Lost Lands Mega-Campaign (Inactive)

Game Master Grimmy

Gotta throw my vote with Jeff Easley. It is the epitome of the original AD&D art as well as early Dragon and 2nd Edition to the best of my knowledge.

Of all the silver age stuff I think I like Keith Parkinson even better than Easley and Elmore. But some of the ones I thought he did turned out to be done by others. Like that one Edeldhur posted earlier.

Livia

Wolfshaman

Undead Army

As someone hugely influenced by the Mystara Gazetteer's series I absolutely loved the art of Stephen Fabian and to me it was a major factor in giving the "Known World" lands and cultures such a unique feel at the time.

Now you just made me realize that I am missing Gazetteer #14, The Atruaghin Clans. I may have to track that one down

Here are Stephen Fabian's Mystara covers.

'(For use with Character Levels 1-36)' - how cool is that?

God those Gazetteers make me drool...

Some of you guys have these things?

**WANT**

I dusted off Gazateer One to get ready for B1-9.

77 pages of adventuring goodness complete with maps and bad guys. Unfortunately I have the need to tinker, hence I am starting the adventure at my Lakeview Inn in Threshold I made so many years ago.

I never met Aaron Allston, but he wrote a great supplement in GAZ1. Epic events, like the Shearing Ceremony for those humans ready for adulthood--bravo Aaron.

King Stefan leaving to take a chance in Traladara reminds me of Duke Leto taking his chance on Arrakis in Dune and leaving the water planet behind.

Many an allowance went to those Gazetteers and other Mystara stuff.

Glantri was my favorite and the orc one had a great drawback chart that we used.

I don't think I ever realized there was so much Mystara stuff in print.

My games as a kid were supposedly set in Mystara but it was just this one map I expanded. I think it came out of a box set, one of the sets that got reprinted in rules cyclopedia?

I was using greyhawk pantheon and modules, slotted into that map. But I remember I called the world "the Known World".

I gave boxes and boxes of that stuff to my old gaming group (when I moved from Seattle to Toronto) and still have bunches left. Even when we were playing GURPS fantasy, I would still use them all of the time; I liberally borrowed maps, pictures and traps for inspiration or to help my players visualize.

Haven't been able to get online as much as usual today but I see great posts in all the games.

I'll keep updating where and when I can.

Grimmy, we were talking before about making a OD&D/AD&D elf in Pathfinder and what it would like look. One of the bumps was not getting Arcane Armor Training until 5th level. I found a trait that would let you have it at 3rd level:

As far as caster level goes, this takes care of the problem for taking a level in a martial class and the CL you'd normally lose getting into the Eldritch Knight prestige class.

That's the trouble with traits though... they are so useful and fun for executing concepts like this, but you bring them into play and you start seeing the well known win-button combos crop up...

Working a cirque du soleil show tomorrow as a lowly stagehand, will be massively busy.

If I get cut I may be on for a few hours mid-day.

OD&D Elf would, in my opinion, probably be a magus.

And, also, hi! I'm a player in DoD right now, will hopefully go into VotS.

Good I'm glad you checked in here Talric, dot the gameplay if you want it added to your campaigns.

Markofbane and I aren't satisfied that magus feels like redbox elf, we are working on a better way.

Bought Champions of Mystara last night. In lovely condition and all for a fiver!

What about the Monte Cook gish, the one with the athame. It was a forerunner for the magus. Can not remember the name....

Cheers

Was it "Mage Blade"?

AKA Stabracadabra.

Yep, that's the fella. Felt very elven to me.

Good I'm glad you checked in here Talric, dot the gameplay if you want it added to your campaigns.

Markofbane and I aren't satisfied that magus feels like redbox elf, we are working on a better way.

When I was looking at making that classic "old-school" F/M Elf, I took a look at the Magus class and wondered why anyone would bother playing a multi-class F/M anymore when the Magus does it "better." The only thing I could see lacking in the Magus was that their spells appeared to be almost exclusively combat oriented, so you had to sacrifice a little versatility for a lot of power. I suspect most gamers would be quite happy with that trade-off.

