gaming lore

     As of this week my group is five or six sessions into our ongoing campaign of Errant by Ava Islam. I've been wading deep into the blogosphere and have been inspired (mostly by Nick LS Whelan over at paperspencils.com and his notes for his On a Red World Alone campaigns) to maintain a log of session reports to help guide my prep and serve as a resource going forward (and so the archivists have something to adapt once we become the next lodoss war of course). I'll summarize the campaign thus far in a broader sweep and then move into nitty-grittier session-by-session as we get caught up. But first.... who am I?

    MY GAMING LORE

    I didn't really get into roleplaying games until mid-2020 when I was working as the sole employee for a small sheep farm on the border of rural Connecticut. I did manual labor alone for 8 or 9 hours a day and I'm gay and prone to hyperfixation so I naturally ended up getting pretty into hit podcast Friends at the Table, which I had probably heard about on twitter or something. COUNTER/Weight still holds a special place in my heart and the theme music is inseparable from the sense memories of sorting wool for me, the scent of the lanolin. This whole roleplaying game thing seemed cool. It was an extension of the weird fantasy worldbuilding daydreams I would lapse into sometimes, but those would always take the form of massive drafts of complex Dwarf Fortress mods that I would never finish or release. Roleplaying games were cool because you didn't have to code or draw anything, you could just speak something into existence and it would be real at your table, people would respond to it and you developed this shared experience of it immediately. That's still part of the draw for me.

    Some time during that period a friend of a friend hosted an online Troika one-shot over Zoom and I played in it. The style of Troika was really captivating and we played a weird romp with talking cubes and coyote dudes. I didn't really get it but I was stoked on it. So stoked I offered to run a game for the same group the next week. I had no idea what I was doing and worse... it was over Zoom. Things went as you'd expect. 

    Some time after that I started lurking on a bunch of discords and played and ran in a couple of one-shots here and there. Eventually I responded to a posting looking for a group to 'just play some old-fashioned Dungeon World'. They were willing to work with me being a new DM... and they were nice, and funny! Our group of six or seven whittled down to a solid four over the next few months as life happened, but by then I had a tight-knit core group going, and we are all happily gaming together to this day... it's a miracle. 

   After our romp through Dungeon World we ended up playing a year-and-a-half-long Beam Saber campaign. That campaign was a joy - we built the setting from the ground up together starting with street magic, my players really gave it their all establishing our planet-spanning equatorial megacity and took big swings against powerful factions, cool robots were described, some of them were powered by ghosts, tragic gay love blossomed among the stars, and we gave it a tender send-off with Everest Pipkin's stunning World Ending Game. 

THE ONGOING CAMPAIGN

     At this point I had become really enthralled by the idea of  this 'O S R' thing that I kept running into  online. It seemed like a ton of people were always posting cool stuff they made for their games and how they were trying to make their games better, and the idea of running material published by other people was appealing as my life circumstances changed a lot in the intervening years. I also had this science-fantasy mutant western vibe kicking around in the back of my head - something dusty and crusty and personal, less heroic, more sludgy, quotidian. 

My imagination was packed to the brim with all of this weird stuff I was reading - the Classic Dungeon Crawl, sandbox hexcrawling, the Ultraviolet Grasslands and Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun - and I was to eager build something weird that had more personal sword-and-sorcery style stakes and could slot in published modules easily. I tried hacking together a few insane science fantasy heartbreakers before realizing I was putting the cart before the horse and settled on Errant, which has been serving us well as an introduction to classic-style play from our more story-gaming/PBtA background. It's lightweight enough that play hums along pleasantly but comprehensive enough that most of the questions we have are already answered in it somewhere, and my players seem to be enjoying it.

I'm calling the ongoing campaign deadSun -MAXIMAL-. deadSun -MAXIMAL- is Vampire Hunter D, Jack Vance's O.G. Dying Earth short stories, Gus L's Crystal Frontier and Gene Wolfe's space catholicism in a neon-radiated landscape of angels and mutants and cowboys and demons, it's Trigun and Roadside Picnic, etc.  It's gothic science fantasy western post-apocalyptica. We kicked it off with Gus L.'s Tomb Robbers of the Crystal Frontier to set the vibes. The world is filled out with a host of OSR modules along with stuff I've written myself. The vision board can say the rest.

Next time - session write ups!