Where I've Been and Where I'm Going

 So, uhhhhh, anyone still there?  Hello?

Yes, I am aware that it's been a long time.  About three years by my calculations, which makes it very unlikely that anyone who used to read this blog still checks in.  That's not even taking into account the general shift of online content from the written word to video; I'm guessing blogs are somewhat deader these days than they used to be, but I still read and enjoy a bunch of 'em, and I still think it's where the best online content for older editions of D&D can be found.  Basically, I like to write and I don't have the discipline or work ethic to transition this stuff over to Youtube, so for the moment I'm back at it.

As for where I've been, let's just say it's been a tough few years.  Separated from my wife, who I'd been with for nearly 20 years. Met someone else who passed away quite suddenly just after we moved in together.  Met the love of my life (so far) while I was still messed up from that, and lost her as well...  Life has been kicking me in the balls a lot lately.  It's what life does, but these last few years have been harder than most.  I have a great son, a supportive family, a job in a library that I love, and awesome friends who I live with and I know will always have my back, so things aren't all bad.  But needless to say, gaming and blogging have taken a back seat to all of that.

Of course I've still been following developments with the game, reading blogs, watching videos, making plans.  I'm not particularly enthused by anything coming from Wizards of the Coast, although I am quite keen to dig into The Making of Original D&D: 1970-1977; that kind of historical material is pretty much the only way they'll pry any money out of me.  I've been watching the various scandals and RPG-related kerfuffles with wry amusement, but as usual I've kept my head down and stayed out of these things, except to talk about them with mates in real life.  All in all, I'm happy enough to have jumped off the new edition train as of 3rd edition.  I'd happily play later editions, but I can't see myself running them or buying the books.  I don't even want to run 3rd any more if I'm being honest.

It's all a moot point, because I haven't been running anything.  I have vague plans to do a quick wrap-up of my campaign that's been running since 1998, having transitioned from 2e to 3e.  But that involves rounding up a number of specific people, one of whom I suspect has very little interest in playing again.  But, if I can convince him to squeeze in 3 to 6 sessions for old times sake... It would be nice to tie off that loose end, and then maybe my other friends will stop pestering me for the answers to various long-standing questions...

Most of my efforts have been going into the planning stages for my next campaign and world, the one that I would like to run for the rest of my life.  I began this blog many years ago talking about "The Ultimate Sandbox", my plan to run a mega-setting that incorporates everything ever officially published for D&D into a kind of huge multiversal sprawl, where I would begin with Greyhawk and OD&D and gradually layer in rules and elements as they're introduced in various supplements.  Youthful hubris, basically, and indicative of my habit for taking on tasks too big to practically accomplish within a single lifetime.  I have more modest goals now, although along some similar lines.

The biggest difference with where I'm going is that I'm not planning on using any official settings .  I may include some smaller setting elements, such as cities and smaller wilderness areas.  I definitely want to include modules and adventures; my plan is to design a world where I can incorporate as much official D&D material as possible, but my own personal spin and a lot of original material as well.  I don't have much interest in running games set in Greyhawk or the Forgotten Realms any more, but I do have an interest in running a lot of the old classic modules, because we didn't do a lot of that when I was younger. (Tomb of Horrors, Ravenloft, Dungeonland, a little bit of Night Below... I think that's about all we had access to.)

So, inspired by Alexis of The Tao of D&D, who uses the real world for his campaign, I've decided to use Australia as my geographical basis.  I could bang out yet another fantasy map, drawing little mountains and trees and coastlines, and I'd enjoy the hell out of doing it... but I like the idea of using the real world and having geography and weather patterns that makes some vague sort of sense.  I'll probably flip it on both axes, so that north becomes south and east becomes west; there are various cliches I still want to play into, such as the "frozen north".  Not that Australia has much of a frozen north (more rain-soaked and windy...), but there's a lot of D&D and other fantasy material that assumes a northern hemisphere, and I do like to play into the tropes where possible.

