Campaign Breakdown & Update The Cataclysm & The War of the Lance The current year for our homebrewed Dragonlance campaign is set during 381AC. Inspired By Trampas Whiteman

You know, I've bounced around campaign settings from Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, Ravenloft and other settings . . . basically lost. I've been out of the game for many of years and trying to make a return to the game has been a struggle for me. My initial return landed me in 5th edition, thinking, well, I might as well jump on what is current so I can find players easier - this was a HUGE mistake. This was corrected quickly by my move to Old-School Essentials. I am so thankful I made this move and don't ever plan on leaving it.

Agree with me or not, I just cannot bring myself to play that WOKE ass 5th edition and simply cannot see me running games under the WotC/Hasbro umbrella. Nope, not gonna do it. Nope, not gonna discuss it. If anyone feels like I should have to explain myself then just go read this because I can't explain it any better than how it is written on that news post.

The World of Greyhawk has been my home in the past for many years which in itself is a problem. I've played and ran games in that setting for so long, it just doesn't feel special to me like it used to and then I looked at Dragonlance. I think Dragonlance is closer to my heart than any other setting simply because of all the memories I have from reading the massive amount of books it has. It is not an easy setting to run campaigns in because it does not have many adventures printed for it, but I cannot deny that my love for Krynn is enough to pull me back home so, with that being said, lets get into this shall we?

First off I want to make clear that the only information covered in this blog is what is directly going on in my current campaign. The only locations and regions that you will find covered here are what my players characters are currently within or have explored in the past so over time more and more content will come to this blog but for the moment it will be rather sparse with information.

In my opinion, Dragonlance is "meant" to be ran using OSR rules, "in my opinion of course", it just has that classic fantasy feel unlike settings like Forgotten Realms, Exandria and such where it just feels like the settings are over powered. It's hard to explain but the older D&D players will understand what I am "trying" to say.

This will be a live tabletop game played around a table. We have three core players, two of which are local players and the third lives in Florida so we will bring him into the game via Webcam/Discord/Roll20. Everything you need to know about our upcoming campaign can be found here.

I want this campaign to be played every other Saturday, It is possibly we may have some Friday nights added to this schedule . . . "possibly". The thing is, with me being out of the game for close to twenty years, this is bound to start off a little rusty but I have never ran a serious campaign in Krynn so the excitement is starting to kick in for me. I really want to throw myself into this one and try to develope a deep story for my players.

We will be using a modified Old-School Essentials Advanced Fantasy for our core set of rules and will be using the AD&D rules as needed. We considered using Advanced Dungeons & Dragons but the more I read on Old-School Essentials Advanced Fantasy the more I fell in back love with this game system. We will also have a few house rules added to our system of rules but not a lot. I think most of these house rules will be more about quality of life rules than anything.

I am more excited about this campaign than you know. I do know this will be a lot of work especially on my part but overall I think the entire experience will be enjoyable for myself as well as my future players. Stay tuned in for future news and updates.

Shedding Light on WotC & D&D The Cataclysm & The War of the Lance The current year for our homebrewed Dragonlance campaign is set during 381AC. Inspired By Trampas Whiteman

Recently, I watch this video from "Diversity & Dragons" and I never realized it was "this" bad. He might be a smaller content creator but he spits pure facts in this video.

This guy touched on a lot of stuff he pulled from Twitter and one thing I want to make clear, all of these people I am about to highlight are affiliated with Hasbro/WotC in one form or another . . . some are editors, writers, executives and content creators. They publically say stuff that is pure racist and WotC/Hasbro lets them get away with it, and as a matter of fact Hasbro/WotC does its best to go along with these people and what they say. It's disgusting and embarrassing. It's bad enough with how WotC/Hasbro tried to redo the OGL to screw everyone over, sure they backed down but only because the entire community rose up against them and forced them to back down. It's just sad how this game has went down the toilet.

