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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ambrus" data-source="post: 2521756" data-attributes="member: 17691">I ran a historical fantasy Dark-Ages campaign set in the West Saxon kingdom in England in the year 511 AD. I picked this time period because it was, among a few other candidates, the period in which King Arthur is reputed to have lived. I based my ideas on two articles published in Dragon magazine #257. I even corresponded with the author by email for a bit. The twist was that the party was made up of first generation native Saxons, i.e. the bad guys. The weren't really bad though, they were just young Saxons intent on surviving and thriving in their native home. The Romans were long since gone from the island but their roads and ruins were still around, though the Saxons assumed they'd been built by giants. The campaign lasted for several years but the game had a lot of turn-around as several early players dropped out not quite realising what the campaign would be like I guess. Those who stayed however got into it and seemed to enjoy it quite a bit.As it turned out, the heroes never met King Arthur but only heard rumours about him. In the time frame of the campaign, he just didn't figure prominently. The PCs did encounter a few Arthurian characters, though they didn't necessarily realise it since I used their welsh names; Merlin, Taliesin and Sir Percival. The campaign started with a quest to escort a christian priest who was seeking an old Greek draft of the gospel of Saint Mark in the roman ruins that lay in Saxon territory. Later the story centered around a group of classic mythology dream spirits called the Oneiroi lead by their master and brother Morpheus. They'd been slumbering since the Romans abandoned the island but had been accidentally roused and were angry at having been forgotten.All in all, we had fun. The problem with a historical fantasy game is the work involved. Essentially, the difference between this kind of a setting and that of a published game world is that of reading versus research. A published game world requires you only to buy the book(s) and read them while a historical fantasy setting requires you to find the right history books, read them and then convert the material into notes, stats and a decent player handout so the players are on the same page. It was a lot of work for me. I read so many history books that I could have written a thesis on the subject of Saxon life. I drew my own maps of the islands with old city names and geographical features that have long since changed on the island. The player handout was about 15 pages IIRC. Another big hassle was the lack of published adventures for the setting, I had to create everything from scratch. Many of the classes also had to be shoe-horned to fit the setting (this was 2ed). If I were to try running the same thing now, I'd use 3ed, I'd consider using Monte Cook's new Iron heroes setting to better reflect the lower-magic setting and flip through Unearthed Arcana to consider some of the possible alternate rules provided.</blockquote>

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