I'll probably center play in Victoria to start, as that's the region I've lived my whole life.  That's where I'd cluster the adventures and material with an OD&D, BX, BECMI or 1st edition flavour.  Areas further out from that would have more of a 2e, 3e, 5e, or (god forbid) 4e flavour.  (Note: flavour, not rules.)  That would cover most generic fantasy adventures, those set in Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, Mystara, etc.  Your meat and potatoes D&D.  I have this idea to make the setting more like Dark Sun the closer you get to the country's "dead heart"; maybe instead of Uluru there's a weird monolithic thing there that warps magic and gives people psionic powers.  It would let me play with some D&D-as-Mad-Max vibes, which could be cool.  Mystara has a Hollow World, so that's probably a given.  Spelljammer, Ravenloft, and Planescape all exist as their own things, separate from the game world, so they're fairly easy.  Anything tropical probably goes in Queensland, and anything too culturally non-Western I'd shunt off into other worlds or continents, or maybe Western Australia.  For Eberron material, with its advanced magic-as-technology civilisation, I'm thinking that my world got to that level of advancement at some point in the past, before it was all destroyed in a big apocalypse (a good old post-apocalypse being the catch-all explanation for all sorts of D&D assumptions).  Maybe there's a "bottle city of Kandor" situation, where a pocket of that civilisation exists trapped somewhere, and maybe the PCs can get in but the inhabitants can't get out.  

It's definitely going to be a hodge-podge setting, and may suffer for that, but I do enjoy fitting those kinds of disparate elements together.  I'm also thinking of making it a part of the world's ancient backstory.  If the world is a hodge-podge of disparate D&D setting elements... why not lean into that?  Maybe there was some sort of cataclysmic, final war across all of creation, realities crashing into each other like in Jonathan Hickman's Marvel crossover Secret War.  And just as in that story, the final surviving world was a kind of smashed together conglomerate of everything that had gone before.  (Well, maybe not the final world; I'll still need places to sail Spelljammers to, as well as other planes and such... But close to it.)  I don't plan for it to be as patchwork as Doom's Battleworld from that story; many thousands of years will have passed since the creation to smooth things out.  And it may not be something the players ever know.  But I like it as an explanation for why my world is going to have all sorts of elements from different settings.

As for rules, I still plan on starting with OD&D, and gradually bringing in new elements and changing rules until I'm running AD&D 1st edition, or something resembling it.  I have some thoughts on how I can explain the changing rules, and also how I can give my players some agency in changing rules they may not like.  But I might tackle that in a future post.  The one aspect of the rules that I'm very keen on exploring is the use of 1:1 time.  As we all know, YOU CAN NOT HAVE A MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN IF STRICT TIME RECORDS ARE NOT KEPT etc. etc. take a bow, Gary. I've become kind of fascinated with what the guys over at the BrOSR have been doing with the game (a journey that started when I discovered Jeffro Johnson's blog).  Say what you will about their online personas (personally I find them quite funny), but they're doing things with the game that nobody else online was talking about before them.  I've no doubt other folks have been out there running things similarly for decades, but this is the first time I've seen it discussed, and it's clarified so many rules from AD&D that I always found mystifying.  So I want to try to run an open table, where campaign time runs at 1 real world day per game day, and the game is "always on" (i.e. players who want to will be doing downtime stuff between sessions).  I'm not sure how my players will like it; before this we've only really done the adventure path style of gaming, so they won't be used to it.  But I'm very jazzed to try it out and see what effect it has on how the game runs.

As for what I had been doing with the blog... I don't plan on continuing with the historical, product-by-product analysis.  Going back over that stuff, I find my understanding of OD&D and its supplements woefully inadequate, and I just want to scrap it all and start all over again.  I would do it better.  But I'm older now, and I don't have that kind of time.  Well, I do, but I want to use it more wisely, in developing my world and playing the game.  I've been going through OD&D again to figure out how I'm going to interpret various rules, and I'll no doubt tackle that as I go.

I have more to write about (three years of build-up!), but it's 4am here in the Antipodes as I type this, and I'm meeting my son for lunch for his 16th birthday tomorrow.  We might even talk some D&D (he's a very casual 5e player).  Responsibility dictates that it's time to polish this up, send it out, and get some sleep.  I don't know if anyone will read it, but writing it's been good for me.  I want to play and run more D&D, and while thinking and planning is great, there's nothing quite like getting those ideas out of your head, even in a scattershot manner like this.  It's good to be back.