I need a good non-D&D fantasy campaign

[jdrakeh]

AEG made some pretty good 3Ed & 3.X products, of which I have several sourcebooks. They happen to be having a sale on their PDFs. Considering your needs, Adventure 1, Adventure 2, The World’s Largest City & World’s Largest Dungeon books would be pretty handy, as would the Accordlands books.

DriveThruRPG

preview.drivethrurpg.com

Warlords of the Accordlands was different enough from standard D&D that it might worth a look. You'll have to be careful praising World's Largest Dungeon, though, or you may give a certain developer a stroke.

 

[Jd Smith1]

I second WFRP 4e. I played WFRP in the late 80s and just started a campaign that mixes the Enemy Within with the various Ubersreik adventures. But if you don't want to run it because you have players who may be familiar with it, how about:

Swords and Wizardry. OD&D Clone, cleaned up and somewhat modernized. Lots of setting an adventure material for it in FGG's Lost Lands series.

Dungeon Crawl Classic. Not really low magic, but magic is dangerous and unpredictable. Goes to 10th level. The system and adventures have an old school weird fantasy feel.

If you want a very rules light system, you might find Index Card RPG (ICRPG) interesting. But from your other threads, you seem to like more crunchy combat with VTT battlemaps. ICRPG isn't the game for that.

If you are going to be kit bashing anyway, check out Cortex Prime. You could build your own flavor of fantasy campaign. While cortex favors a more narrative style play, there is a rich tactical element through how your build your dice pools. With Cortex Prime you have a great deal of latitude on how crunchy you want to make it.

Interesting. I've got my system and setting.

 

[aramis erak]

[snip of list of systems, not campaigns]

I suspect he's planning to run whatever the campaign is under his favored system, Zweihänder.

The WFRP Doomstones campaign isn't great Warhammer, but it's what happens when a decent D&D campaign gets reworked for WFRP 1e... and it's in PDF on Drivethru.

The Great Pendragon Campaign is awesome, but has some issues that may make it less than suitable - specifically KAP's presumption of one adventure per year - for adaptations. The Paladins campaign is, like Pendragon, one per year, and uses the Pendragon engine.

Jackals has a campaign as well - Fall of the Children of Bronze, which is 14 adventures across 9 years. I've yet to run it, but I've read it and it's pretty good as a read; the setting, however, is not detailed there, being in the other two books of the game. The system is a BRP derivative, but with significantly more generous damage rules and strongly tied to its bronze age Levant setting with the names changed. The E-Books are all on Drive Thru.

 

[Jd Smith1]

I suspect he's planning to run whatever the campaign is under his favored system, Zweihänder.

actually going with Hackmaster 5th, another one I like.

 

[MNblockhead]

Interesting. I've got my system and setting.

Ah, sorry. Read too quickly. I would suggest looking at some of the large setting and adventure books by Frog God Games. I'm not familiar with Hackmaster, but if it is an OSR game, you could get the S&W version of the FGG material and it should be easy to convert on the fly.

They have adventures and settings for a variety of styles. There are over 120 adventures and setting running from short adventure modules and 600+ page books.

• Adventures and Tehuatl (Mayan/Amazon inspired theme)
• Adventures in the Borderland Provinces + The Borderland Provinces setting book (good for more sandboxy, bog-standard fantasy medieval fantasy game)
• Bards Gate (large city setting with some adventures, also a separate
• City of Brass (very large adventure and setting book that eventually take you to the City of Brass and its surrounds, you don't have to play it all the way through if you want to avoid higher levels (the revised S&W has rules up to level 20 and City of Brass eventually gets into the highest levels)
• Cyclopean Deeps. Set of two books, each hundreds of pages. Underdark style weirdness.
• Grand Duchy of Reme. A setting book. Has Rohan (from Lord of the Rings) vibes with some horsemen nomad clan elements
• Rappan Athuk. Megadungeon
• Razor Coast. Island hopping, pirate flavor. More early age of sail era fantasy
• Sea King's Malice. I don't own this one. I believe it is underwater based.
• Stoneheart Valley. Solid adventure path in a more contained area. Would be good to pair with Bard's Gate. More bog-standard fantasy.
• Tegel Manor. Remake of the classic 1977 Judges Guild haunted house and surrounding area. Can be run as a shorter campaign. I like it, but there were some issues with the maps.
• The Blight. Massive city state setting, higher level tech than typical fantasy. Grim dark: rotten, urban, degenerate city. Adventure path to uncover plots and threats from extraplanar incursions
• The Northlands Saga. Viking era inspired.
• Or you can just buy the Lost Lands setting book and a bunch of shorter adventures and piece together your own campaign from that.

