But suddenly I felt the desire to reopen this creaky trapdoor. John Arendt (formerly known as Beedo) has been recently posting again on his Dreams in the Lich House blog. (Ironically, he has also moved from B/X to 5e.) And I figured, I have this blog and it doesn't have to be limited to the one campaign, so why not use it? I haven't stopped playing D&D and this blog was never meant to be solely a campaign journal.
As my Curse of Strahd campaign nears the end (the party just hit level 9 and has one last area to explore before they tackle Castle Ravenloft and the vampire Count Strahd himself) my thoughts turn the next campaign. I'll probably offer the group a vote on a selection of the 5e hardcover adventures, but I've also been giving a lot of thought to running a very free-form, sandbox style campaign in the Forgotten Realms. Since we would be using the 5e rules, I'd probably set it in the "current" era of the Realms (1489+ DR) but increasingly, I've been attracted to the idea of leaning most heavily on the original AD&D (1e) Forgotten Realms Campaign Set as a baseline, and using later materials (including 5e material) on a pick-and-choose basis. One of my issues with the Forgotten Realms has always been the immense amount of materials available for it. It's a double-edged sword. On the one hand, this is a major attraction of the Realms, that so much of the world building has been done for you and you can let your players just roam around and it is easy to just wing it using the existing materials. On the other hand, all this material (and the history of "Realms-shaking events") tends to pile up and become a tangible weight on the setting. With so many demigodlike NPCs walking around, is there really room for adventuring? So I like the idea of rolling back all that cruft and leaving it as a "what if" or a "maybe it happened that way, who knows?" Rather than have Elminster be an immortal and nearly omniscient demigod and the Chosen of Mystra, I'd rather have the players meet Elminster the eccentric sage who is more concerned with his project to comprehensively catalog the butterflies of the ruins of Myth Drannor than in saving the multiverse from the latest and greatest apocalypse.
But we'll see! Maybe I'll even find a place on the map of Faerûn to plop down the city of Idalium. We never did explore too much of the world outside the city.
If I end up going ahead with the sandbox campaign idea, I might use this blog to post some world-building ideas as I put together my version of the Realms. In the meantime, I'm planning on posting a couple of the new monsters I created for the Idalium campaign. And maybe (no promises) I might be able to catch up on some of the Idalium campaign journals. Writing full journals is a bit of a time sink, and I might do these (as well as any future journals) in a more abbreviated format. It would be nice to have closure of the campaign for the handful of loyal readers that I did have.
I will miss Idalium. I have had two different campaigns die off due to the pandemic, so I get it.
ReplyDeleteIn all honesty, I was just about running out of material on the dungeon levels that I had mapped and keyed. I had some ideas for the next level, but no detailed designs yet. And we were starting up the Curse of Strahd campaign and I was excited to focus on that. (And that has been a fun campaign!)
DeleteGlad you saw the update to the blog. I'm going to try to catch up and finish the campaign reports, just for some closure. Probably in abbreviated form, if I can suppress my natural verbosity. :-)
Hoping to use this blog more often to talk more generally about D&D stuff.