It was over.
The five adventurers turned their backs on the twilight battlefield with its
scattered boulders and the great standing stone over an ominous burial mound, walking
back through the dark forests towards the slowly fading rainbow bridge which would
lead them out of the enchanted valley among the silent mountains. The
Inheritance which had eluded them all this time was safely contained, to be
gradually forgotten again by living men – or was the Inheritance the secret
they now held in their hands, as its new guardians?
A proper ending
to a long-running campaign is not something you see every time. Most attempts
at continuous games trail off, fall apart due to scheduling issues or a clash
of interests, stop in their tracks as the participants run out of ideas or
encounter an insurmountable roadblock, or are just replaced by newer and newer
ideas. The “full-length AD&D experience” as envisioned in the rulebooks is often
more ideal than practice. It is quite nice, then, that we could finish The
Inheritance, our latest game series, on a suitably high note. It is done –
and here are my reflections and findings about the experience.
 |
| Enchanted mountains |
Campaign
dynamics
Our campaign
lasted the better part of three years, running from October 2016 to September
2019, covering exactly 100 in-game days over 35 sessions. Our sessions grew
more scarce in the last year – scheduling issues, sure, but also the changing
nature of the adventures as the game flowed towards its finale. This is a
common pattern in campaigns I have been involved in: a relatively unfocused,
exploratory first phase; consolidation towards sub-objectives; and finally a
more straightforward resolution arc (with fewer, but individually longer game
sessions). Character power also contributes here: low-level adventurers must be
careful opportunists looking for openings where they may succeed, while mid-
and high-level ones can increasingly dictate the pace and enforce their will on
the game world. As it happens, the characters in our game were exactly name
level when we wrapped it up, going from 3rd to 9th at a rate
of approximately 4-5 sessions per level (with some setbacks due to dead
characters). This is faster than the Gygaxian standard, but at the frequency we
can meet and sit down to game, my relative generosity with XP made for a good
pace of advancement.
 |
| This is Bait |
This was also a
campaign which had chewed up all of the starting characters. I started out with
a common motivation for the party – a mysterious letter of inheritance they had
all received, promising riches and power in a ruined manor house. My idea was
to use this initial spark to establish a common party goal, create hooks for
further adventures, while allowing for complete freedom in reaching the clues
leading to the Inheritance proper. My original plan was derailed pretty
much instantaneously as the players followed an ad-hoc adventure hook
instead of the main course, then followed it up with a colossal blunder that
got them sold into galley slavery. Furthermore, the initial sequence of
adventures ended in disaster as all but one player character was unceremoniously
killed by a fireball under the ruins of Perladon Manor, a place of no
outstanding significance.
As a result, a
lot of the middle arc of the campaign was spent reorienting and finding our way
again. Ironically, this left the planned “rival NPC adventurer party” to pretty
much act unimpeded, and gather the magical geegaws required to obtain the
mysterious Inheritance for their own – essentially becoming the protagonists of
their own campaign until they were successfully (although not at all easily)
dispatched in the grand finale. This changed the campaign in ways I did not
foresee: it made it much longer (I originally expected it to end when the
character were around level 6 or 7), and refocused it fairly thoroughly. A “tentpole
dungeon” I envisioned for multiple forays as the campaign would progress, the tombs
beneath the Valley of Barzak Bragoth, never came into play, and was left as a vague
outline (if you ever play a campaign on Erillion, you can use Barrowmaze or a
similar dungeon in its place). Areas I thought would become important became
footnotes, while others gained significance. In the end, Erillion became a more
complex place for it – larger in scope and detail than I had envisioned, and
with a layer of unsolved puzzles which, in my mind, help establish it as a “real”
place. Some discoveries shall wait for a different group to solve!
As an important
aside, the party mostly lacked something usually taken for granted in D&D:
a cleric. The cleric characters who joined the group died or left, leaving a
constant need for non-magical healing. I employed a mixture of low-yield healing
options, from first aid rules to healing berries and natural rest, all treated
a little more generously than the rules tend to do, but turning hit points into
a more strategic resource. Likewise, the party never gained access to raise
dead spells (although it was not out of the question), and dead characters
were simply buried and replaced with new 3rd-level adventurers (6th-level
ones in the last stage of the campaign). This is not an entirely new
experience, as the concept had been germinating since our second Fomalhaut
campaign and the historical fantasy of Helvéczia, but it worked out
especially well. Modern D&D loses a lot from its long-term dimension due to
the abundance of player resources, and sometimes, even old-school D&D feels
overly generous when it comes to replacing spells and hit points. In this game,
the players often had to consider the hard choice between timed tasks (events
moving at their own pace if they didn’t act) and fully replenished resources,
and were often forced to operate at sub-optimal efficiency, particularly on
higher levels. This made the campaign more low-powered than the default, and
kept it challenging and tense to the very end.