 

[aramis erak]

Ah, sorry. Read too quickly. I would suggest looking at some of the large setting and adventure books by Frog God Games. I'm not familiar with Hackmaster, but if it is an OSR game, you could get the S&W version of the FGG material and it should be easy to convert on the fly.

HM4 is, kind of - it's essentially AD&D 1e on steroids with a different skill system bolt on, an attribute climb bolt on, and a number of other bits bolted on. Which strongly implies it to not be OSR... as it's even more convoluted rules than AD&D 1E.
HM5 isn't OSR. It's a modernized skill driven game in the D&D-Dungeon Fantasy genre... a near complete redesign, since their license to the AD&D 1e/2e engine was no longer in force.
Aces and Eights is a related design to HM5, but drops the class-based elements.
They all have some appeal to some persons who like certain portions of the OSR...
... and can readily use OSR adventures with convert-on-the-fly approaches.

 

[Jd Smith1]

HM4 is, kind of - it's essentially AD&D 1e on steroids with a different skill system bolt on, an attribute climb bolt on, and a number of other bits bolted on. Which strongly implies it to not be OSR... as it's even more convoluted rules than AD&D 1E.
HM5 isn't OSR. It's a modernized skill driven game in the D&D-Dungeon Fantasy genre... a near complete redesign, since their license to the AD&D 1e/2e engine was no longer in force.
Aces and Eights is a related design to HM5, but drops the class-based elements.
They all have some appeal to some persons who like certain portions of the OSR...
... and can readily use OSR adventures with convert-on-the-fly approaches.

I play both HM5 and A&8. Love the count-by-count system.

 

[Jd Smith1]

Ah, sorry. Read too quickly. I would suggest looking at some of the large setting and adventure books by Frog God Games. I'm not familiar with Hackmaster, but if it is an OSR game, you could get the S&W version of the FGG material and it should be easy to convert on the fly.

They have adventures and settings for a variety of styles. There are over 120 adventures and setting running from short adventure modules and 600+ page books.

• Adventures and Tehuatl (Mayan/Amazon inspired theme)
• Adventures in the Borderland Provinces + The Borderland Provinces setting book (good for more sandboxy, bog-standard fantasy medieval fantasy game)
• Bards Gate (large city setting with some adventures, also a separate
• City of Brass (very large adventure and setting book that eventually take you to the City of Brass and its surrounds, you don't have to play it all the way through if you want to avoid higher levels (the revised S&W has rules up to level 20 and City of Brass eventually gets into the highest levels)
• Cyclopean Deeps. Set of two books, each hundreds of pages. Underdark style weirdness.
• Grand Duchy of Reme. A setting book. Has Rohan (from Lord of the Rings) vibes with some horsemen nomad clan elements
• Rappan Athuk. Megadungeon
• Razor Coast. Island hopping, pirate flavor. More early age of sail era fantasy
• Sea King's Malice. I don't own this one. I believe it is underwater based.
• Stoneheart Valley. Solid adventure path in a more contained area. Would be good to pair with Bard's Gate. More bog-standard fantasy.
• Tegel Manor. Remake of the classic 1977 Judges Guild haunted house and surrounding area. Can be run as a shorter campaign. I like it, but there were some issues with the maps.
• The Blight. Massive city state setting, higher level tech than typical fantasy. Grim dark: rotten, urban, degenerate city. Adventure path to uncover plots and threats from extraplanar incursions
• The Northlands Saga. Viking era inspired.
• Or you can just buy the Lost Lands setting book and a bunch of shorter adventures and piece together your own campaign from that.

I have a setting, I'm using the Garweeze Wurld setting, also from Kenzer. You hit the nail on the head, though: if I can't find a lvl 1-15 product, I'll tweak individual scenarios into a central theme.

I've done that more than once. Cthulhu scenario have been duct-taped together to create a very satisfying campaign in the past.

 

[Autumnal]

A non-OSR possibility is Eyes of the Stime Thief, for 13th Agr. It presumes that game’s default setting, but it’s easy enough to move if you just say that living dungeons like the Stone Thief have recently entered the game world.

 

[Vaslov]

DCC Castle Whiterock is a megadungeon option. I suspect it could work well with the Hackmaster 5e system w/o too much fuss.

My own preferences tend to shy away from running megadungeons like that, though I do enjoy reading them for ideas. For my own table I am preparing to try out some of the Hyperboria 3e adventure modules. I'm leaning into starting with either The Anthropophagi of Xambaala or Taken from Dunwich and figuring out where to go from there based on how the game grows on its own. Hyperboria isn't for everyone as it sits firmly in the Aston Clark Smith "Fantasy with scifi elements" genre, though it is pretty easy to tone down the scifi stuff imo.