Influences

My influences are primarily old school RPG - D&D, Tunnels & Trolls, Rolemaster, Star Frontiers, Lords of Creation, Marvel Super Heroes. Some of these are the games I used to play back when I was a keen gamer (1982 - 1995) and some are those I've played in my recent resurgence (2010-2015).

I got back into RPGs through running D&D for my family. As D&D 4th Edition did not look like a game I wanted to play, I got the Pathfinder rule books but they were far too complicated as an introductory RPG, so I went for the quaint nostalgic approach of buying a copy of Moldvay's Basic rules from Ebay, and rapidly re-discovered why the game had been a runaway success in the first place. I tried introducing various ideas from D&D 3.0 / Pathfinder such as the battle grid and initiative order and although I could see what problems they attempted to address, they had bigger issues than the problems they tried to solve. Many thanks are due to the various OSR blogs, in particular James Maliszewski's Grognardia, which showed me that I wasn't alone in feeling this way!

Initially for the Nostalgia vibe, and later trying to understand why the game had been so popular in the first place, we went through B2 Keep on the Borderlands, X1 Isle of Dread, The Tomb of Aethering the Damned (Judges Guild Treasure Maps), A1-A4 The Slavers, G1-G3 The Giants, D1-D3 The Drow (some with a rather large helping of rewrites).

Unfortunately Q1 is not a great module, nor is battling Lolth a fitting finale for a series of modules where she had not been the enemy, so I finally bit the bullet and wrote my first new adventure - an inter-dimensional hunt for the scattered parts of a Tesseract prison which could imprison the Elder Elemental God. Foddy, Shadow, Turgon and Tuck had many more adventures before they retired to their castle, surrounded by the growing city of New Specularum (the original Specularum having been destroyed due to them accidentally releasing a demon).

We've also had great fun on the way with a Star Frontiers Volturnus campaign and two Marvel Super Heroes adventures. For the last year we've been Exploring beneath Castle Blood...