 |
| The Isle of Erillion |
Adventures
and the campaign setting
As vanilla
fantasy does, Erillion was clearly inspired by the British Isles, a place I
only know from secondary sources (my one brief visit to London was a trip to a
strangely placeless global metropolis, and does not count). The mood of the
island was influenced by the idea of successive civilisations each leaving
their mark on territory before fading away, and leaving behind their ruins and
half-remembered legends. This is perhaps best captured by The Ruin, an Old English poem
wondering about what had once been, and which, along with the painting to the top of this post, gave me the initial spark for the
setting.
Of course, the
main texture of the adventures comes from 1st edition AD&D,
particularly the DMG and The Secret of Bone Hill (through a
Hungarian pulp fantasy series), and my aim was to capture that kind of
experience, to return to that particular brand of adventurer fantasy I had
always loved. I seeded my sandbox setting with adventures borrowed from the
classics library: Huberic
of Haghill became the main hub for the start of the campaign, Citadel
of Fire was used for “The Mage Tower”, a place where magic-users and
illusionists would go for their trials, and all three Giants modules
were placed in remote mountain locations of the map (the characters never found
G2, gave G1 a wide berth, and mistakenly entered the gates of G3, but fled once
they realised they were in over their heads). A few more modules, old and new,
were distributed in various locales. Bone Hill and Restenford could not be used
directly – every old-school gamer in Hungary knows it too well through those
novels to be of use – so I ended up paraphrasing them in The Mysterious
Manor (Echoes #01) and the city of Baklin (hopefully published early 2020),
places of my own creation.
I envisioned the
campaign as a mixture between hex-crawl-based wilderness exploration and
site-based dungeoneering and city adventuring. Somewhere along the way, I got infatuated
with smaller pointcrawls, and ended up designing multiple forest adventures
(and a large mountain expedition) in a “deep
wilderness sandbox”. Enchanted forests are not too commonly seen among
D&D adventures, and I liked the challenge of this unexplored domain. As it
turns out, they are very rewarding to construct and run using a combination of
trail maps and landmark-based navigation. In these adventures, the “dungeon
walls” are permeable (although increasing random encounter frequency, the
chance of being lost, and convenience tend to keep parties mostly on the
road), and finding a high observation point gives away, if not the full map, at
least some of its interesting features. Two examples of these adventures were published
as The Swine Lord and The Wandering Glade (in Echoes #02 and #06,
respectively); I can wholeheartedly recommend other people to try their hands
at making one – just describe your forest or swamp as a regular dungeon, and go
wild with it.
 |
| The Valley of Lost Graves |
How do you keep
a vanilla fantasy setting fantastic? My solution was to use a basic texture of
(relative) realism for most of the milieu, but keep plenty of hidden or distant
places as enchanted locales – sometimes what Moorcock described in Wizardry
and Wild Romance as “the exotic landscape”. If you stay in the well-trod
areas, you are in a world of scheming orcs, craven magic-users, feudal lords, Northman
raiders and ambitious merchants, but go off track, and you enter an unexplored
and mostly uncharted world of faerie enigmas, spatial anomalies, lost ruins and
shadowy forest realms, where mundane logic gradually gives way to the working
mechanisms of symbolism and uneasy dreams. One of the guiding concepts behind Erillion
was that civilisation mostly stuck to the coastal areas and a small road
network connecting mostly maritime cities, and civilisation could never really
make great headway further inland. The deep woodlands and forbidding mountains
of the island could contain entire pocket worlds far from human eyes. The key
to the experience was keeping alive this contrast – and gradually, letting the
players come close to the island’s deeper and more carefully guarded mysteries
where all bets were off.
