungeons & Dragons 5e fun with a select group from the Extraordinary Gamers. We began, ages back, with a conversion of my interpretation of the Red Box D&D “First Adventure” – what I call Castle Mystamyr – and had a pretty good time delving the three levels therein.
Most recently, I stocked the map from the 1e Dungeon Masters Guide (p. 79) and we’ve been having some fun playing that too. With a new adventure needed, I figured I’d pitch out playing in Mykenia… although I didn’t really want to play it with 5e.
Enter… Castles & Crusades!
Fantasy Grounds is great! I like the software a great deal and enjoyed running games using the excellent D&D5e materials. When it comes to “old school” flavor, however, there are more limited choices. As a past fan of Castles & Crusades, a sort of 1e-meets-d20 adaptation of the original game style, I felt that this system offered a low-pain way into running the classic wilderness and dungeon game I have in mind.
Why not just run with 5e? Because 5e is a very new school game with a high-fantasy power edge that doesn’t quite gel with the swords-and-sorcery source material that’s inspiring Mykenia. Yes, I can modify it… but, when using Fantasy Grounds, that’s a tough mod to code when you’re a total code novice like me. Absent the time and talent to reconfigure 5e to fit my new campaign world, I decided to use a pre-existing and more old school game engine.
Starting Greyward
That decision has liberated me from creating and hacking my own rules and focused me on creating a great adventure. Using the Castle Oldskull Adventure Generator has been a whiz of fun and proven a good approach (once you get past the author’s rather meandering writing style). The Generator has allowed me to outline the core adventure and forced me to consider ideas that are both things I’d never have thought of and Gygaxian in style. The result is an adventure that is very different to what I’d previously have run.
One of the joys (at least for me) of adventure writing lies in also formatting the maps. This adventure includes some “hex-crawl” journeying but formed within the framework of the Adventure Generator’s random tables. From the initial regional map I designed for the whole Earldom of Greywold, I have now zoomed into just two of the 24-mile regional hexes and detailed them down to 1-mile per hex.
Here’s the GM map for the Greyward hex:
It’s been a lot of fun to imagine my way into this first adventure. From completing some maps, I’m now delving into creating specific encounters, random encounter tables, and the details of the locales shown. Once those are all done, I can begin to think about the dungeon itself… and the first three levels of deeps needed for the adventurers to explore.
All in all, it’s going well. I’m inspired and having a fair bit of creative fun! I hope that I can enthuse the players and get them ready to play before the middle of June.
Game on!
Interesting! I’m liking that zoomed in map. Using the dashed red to denote what looks like adventure zones is a clever idea. I personally like WelshPiper’s hex generator tables for my own random lands.
I haven’t played on any of the online services, myself. I’ve played a bit over skype, but that was several years ago.