Okay so I know I haven’t updated recently (no surprise there, right?), and I’m not 100% sure that I will very often in the future either. Currently we are playing Star Wars, and we’ve gotten a few sessions in so far. While I’d love to share character bios and what happened with the characters during their adventures (not to mention having a record of them somewhere), I’m just not sure I have the time to put into typing it all up these days. While Star Wars hasn’t been taxing in the prep department – I make a small handful of notes and I’m easily ready for five or six sessions – I have had other things taking my time and attention.
MMOs (I do pay for those with a monthly fee after all), a huge backlog of games otherwise (though it has been whittled down of late), writing novels with my wife, actually running my game (which does take up an entire day out of my week), working on my perpetually stalled RPG (that I plan to get back to soon). I find that I just don’t have the time to post here as consistently as I would like to.
So here’s my plan for the future just in case I don’t post again soon – I am just about to start working on the next campaign for my AD&D setting that will use events from the last campaign as a springboard. I will plan out everything that I can think to plan out ahead of time. I have a template that I have lined up in my head currently that I think will work for running a more sandbox based AD&D game so that the players can choose to go anywhere and deal with rumors and story hooks that I place in the game in whatever order that they choose.
Obviously this will be quite an undertaking, and I am looking at it as a bit of a spring project. My wife is taking a temporary teaching job that starts soon that may make it so that we don’t have a lot of free time to spend together for the next couple of months, so I may need something other than video games to hold my interest- so this project came to mind. It’s finite (I do have an end game planned for this in my head), so it won’t take forever, but it will probably take me a good three weeks or so to do, and that is me working on it while she is at work, working on her homework and such for college, and working on it after she goes to bed, with breaks here and there for video games.
We are actually not gaming for the next two weeks due to Spring Break, but it will also hopefully give me extra time to work on the campaign as well. Once it is done, I will run it, and while I am running it, I will have zero prep time needed because everything will already be plotted out for the most part. Now it may seem like I will have to railroad the players into doing what I want, so they follow my planned out campaign, but with how I am planning it, I won’t have to. Or at least, I hope it’ll work out that way (no matter what, I won’t railroad my players though).
At any rate the hope is to eventually get them to level 20 and have this be the campaign that the last one should have been. I know that since I am running the “epic quest” style campaign (ala Lord of the Rings) that I can only have so many sandbox elements in it, and that’s okay, at least those elements will be present this time. I do hope to one day just run the “episodic-never-really-ends-what’s-going-to-happen-this-week” style campaign (more like how Salvatore writes the Drizzt novels) that AD&D is really known for at some point as well. To be honest though unless I have two game nights, I’m not sure I could ever run one of those for years and years due to my need to play other game systems every once in a while (you know not to mention my own game system which will need playtesting).
Anyway I will get PC and NPC bios up when I start AD&D, but I am not sure that I will keep the posts updated with their week to week adventures. What I may do is post the adventure (which I will be trying to write out as a professional-level adventure) for download and post an overall idea of what my group did during the adventure. Right now, I am not 100% sure as to what will happen though, so don’t hold me to that. Either way I hope that this campaign comes out the way I want it to this time. This is me signing off for a bit.
Keep gaming and have fun!