For its small
size and self-contained nature (with about the land mass of Ireland), you can
put a lot of stuff in a sandbox of this scope. One of the things that informed
the campaign background was the variety of competing cultures and ideas, for
whom Erillion would be both meeting point and place of conflict: barbaric Northmen
raiders living in a combination of anarchy and petty tyrannies in an archipelago
of island kingdoms; the disintegrating Twelve Kingdoms, locked in a perpetual
civil war; the southern empire of Kassadia, the local equivalent of a Roman
Empire that never fell to outside invasion but effectively dissolved into competing
city states; and Erillion’s lost kingdoms, which had all left behind ideas and
legacies, however vague. I did not really think through all of these details at
the setting’s inception (the setting information was consciously almost all
bottom-up and adventure-derived), but the details emerged over play, and made
for a nice, cohesive whole, influencing internal divisions, and contributing to
the different feel of different parts of the island.
So what’s next beyond
Erillion? I still have two campaigns of variable frequency to run: Morthimion,
an OD&D dungeon; and Kassadia, a game set in the aforementioned
Roman/Italian setting. I also have plans outside D&D, for a Mini-Six (simplified
D6 Adventure) campaign set in a setting inspired by the Cherubion trilogy, my
favourite set of Hungarian science-fantasy novels (this is where the character
of Melan comes from), and featuring the clash of primitive and advanced
civilisations. As for Erillion, the paper folders now return to the bookshelf,
although some materials are still to be published in Echoes or elsewhere – and
we will see how it goes.
 |
| Drusus the Historian and Phil the Terror of Turkeys make a new friend |
Characters
(in order of appearance)
+Gadur Yir
(Gabor Izapy): half-orc Fighter 5. The only
survivor from the first party, Gadur Yir was resourceful, lucky, and sometimes
even up to the ideals set by Haldor, god of heroism… until he was cornered and
killed by Argul the Demented, an undead barbarian warlord buried beneath the
city of Baklin.
+Jonlar Zilv
(Kalman Farago): human Bard 4. He was petrified by
a cockatrice among the ruins of Perladon Manor.
+Harmand the
Reckless (Gabor Acs): half-orc Cleric 4 (of Zeltar,
God of Fortune). An adventurer in the classic sense, he sought risk and reward
in equal measure. He was eventually fireballed by Godfred Perladon in the
crypts beneath Perladon Manor.
+Einar
Sigurdsson (Istvan Boldog-Bernad): Northman Fighter
4. Einar’s origins as a sea wolf came handy after the company orchestrated a
slave uprising and took over the dragonship of Lady Geranith, a northern
princess. He would have become an able sea captain, were he not also fireballed
by Godfred Perladon in the crypts beneath Perladon Manor.
+Sufulgor
del’Akkad (Laszlo Feher): human Cleric 3 of
Kurlakum of the Seven Misfortunes. A truly wretched follower of an evil deity
with delusions of grandeur (“just call me the Master of the Night!”), his way
towards more substantial villainy was cut short during the siege of a homestead
ruled by a small clan of werewolves. Trying to save his skin, he offered his
cut-off nose and a terrible oath as a sacrifice to his deity, but it was of no
use, and he was torn apart by wolves.
+Elandil
Hundertwasser (Laszlo Feher): elf Cleric 3 of Irlan
the Merciful. Coming from “the forests of song and harp-music in the distant
West”, he made an instant impression with his flower-embroidered green cloak,
and sayings like “It is a great sorrow, that man may not become a flower”. He
was fireballed by Godfred Perladon in the crypts beneath Perladon Manor.
Drölhäf
Haffnarskørung (Kalman Farago): Northman Fighter/Thief
9. Coming from a culture best known on Erillion for raiding and indiscriminate
violence, Drolhaf (who earned his ümläüts over the span of the campaign) was a
civilised barbarian who even had “soap” listed on his character sheet. Serving
the interests of Gladuor, God of Aqueducts and human progress, he survived the
campaign, and joined the Knights of Jolanthus Kar to keep peace on the island.
+Franz Who
Wasn’t Even There (Laszlo Feher): human Illusionist
4. A talented “background player” who manipulated things from the back ranks
with 6 Hp, he was, eventually, flattened into a paste by a boulder trap in the
Singing Caverns.
Phil the
Terror of Turkeys: hobbit Thief 9. Using several
aliases (“Greg the Rat-catcher”, “Jan Quietstep”, “Uncle Philemon”, “Karl, the
Guardian of the Flower”), this jovial and portly-looking hobbit grew into a
frighteningly efficient killer by the end of the campaign, especially once he
got his hands on the ring of gateways (which gave him the ability of using dimension
door). He was also known for his love for mushrooms, which he knew very
well.
