Month: November 2022

Castles & Crusades Diary: Barrowmaze, Sessions 124-130

/ PhilosopherZ / 1 Comment

It’s been a while since my last game diary! Why? Well, at some point you can see the campaign is coming to an end and you begin to get excited for the new campaign that is coming up. A lot of my time switched to prepping for the upcoming Aufstrag campaign.

However, over the last six sessions, the players:
– completely destroyed the Cult of Orcus
– slaughtered evil Trolls working in the service of the Orcus cult
– brought the end to Minos the Minotaur Key-Master of Nergal
– killed the Barrow Wight Rorteb Meerab, former high priest of Nergal and the person responsible for corrupting Dhekeon “the Disgraced.” Dhekeon is a skeletal warrior and a former paladin who has been with the party since 2019 working to redeem himself for the sins of killing a group of paladins, their leader, and his actual brother after he fell victim to Rorteb’s promises of power.

But now we are at the point when I need to return to writing up game diaries again, for the end is near.

The party has only two areas left to explore in the Barrowmaze. After exploring 375 rooms and more than 500 sub-rooms over 3 years and 8 months and 130 game sessions, they are now about to enter either (i) the chamber of Ossithrax Pejorative, who they are aware is some type of undead dragon lurking in what was once, ages ago, the Grand Temple of Nergal; or (ii) seek out the Tablet of Chaos and its Keeper and destroy it once and for all and free the Duchy of Aerik of centuries of chaos that has soaked into the landscape. What order they choose to do (i) or (ii) is up to them.

I was so excited to prep the last two game sessions, for I was hoping to do one session for Ossithrax and another for the Tablet of Chaos (but if they run over then they run over, for you don’t want to rush the finale!).

But as that was about to happen I tested positive for Covid! Luckily, I am vaccinated and double-boosted, so after a couple of days of fever, headache, fatigue, and sore throat, the acetaminophen/paracetamol, and ibuprofen kicked in and I am recovering, however, some of my gamers are immunocompromised so we are going to wait about two weeks before we reconvene for in-person gaming. Some might say “why not go back to Discord gaming?” But I will be honest, I ran two C&C games on Discord during the worst of Covid in 2020 and 2021 and my games suffered as a result (I rely heavily on theatre-of-mind, physical props, and ambient music, VTTs just can’t reproduce my style of GMing). No, face-to-face games are vastly superior and I do not want to go back to online gaming for the final two sessions of a nearly 4-year campaign. So, I am now expecting to begin the final run of Barrowmaze adventures beginning the last week of November.

I hope my players are ready for an Undead Dragon, the Keeper of the Tablet, and all that lies in store for them in the final epic battles! The End is Near! “Life In Death!” (as the Church of Nergal says).

Let me leave you with some photos of what my game room looked like during the month of October.

Folklore in RPGs

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I find myself shifting further away from the common D&D monsters and seeking to reach further into folklore and revisit the original source material for modern monsters. In a previous post, I looked at kobolds. But since then I have felt the need to revisit many more of the common D&D monsters such as Goblins, Trolls, and Bugbears, for example, and I am planning a soft-reboot of many of these creatures in my Castles & Crusades campaigns.

But if you were interested in doing this, where would you begin? A great starting point for anyone in D&D seeking to bring in more folklore to their campaign, are the Codex Mythological books that Troll Lord Games have published (written for Castles & Crusades but they fit into D&D with minimal effort). The author, Brian Young, has a Masters in Arthurian Studies and is working on his Ph.D. in Celtic Studies, so he has a good grasp of much of this material.

There have been other good sources you can find from other companies. Pendelhaven has some unique takes on Faerie-Tale Myths, Izegrim recently published Twilight Fables exploring folklore and mythology (available in both D&D5E and OSR formats), and Rackham Vale by Crowbar Creative is another great resource inspired by the art of Arthur Rackham.

Sometimes all you need are non-gaming books to inspire you with tales and art, and Brian Froud’s Faeries is a good example.

Let me revisit the kobold, I find the visual and narrative presentation given by Froud in Faeries, Twilight Fables, and Pendelhaven’s books to be far more interesting than either the dog-like kobolds from 20th c. D&D, or the lizard creatures from 21st c. D&D. In a case like this, going back to their medieval heritage and then from that place in time giving them a new twist is more fun and exciting for me. D&D has been around for nearly 50 years and I think it has become too self-referential, I want something fresh and new, and sometimes going to the original sources of modern D&D creatures you find new resources to mine, and sometimes the old stories are even more interesting than the modern ones we have come to learn.