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Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tav_Behemoth" data-source="post: 4785326" data-attributes="member: 18017">Too bad we missed you, jaerdaph! If you're back in town at any point & looking for some old-school gaming, check out the New York Red Box site in my sig and see if there's anything scheduled when you're around - if not post & we'll try to get a session together then.It seemed like a good time was had by all. Here's my own experience:One of the best moments of the gameday for me was right at the beginning as we were getting set up; a player in Brad's epic 4E game was telling me that in his gaming history, Arneson had been much more influential than Gygax because his group had stuck with Basic/Expert/C/M/I and played in Mystara. I asked whether they'd done a lot of wilderness adventuring and he said yeah, they'd used all the rules that the Compendium had to offer. Building baronies? I asked (enviously) and he said yeah, because a stronghold was always his character's highest priority when he got to the right level. All of this sounded like a ton of fun!I'd always seen the Arneson -> Basic / Gygax -> Advanced split cynically, simply an artificial result of a sad litigious schism in TSR's history rather than a real stylistic branching. My own experience was dominated by AD&D from pretty early on, so it was interesting for me to realize that Arneson's influence was actually much better preserved on the Basic side of things. I'd known in an abstract way that Blackmoor remained a supported part of the BECMI Mystaran setting, but never made much of it - it's there on the map of Greyhawk too, and in First Fantasy Campaign Arneson redrew his map to let you stick Blackmoor adjacent to the Wilderlands as well. More than that, the elements that stand out in FFC - overland travel, clearing territory for strongholds, overseeing baronies, leading armies - are also strongly prominent in BECMI. (It might well be that Gygax devotes just as much space to these things in AD&D, but does so in a way that I and most people I played with missed it in amongst everything else).I had to leave to take my son to a birthday party in the middle of the afternoon, so we played my Blackmoor hex-crawl for the first half of the gameday. Character creation was simplified to choosing class (warrior, magician, believer), alignment (law, balance, chaos), and species. I made six races available to PCs, one for each type of terrain on the encounter chart - cleared lands/castles (robots), rivers (animals), mountains (fighting men), swamps (fairies), forests (wise women), and deserted lands (elves). The final stages of character creation were for everyone to pick a magic item - coolest might have been my son's Flying Boat, because he made an awesome Lego interpretation of it & was always eager to use it in every situation - and a miracle (believers), spell (magicians), or power (warriors). The Miraculous Blizzard of Fireseeds spell got the most mileage, being used from everything from freezing a water weird to the contemplated vaporization of a water elemental. I think the stripped-down, tri-color Lego-based system I used for this has promise, although spending more time on the Lego tactical scale with the whole party taking minute-long actions would have been satisfying; most of our play time was spent at the strategic scale, where the rotating caller takes two-week-long turns exploring ten-mile-wide Heroscape hexes. And certainly, it was a blast to experience the results of the First Fantasy Campaign maps, ideas, and outdoor adventuring charts that we were using this system to run.After I left to drop off my son, Jon took over with Fane of the Toad. When I rejoined the group, we had two assassins, a monk, and an elf adventuring as a magic-user, so I made a cleric of Law to serve as the monk's spiritual advisor and political officer.Using speak with plants, we learned that a group of feet had walked over the roots leaving the Fane three days ago, and that the last time this happened the feet returned three days later bringing more feet with them. So we decided to set up an ambush at the entrance to the temple, and used speak with animals to feed some birds and convince them to warn us of approaching humans. With these preparations, the elf's sleep spell, and a pair of successful assassin's strikes from hiding, we had no problem putting down the six batrachian spearmen and rescuing their captives. To our chagrin, one of the things we thought was a captive was actually a frog-mummy they were leading on a rope. Fortunately, everyone hit by the mummy made their saving throws, and although we largely lacked the magic weapons we'd need to harm the thing, my Bishop Patmoss was able to make it flee from the sight of the cross.We ended the session with both the mummy and the cultists tied up and awaiting further disposition. We used ESP and detect evil to extract a fair amount of information, but ran out of time before we could act on any of the plans we came up with. Another session is being planned to continue our exploration of the Fane, so the gameday has inspired at least one continuing celebration of Arneson's legacy!</blockquote>

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