Yeah but it's got it's own shtick, you deliver spells with the weapon and all that.

I'm not a huge fan of the Magus, though they're pretty good in combat. They lose out on a lot from not multiclassing.

I feel the Fighter/Sorcerer has more versatility in spells and feats plus some bloodlines, such as the serpentine one, could really work for half-melee types. The fighter-only feats allow things like Disrupting Shot so that you can ready either arrow or ray to really screw with enemy spellcasters.

A magus would win out in sheer power though.

SWAMPED

Citrque du Soleil is crazy.

I have seen several Cirque du Soleil shows in Vegas and did a lot of work, lights, sound, etc. in college on traveling shows. I cannot imagine how much work it must be to get the traveling Cirque up and running.

This made me rethink how I saw Killian and his raiders

BADASS

Kincaids go barefoot though.

I have seen several Cirque du Soleil shows in Vegas and did a lot of work, lights, sound, etc. in college on traveling shows. I cannot imagine how much work it must be to get the traveling Cirque up and running.

Ghae I do stagehand work for big national tour productions like Trans-Siberian Orchestra, Disney on Ice, and I have never seen anything like this Cirque show.

Motors hung from 18 points, I've never seen the riggers get grouchy like this before but verizon seemingly won't give us AC while we load-in and build...

You really don't want a grouchy crew 60' above your head responsible for making sure several tons of truss don't fall on you :p

PS I lived in vegas for 6 years, worked at Bellagio.

I never worked on huge shows like that. We had a lot of touring dance productions when I was doing it in college around 1989-1993. I also designed and ran sounds and lights for Club Med for a while. Now I just pretend to be an attorney and wonder why everyone has to b$#@~ and moan so much.

I'm off until sunday, hope there's some weekend warriors online.

I'm always around, though until I get my keyboard replaced I have to deal with a pesky on-screen one for my posts.

Got some work to finish during the weekend, but I'm around ;)

I'm shopping and getting the house ready for our Fourth of July party we're going to have, but I'll take regular breaks and check in. I'd hate to be responsible for making our momentum flag!

Work is completely utterly bonkers guys, I will be back soon.

Literally 18 hours of non-stop HARD labor and I get 3 hours sleep now then back to do it again.

Please spread the word I know not everyone checks here.

Be back soon!

Grimmy, hope you didn't get run too ragged these past couple days. Hope you can get some real rest soon. Looking forward to a reinvigorated GM later this week.

I'm back. Slowly catching up. Hardest work I've ever done in my life I think (or maybe I'm just getting old).

I clocked 40 hours in two days. Continuous hard physical labor with two half hour breaks/day.

Sooo tired guys. Full updates after full rest ;)

Rest up! We need you at your best! Um, hold on.... :)

One more crazy day tomorrow and then I'll be back to normal. Fri and Sat my games will have my full undivided attention, and sunday will be one of my normal shows with lots of downtime to log in and post ;)

long days for me Sat/Sun but free Friday if that helps Grim

For any of you guys who are interested in 5th edition and liking these necromancer/FGG adventures, there's a new kickstarter for bringing the necro/fgg "old-school feel" to 5th edition rules.

Kickstarter

Yeah, it looks awesome. I would totally go in on it, but I'm in a saving crunch right now for Gen Con next month.

Check this out, you can see the daughter of Bill Webb, the author of these adventures I'm running in this campaign, playing with Dennis Sustare, Erol Otus, Jeff Dee, Rob Kuntz, and Frank Mentzer! I heard she's an awesome DM too :)

I swear kids are the most kick-butt players.

Check out this quote from Bill (guy that wrote most of this stuff we are playing)

One thing about sand-box style adventures, as well as basically anything I write, in any case, is that I am not going to tell you exactly how to get to the end. The whole point of a huge adventure like this is that the journey matters more than the destination. There are thousands of hours of play material here, in addition to a carefully crafted adventure. The main adventure can be played as a directed main theme or alternatively as something the player characters stumble upon from time to time, slowly building bits and pieces until they finally take on the main path.