These are just a few of the tweets that were found on Twitter. Dominique Dickey posted a couple of tweets here and here. How much of a racist can someone be?

Then you have Sadie Lowrie who assisted as a writer for Call of the Netherdeep making tweets like this. I send her a tweet asking her about her tweet and this is the reply I got from her. Instead of explaining herself, she blocks me. Typical racist hiding from what she has done. The exact same thing happened with Sarah Madsen . . . when I sent her a tweet about these tweets that she made and I got another reply just like I got from Sadie Lowry.

Lets look at Makenzie De Armas with her tweet or how the one and only Christopher Perkins tweeted this and to think, it pretty much all started with this from Kyle Brinks. Now the latest news is WotC is saying they are removing the Half Elf and Half Orc races or half ANYTHING from D&D because it's racist. It's just gotten out of control. I have been playing Dungeons & Dragons since it was called Basic D&D, hell . . . even before Basic, back when it was called Chain Mail and I've never been this dusgusted with a game, it's people and it's company than I am right now.

Sure, myself and my group had originally planned to get into 5th edition D&D . . . until now. With that being sad, I want to make one thing perfectly clear, I'll never buy another product from WotC. I simply cannot handle everything that is going on with the current state of Dungeons & Dragons right now. You know . . . back when we played classic edition Dungeons & Dragons, we didn't have all this drama, it was all about the game and we had one community that stuck together. It's simply not like that anymore. This game is a mess. We are now 100% an Old-School Essentials Advanced Fantasy gaming group.

Welcome to our Dragonlance Campaign The Cataclysm & The War of the Lance The current year for our homebrewed Dragonlance campaign is set during 381AC. Inspired By Trampas Whiteman

Hello everyone. The old man is back to ramble one last time. I have a few folks that actually follow my gaming blogs so I figured it might be time to do a post and give an update on everything. Yes, I know ... I've been gone for a while and for that I am sorry but I've had a "lot" of various medical problems since last November that I will not get into right now but I am on the mend thankfully so I thought I would dive into something to suck up some of my free time. During this downtime a few things have changed, not by chance of course, but it's just been one speed bump after another. This will all be covered in a new post shortly.

This campaign idea was thought up several years ago but one thing after another came up and delays just kept slowing us down. We had a solid six player group going but one got married and went *poof*, another got a new job which took him out of state and the third just dropped but I have retained my oldesat core three players that have been with me from the start. Well, as you all know, Covid hit and that shut us down for close to 18 months.

Last year my father caught Covid and we almost lost him but I am happy to say he is doing fine now. The on top of all that I had some pretty serious medical problems kick in which I am pleased to say . . . I am on the road to a full recovery. It still might be June or July of 2024 before I am able to fire this thing up. So, yea . . . it's been a rough last couple of years for us.

During all of this I had decided I was going to take a break from Dungeons & Dragons just to take a break from it all. I can say first hand, it is super hard staying motivated with gaming when you've had a couple of years like we have all had but I can now see the light at the end of the tunnel and the excitement has started to kick in.

Now on to the campaign description. I've been doing a lot of thinking about what I wanted to do with this campaign and one thing I knew for sure is when myself and my group started back playing I was going to give them the best campaign I could create. I ended up deciding to go with the Dragonlance campaign since it pretty much works perfectly with the Old-School Essentials game system. The decision was made that we leave 5th edition. I'll make a new post covering this decision later but just know a lot of things has happened with the current state of Dungeons and Dragons which has left a bad taste in our mouths and it's time for a change.

This campaign is a long time in the making because for a long time I simply did not know what campaign setting I wanted to run my games in and trust me, it was a hard decision since I had been out of the game for so many years. In the end I decided the world of Krynn was where I would return to since it is the setting that I had lived in since the beginning of my D&D days way back when it first released. I am sure this will be a challenge to make sure non of the canon story is stepped on.

