14 January 2025 Working on C&C

 14 January 2025 

    I have spent the last week or so working with C&C, and building out a homebrew Tier One campaign. I am using Roll20, which has a very bare-bones compendium and character sheet support. Right off the bat, I am simplifying the monsters: insteading of having three or four special attacks, defenses, etc. they have one or two things that they can do well. Making rollable monster tokens is not something I enjoy doing: it's a time sink, and the juice is not worth the squeeze. I am creating tokens, and putting notes directly on them so instead of rolling a macro, I'll just say "This is a d20+3" or whatever. My fear with C&C is that it will feel generic. I rolled up like 10 characters of various races and classes, and it wasn't super hard...but it feels kind of blah. Now, maybe that's the point, right? There are no class features/bonus actions/sub-classes/reactions, so the tabula rasa will lend itself to player character development. There only way to know is to play.

    I am setting this game in Blackmoor, the oldest of all campaign settings. Created by Dave Arneson way back in the day, Blackmoor is a region of Greyhawk to the far north. The game will begin in the village of Barrowgate, where a night hag has begun to unleash dark fey on the people and is attempting to open a gate to the Shadowdark. At the same time, 'low men in yellow coats'--scrubs escaping the wars with Iuz to the south, are setting up a bandit outfit in the nearby hills and beginning to prey on people in the region. Finally, there is a marco-narrative about a war from 100 years earlier when the people of the Ten Dutchies (Barrowgate is a member) fought in a brutal conflict against armies from the Great Dismal Swamp. These 'Cold People' live on in legend and nightmare, and are beginning to stir again...

    Should be fun. I am working scene by scene, setting up the main idea and bare bones of encounters. I'll refine them as I go. So are I have seven or so, with two bigger ones to go. I am using Notion and Imugur more intentionally than I have in the past, and relying on Sly Flourish's campaign template to help me organize. Since I am on a leave of absence from work, I have lots of free time. 

    With all of that said, I still have an Underdark campaign percolating in the back of my imagination. I think that would be better as a DCC game, but I need to ponder it more. 

Noni-Bones, the Night Hag

6 January 2025 C&C, 1:1 Time, and Jeffro

     New year new same old me! Still thinking, reading, writing, and buying TTRPG stuff. I just love it all so much. Sometimes I think I like to read about it, and imagine with it, more than I actually like to play. Whatevah: everyone needs a hobby! 

    I haven't GMd in a few months, and while I miss the prep. and the direction running a game gives me, I also don't miss the prep. or the moronity of my players (just kidding; they are...not always morons). I'm getting pulled further and further into the Troll Lords sphere and the Castles&Crusades ecosystem, which I like a lot. Supporting this company actually makes me feel good: they are veteran owned, they give a massive 50% to veterans, they do all of their printing and manufacturing domestically, etc. Take my money, boys. Just take my money.

    Their big campaign world is called Aihrde. I don't know if I've written about this before or not, but I don't love world-building. I like to have a module that gives me all of the people, places, and things so that I don't have to make them up on my own. I then string together disparate elements from a lot of sources, marinate it in my own imagination, and create campaigns and scenarios. I've always done it that way, going back to 1981. This particular world is very well imagined and deep. The author, Stephen Chenault, has been working on it for decades, so it's huge but not terribly well explored. C&C has a lot of modules (of middling quality, to be honest) but mostly this world is wide open. I am using their big 1-12 campaign module After the Winter Dark as my base, but I am going to expand on it in a lot of ways. 

    One thing I have been thinking about is 1:1 time, a concept brought to my attention by the Twitter terrorist Jeffro Johnson. He is quite a character; his book Appendix N: The Literary History of Dungeons&Dragons is a great read, as is How to Win at D&D. He is a bit of a right-wing kook in a lot of ways, but I admire his take on gaming (the BROSR). Johnson points out that 1:1 time is the best way to play D&D, and that it is how Gygax. et. al. played back in the day. The game world calendar is connected to the real-world calendar (i.e. a week of time in the game world is the same as a week of time in the real world). This allows for the possibility of multiple parties of adventurers all moving around in a world with a greater sense of verisimilitude. I would also allow for more people playing in different character configurations and groupings. It all works in my head, but I haven't ever run a campaign world this way before. 

As I wrote previously, C&C isn't well supported on Roll20, although they are releasing updated stuff on Foundry. I am not very keen to learn a new VTT, but I may end up doing so, or just running a less detailed game on Roll20 (like no rollable monster tokens). I'm not sure, but this is where my head is at on this cold January 6th.