New year new same old me! Still thinking, reading, writing, and buying TTRPG stuff. I just love it all so much. Sometimes I think I like to read about it, and imagine with it, more than I actually like to play. Whatevah: everyone needs a hobby!
I haven't GMd in a few months, and while I miss the prep. and the direction running a game gives me, I also don't miss the prep. or the moronity of my players (just kidding; they are...not always morons). I'm getting pulled further and further into the Troll Lords sphere and the Castles&Crusades ecosystem, which I like a lot. Supporting this company actually makes me feel good: they are veteran owned, they give a massive 50% to veterans, they do all of their printing and manufacturing domestically, etc. Take my money, boys. Just take my money.
Their big campaign world is called Aihrde. I don't know if I've written about this before or not, but I don't love world-building. I like to have a module that gives me all of the people, places, and things so that I don't have to make them up on my own. I then string together disparate elements from a lot of sources, marinate it in my own imagination, and create campaigns and scenarios. I've always done it that way, going back to 1981. This particular world is very well imagined and deep. The author, Stephen Chenault, has been working on it for decades, so it's huge but not terribly well explored. C&C has a lot of modules (of middling quality, to be honest) but mostly this world is wide open. I am using their big 1-12 campaign module After the Winter Dark as my base, but I am going to expand on it in a lot of ways.
One thing I have been thinking about is 1:1 time, a concept brought to my attention by the Twitter terrorist Jeffro Johnson. He is quite a character; his book Appendix N: The Literary History of Dungeons&Dragons is a great read, as is How to Win at D&D. He is a bit of a right-wing kook in a lot of ways, but I admire his take on gaming (the BROSR). Johnson points out that 1:1 time is the best way to play D&D, and that it is how Gygax. et. al. played back in the day. The game world calendar is connected to the real-world calendar (i.e. a week of time in the game world is the same as a week of time in the real world). This allows for the possibility of multiple parties of adventurers all moving around in a world with a greater sense of verisimilitude. I would also allow for more people playing in different character configurations and groupings. It all works in my head, but I haven't ever run a campaign world this way before.
As I wrote previously, C&C isn't well supported on Roll20, although they are releasing updated stuff on Foundry. I am not very keen to learn a new VTT, but I may end up doing so, or just running a less detailed game on Roll20 (like no rollable monster tokens). I'm not sure, but this is where my head is at on this cold January 6th.
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