No railroad conductor here. I can be the monkey, but you have to drive the train....

So never feel bad if you think you are sidetracked, it all goes in the story ;)

Guys I've been very stressed out about losing momentum in the different games in this campaign lately, especially with the unexpected stuff at work this summer.

Just want to let you all know I am very committed to this campaign and making it great, and I'm mulling over a lot of ideas and I want your feedback. I lost a truly valued player last week and I never even knew he was unhappy.

I'm learning maptools to make my maps better especially for dungeons, and I'm taking a look at what the good PbP GM's are doing. I got some very good advice from GM Alexander Kilcoyne.

One thing I'm going to be trying out is more cutscenes to push the action forward so I'll be needing your feedback to find the sweet spot.

I was also toying with the idea of introducing player run hirelings and/or cohorts at some point.

Another thing that crossed my mind was VTT. Pretty soon we'll be reaching the climax of the first chapter for the original groups that started at the beginning of the year. As Wizard's Amulet and Valley of the Shrines conclude, maybe some of you would be interested in doing a little real time session via VTT inserted to accelerate the progress of the story? If it's successful it could be something we could insert here and there at logical breaking points throughout the campaign. Just a thought.

Anyway just checking in to make sure everyones having fun, and let you all know even though my summer is turning out differently than I expected as far as my job goes, I'm not going anywhere (and more of those nice gigs where I can post all day from work are around the corner heehee).

Link

Love it Kara ;)

But I know I can make this game great. I just really got sideswiped by work this summer. I am used to being able to post all day at work, now I am doing all these huge productions as a stage hand instead of small productions as a mix engineer.

Long hours I'm used to, but doing real work, not so much!

Well, the stagehand work was always there but it was like 20/80, now it's like 60/40...

Looks like things will settle down in aug and sep, then more madness in october.

Thank you all for bearing with me while I adapt.

I know I've been sloppy on rules and details and maps.. You've all been very understanding and helpful.

The other hazardous thing I know I am doing is obstinately trying to batter a square peg in a round hole by pursuing an OSR/old school feeling gameplay so aggressively under pathfinder mechanics... Mind you, I know it is possible, we have achieved it in my home group and it can be a blast, but it took some strange alchemy at the table and it's something that can't be forced.

So, as I come back to this game in the coming weeks and months I intend to be less aggressive about that and embrace some of the strengths of pathfinder, after all it has been my system of choice for years now. There's a reason I haven't switched to retro-clones or something. I actually am quite hooked on the crunch and the tactically rich combat of d20, as long as the feeling doesn't get lost.

No problem here. I absolutely appreciate though that you pop in and give us a quick note saying you are going to be gone for days. Even if you said "I need to take a hiatus for the month of October", no worries here. I think we all have families/jobs/commitments, and real life has to come first. I just tend to get concerned when friends I've made online, and who I don't have another means of contacting, just disappear. I worry. :) So again, thanks for the quick notes you leave under those harrowing circumstances!

I agree 100%. A 30 second post informing people you will be gone for the weekend, or a week, or whatever is always appreciated -- and this foes for players as well as the DM. There is nothing worse than being in a combat and having the bard or fighter not post for 2-3 days. If someone is taking off, list how your character is likely to act, then someone or the DM can run the character to avoid big delays.

Agreed, I know we all appreciate the level of communication you have with us about your availability...as well as your concerns.

In a forum setting like this it is extremely important for every one of us to mention if we are unhappy with some aspect of the campaign. It's the only way we can tell if there is a problem.

Cutscenes are a big help in pbp. In my experience, keeping the action moving forward does a lot to keep everyone posting regularly.

Thanks again for all the work you put into this campaign!

I'm thinking of getting heavy into cutscenes. I saw that movie Edge of Tomorrow and it got me thinking.

ever eager