Brief Records - About This Blog

The purpose of this blog isn't really to craft a narrative, or make something of substance, or leave a compelling history. It's to keep a record of details, to leave the bones of our story, from session to session, as it plays out. Largely to help me remember the connective tissue from one play to the next.

I am running Greyhawk for my home table... My home table is my kids. We started about seven months ago, and have played anywhere from one to four sessions a month, of vastly varying lengths.

The parameters for the game have been very simple. We plan to play in Greyhawk, using only the original World of Greyhawk box set materials, from 1983. We're not adding in any of the Living Greyhawk, or any of the later base material. The idea is to build our own Greyhawk, using the information in the Guide and the Glossography as the base foundation, and working up from there. We do have the City of Greyhawk book, as well as the Temple of Elemental Evil, but we'll see if they ever come into play, and if so in what manner they appear.

We're using the marvelous Darlene map. To start, we sat down and looked over it. The kids decided to play in Ket. I then spent the better part of a week of evenings designing a bizarre, cultural-mishmash dungeon, which I've set about 18 miles as the hex flies northeast of Molvar, the northern-most border town in Ket, just below the mountain pass to Perrinland. After that, I put together a 30-mile-hex worth of six-mile-hexes, set into a crawl, devised a page of various factions (including two competing merchant factions), and copied encounter tables from the amazing Glossography, as well as computed 2 weeks of weather.

For rules, we're using Rules Cyclopedia, without "skills," with Weapons Mastery.

We use exclusively Theatre of the Mind, and Player Mapping. What this means is that I have a map behind the GM screen, and as the players progress through dungeon turns, moving through the dungeon, I give verbal descriptions to the mapper, who maps what they are seeing ("the wall runs thirty feet north, ten feet west, then twenty feet south. From there, it runs ten feet south-west, and that's all you can see..." that sort of thing).

We've been playing for months now, as I've said. The kids have delved to the third level of my dungeon (The Ziggurat of Golba-Zemnon, itself a product I'd like to one day polish and perhaps make available to the public). Getting that deep has involved more than 10 PC deaths (swinging blade traps, a hungry Rhagodessa, a bottomless pit, a Tarantella, a few unfortunate battles with zombie cultists...), numerous equipment purges, and one unfortunate real life example of losing two fully mapped layers, leaving the players themselves without a map (we justified it by saying the in-game mapper had dropped their map into a damp puddle on the third level).

On the way, the players helped a mad wizard retrieve his displacer beast and currently have his backpack in holding, planning to return it to him in Lopolla, the capital of Ket; have encountered a suspiciously rat-like man lurking in the corridors (a were-rat, maybe?), have rescued an unhappy Tusmit warrior from an enchanted mirror, and have discovered first hand the dangers of sleeping in an area of dungeon where you didn't know there was a secret door...

The party currently is a Cleric of Istus (in the Greyhawk Pantheon), named Iambred (1hp), a Dwarf named Lincoln, and a Magic-User named Uh-Oh (after Uh-Huh met a very quick and untimely demise).

They are all first level. As of yet, they have barely found anything worth taking in the dungeon... That is all about to change, however...