+Dawn of the
Southern Climes (Istvan Boldog-Bernad): elf Bard. His
name a poor translation of the much more flavourful “Délszaki Hajna”, he was
encountered in a valley known for an enchanted flower. On the way out through a
sequence of cavern passages, he was caught and strangled by a ghost.
+Balthasar
the Elf-bane (Istvan Boldog-Bernad): dwarf Cleric 3
of Haldor, God of Heroism. He was flattened into a paste by a boulder trap in
the Singing Caverns.
(+) Buck
(Laszlo Feher): half-orc Cleric 3 of Agak the
orc-god. A walking disaster instantly hated by the rest of the party, he saw
fit to retire after just one adventure. He was encountered much later as a much
more powerful NPC cleric in the orc fortress of Tol Grannek, and was defeated during
an epic battle at what would later be called Orc-Kill Pass, backstabbed by Phil
the Terror of Turkeys with a dagger carrying rock spider venom. Petrified, the
lifeless body of Buck was left as eternal reminder of the great slaughter.
 |
Drolhaf Haffnarskorung, Silver Olaf Thorvaldson and Armand the Scumbag
encounter suspicious barbarians on the Plateau of Faces |
Lafadriel Hundertwasser (Laszlo Feher): elf Fighter 9. An
armoured knight and much less talented minstrel (with a Strength of 12 and a
Charisma of 8!), Lafadriel came from “the distant West” to find and bury his
dead brother, Elandil Hundertwasser. Of a gloomier disposition than Elandil, his
poetic adventures were either wildly successful or complete flops, with no
place in between. He survived the campaign, and true to his word, returned to
his homeland with Elandil’s remains.
Armand the
Scumbag (Istvan Boldog-Bernad): human Assassin 9.
An ominous stranger from the distant and decadent, Italy-inspired lands of
Kassadia, Armand, who had sometimes also called himself “Yil the Mysterious”
(but was really called Arianus) was sent by his brotherhood to investigate the
opportunities for expanding the business on the Isle of Erillion. Finding
himself in the middle of a bid for power by the assassins of Gont, who had
betrayed, and were slowly killing off the rival crime networks on the island,
his cover soon compromised, he successfully turned the tables to his own
advantage, and – when the campaign was finished – managed to take over the
local crime business.
+Drusus the
Historian (Gabor Izapy): human Magic-User 6. Coming
from the southern lands, Drusus was tasked by his new mentor, the wizard
Slarkeron, to bring him the brain of a mind scrambler to let him take the Test
of Mastery. Ironically, Drusus met his end much later in the icy mountains, in
the secluded tower of a mind scrambler, which had reduced him to a drooling
vegetable and sucked out his brains.
Silver Olaf
Thorvaldson (David Barsony): northman Cleric 3 of
Edoran the Mysterious. A puzzling figure who would occasionally appear out of
nowhere, join the company for an adventure or two, then disappear just as
mysteriously. This is something the others had found creepy – was he following
them? Was he a spy? A dimensional anomaly? He was not telling.
+Yaxur (Gabor
Izapy): human Cleric 6 of Roxana, Goddess of Death.
Yaxur joined the party after Drusus’ unfortunate demise, and lasted all of a
half session. Coming to a great stone throne on a high mountain peak buffeted
by icy winds, Yaxur was the first to encounter Kornax the Revenger, a powerful
anti-paladin cursed to this place. Yaxur won the fight by ambushing Kornax with
a hold person spell and killing him outright (thereby winning the powerful
sword of chaos), but he did not count on Kornax coming back from the
dead next night and massacring him without breaking a sweat.
Zartan (Gabor
Izapy): Illusionist 7. He was the last to join the
group, suddenly appearing among the mountains in his elegant clothes. Was he motivated
by anything more insidious than a desire for loot and new spells? The world
would never know.
 |
| Grey Ooze : Magic Spear 1:0 |
Notable
quotes
Jonlar Zilv, musing about the party
alignment: “If I sold you lot out to Lord Gramantik, my alignment would move a
notch towards ‘good’.”
Gadur Yir: “Werewolf wounds! We must burn
them out with fire.”
Jonlar Zilv: “I am already feeling better!”
Einar Sigurdsson: “I believe we should stop
exploring hypothetical realms of fantasy, and go loot that manor house.”
Jonlar Zilv, stoned: “I call it ‘temporary
invulnerability’.”
