Well, here we go again.
It’s been over a whole month since my
last expedition through the Story Hour forum ended, a trek that took the better part of three years to complete. Since then I’ve been tinkering with a few novels (one new, one I’d started in 2001), but neither has really fully satisfied
the itch.
Heh, mostly I guess I’m just addicted to the reader feedback I got on my earlier tales. Over nine hundred mostly-positive posts from readers in the
Shackled City thread blew my head up to a severely swollen level that was beginning to recede of late.
So I just got the
Rappan Athuk Reloaded boxed set in the mail a few days ago, and naturally as I read I started getting story ideas. I’d heard a lot about the Dungeon of Graves, naturally, and even read most of the first installment in a bookstore shortly after it came out (back then I had almost no money, so actually
buying RPG products was a difficult proposition). Seventy-five dollars is still a lot of scratch for me, but when I saw that Amazon had the boxed set on sale for $47 (with free shipping to boot!), I went ahead and decided to get my hands on this classic.
Like my previous stories, this one is entirely fiction, although rooted in the D&D 3.5e rule system. If you are looking for a more conventional campaign write up, you should look elsewhere at the many excellent summaries posted in this forum.
The “set up” for this story borrows from one used in a classic module from back in the ol’ 1e days. I’m sure veterans of that era will recognize the source of the plot device I used.
This mod is pretty much a big dungeon crawl, so I’m going to write it in a somewhat different style than I used for
Travels and
Shackled City. I don’t have a goal in mind (in fact, I’m still only a few levels into the module itself), so in a way I’ll be discovering what the dungeon has to offer as my characters do. I may end up skipping over a lot of stuff and focus on what I find most interesting, but most of what’s here should be quite familiar to fans of
RA.
I’m not going to commit to an update schedule at this point, as I’ve got a vacation coming up and I’m not sure how quickly this story will start moving. If you like what you see here, let me know; reader feedback has always tended to motivate me to write more.
A Rogues’ Gallery thread will follow next week. I’ll post more about the character creation scheme I used there.
Thanks to all past readers for their support. I hope you enjoy the tale.
LB
And yet another word from our sponsors