I'll be starting this campaign off with a short one-shot adventure. I will be doing recap vlogs over each session once they complete and adding them to this blog. I'll also be doing a hand written journal covering each session which will also be posted on this blog. This opening one-shot will be an ice breaker, letting the players begin to learn to work together as well as let me knock the dust off of my game mastering skills.

One of the main reasons that I chose the Dragonlance setting was because out of all of the campaign settings that are available this one just seems the most down to earth high fantasy setting from them all. It was created back when people actually had love for the game. People weren't worried about what color skin the players had or making sure you had . . . ugh before I get on a long drug out rant I'll just say, classic D&D was and "is" the purest form of D&D and I do not want to leave it. One thing that does bother me about Dragonlance is . . . no orcs, no drow, not really known for having epic dungeon crawls . . . it also has very few adventures published for this setting that don't rinse/repeat the Dragonlance novels so this will be a challenge with the amount of homebrewing I see ahead of me plus having to be super careful not to step on any established lore, history or stories from the novels.

At this time this campaign will be ran live around a table. We currently have three core players. Joe will be playing a Human Ranger, Joseph as a Dwarven Fighter and Jennifer as a Human Cleric. We hope to pull in two other locals to the group to round us off at five players. We are still working on this.

Ready, Set, Go! The Cataclysm & The War of the Lance The current year for our homebrewed Dragonlance campaign is set during 381AC. Inspired By Trampas Whiteman

I have some things that I would like to touch on with those of you that are first time readers on this blog. The first thing that I kind of want to get into is what many call the "Matt Mercer Effect". I think one thing we all can agree on is Matthew Mercer is ranked in the top level of Dungeon Masters. The man knows his stuff, but it isn't just about Matthew, his players bring a huge part of what makes Critical Role special to the table. To quote an old saying ... "it takes two to tango", or in this case, it takes a Dungeon Master and a group of players to make a game special.

As you can see by this blog, I plan to run my own personal Dragonlance campaign setting based off of a lot of ideas of my own but still keeping with the overall story from the novels. I don't want to focus on specific things that are canon to this setting from the past, but instead I want to focus on my own idea for a new campaign. For the most part I want to keep this setting as close to canon as possible but from our starting point forward, I am sure things will start to ease into homebrew.

One thing I very much want to emphasize on is "I am not Matthew Mercer" and if you expect me as a Dungeon Master to be like Matthew Mercer then I would say "go find you another campaign to follow" because I am not on his level, nor will I even try to be and to be perfectly honest I am not sure if the world has a Dungeon Master that even comes close to his level of story telling "well maybe but I have yet to see one". I try to run a good game where my players have a good time (plain and simple) and in the past my players have all had a great time so I guess I am doing something right.

Critical Role is a staged game, with some scripting involved - Matthew and his players are all voice actors. When you watch his campaigns, this is not what Dungeon & Dragon games are really like. His campaigns are strictly constructed to bring entertainment to his viewers.

Next thing I would like to talk about is this campaign and how it will be ran. At the time of me writing this post, I have just started working on this campaign setting and this blog will still be a ways down the road before it really takes off so if you plan to follow us, please be patient. We have always ran classic 1st edition AD&D and up until recently when we jumped into 5th edtion "huge mistake", but . . . things have changed that have sent us back to classic, specifically . . . Old-School Essentials Advanced Fantasy that you will read about above in another post.

About this Pandemic going on ... yea, it has really screwed a lot of things up in the world and also in my life. I will not go into detail about my personal life being affected by Covid-19 "yes, I have had it twice" but it had affected my work schedule "before I medically retired", and my free time and socializing with friends and family "just like I am sure the same has happened with many of you". It's just part of life and I will find ways to work around it where my tabletop gaming is concerned.

This campaign will have a set of house rules in affect that will be imported into the Old-School Essentials Advanced Fantasy rules, not many but a few. They are pretty generic and can be applied to pretty much any edition. Anyone that might think they are interested in joining us in future games should check this page out and everything about the campaign we are currently playing will be located on this page. Stay tuned, much much more is coming!