Harmand the Reckless: “I call you our
ship’s new figurehead.”
Elandil’s player, after a near-TPK, where
Elandil and the rest were torn into bits by a fireball: “But who will now make
the world a better place?”
Someone else: “Not you.”
Someone else 2: “Was this a homemade
module?”
Elandil’s player: “Do you really think
anyone else could make up something like a shadow shooting a fireball?”
Someone else 3: “The ecological footprint
of Gygaxian Naturalism strikes again.”
Gadur Yir, about 500 gp worth of cave
crystals: “The two of us mined it together, while the rest of you were cowardly
homos. It is ours.”
Drolhaf Haffnarskørung: “In civilisation,
everyone does his own share of work. We guarded the passage while you were
exploring, and we have our due.”
Gadur Yir: “A Marxist barbarian!”
Phil the Terror of Turkeys, under attack by
a giant stag beetle, to Drolhaf: “It is going for your horned helmet; it just
wants to mate with you!”
(…)
Gadur Yir: “I wipe the bug juices from my
rations.”
Franz Who Wasn’t Even There: “You wanted to
play David Fucking Attenborough, wise guy.”
Franz Who Wasn’t Even There: “This must be
a gender-conscious sphynx.”
“Favoured enemy: Doors.”
Franz: “I am not really in love with this
fucking door.”
Drolhaf Haffnarskørung, after Buck sent his
new followers to their certain doom: “…But you are the follower of Agak, NOT
Ayn Rand.”
Phil the Terror of Turkeys: “I slide the
poor widow a coin as my condolences, and as a form of carousing.”
GM: “It is worth no XP because there is
self-interest involved.”
Phil: “I take back the coin.”
Lafadriel’s player: “The menu is…
gelatinous cube in aspic. And then, black pudding.”
Phil the Terror of Turkeys: “This was no
random ambush.”
Armand the Scumbag: “It couldn’t have been
meant for me.”
Lafadriel Hundertwasser: “Who could have
done such a thing?” – I ask the cruel stars, but there is no answer.
Phil the Terror of Turkeys: “I know these
things and it was definitely meant for you. Look, Armand, it might be time for
you to assume a fake name.”
Armand the Scumbag: “I am not very creative
with these…”
Phil the Terror of Turkeys: “You could be…
Armand the Clod!”
Drusus the Historian, dripping with water:
“The grand master of sailing found us a leaky boat.”
Lafadriel Hundertwasser: “My whole wealth
amounts to 25 gold pieces, but at least the light of the stars is mine.”
Someone: “Have the mugs been cleaned [in
this pub]?”
Lafadriel Hundertwasser: “When the world
was young...”
“My god is Erdogan... no, Edoran!”
Lafadriel Hundertwasser: “This is a
low-budget valley.”
Drolhaf to Lafadriel (after Drusus tried on
the expensive boots and the golden diadem): “Is your god also Robespierre?”
Lafadriel Hundertwasser: “Rest here? In the
Forest of Death?”
Drolhaf Haffnarskørung: “This is where we
will screw the pooch.”
Drusus the Historian: “Just two or three
days?”
Someone: “You have already died twice in
this campaign.”
Someone 2: “Yeah right, the Forest of Death
is famous for providing a healing rest.”
Silver Olaf Thorvaldson joins the party.
“We could use a few strong hands.”
“That’s two of them, because that’s how
many you’ve got.”
Lafadriel Hundertwasser: “The spiders are
not evil… they are just different.”
Armand the
Scumbag, to a new party member: “Can you break curses?”
“Impotence is no
curse!”
Silver Olaf
Thorvaldson, looking at small figures in the distance: “Are these giants? …or
dwarves?”
Phil the Terror
of Turkeys, after encountering some giant goats guarding a gold vein: “We
shouldn’t tell this tale in the pub… crapping our pants and chickening out when
we saw a bunch of goats.”
“Why do you
think you are the destined bearer of this sword?”
“The world has
carried no greater scumbag than I.”
“What kind of
moss isn’t suspicious?!”
“There is no
more paper this way, let’s go in the other direction.”
Zartan has
donned a helm of opposite alignment, turning from Chaotic Neutral to
Lawful Neutral.
“Wait… he can’t
steal from the party anyore!”
“Oh YEAH!”
“Yesssss!”
“It was worth
it.”
“You are the
reason we set guards at night.”
