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New Campaign Time! Unfathomable!

Starting up a new campaign, I sent a menu of options out to a bunch of perspective players:

Operation: Unfathomable!

Civilization stinks—an eternal tyranny of Immortal Sorcerer-Kings and undead nobility. Freedom is found on the borderlands, such as the primeval frontier of Upper Mastadonia. Here, rebels, misfits, and fugitives might scrape together a life on their own terms. Unfortunately, your band of rebels, misfits and fugitives have been press-ganged into a dangerous mission in the vastness of the uncanny Underworld.


System: D&D 5e

Initially available playable lineages: Human, Wooly Neanderthal, Citizen Lich

Tone: blacklight-poster gonzo fantasy

Monster Hunt

The freshly-ennobled Lord Saewig has been granted control of a long-abandoned castle of Hithercourt, provided he can fix it up, clear the monsters out of the wilderness, and keep a decent population of peasants alive. Saewig has recruited two bands of monster hunters, and the other band are a bunch of jerks.


System: D&D 5e; except that characters will be generated randomly using a life-path system, and advancement will be pegged to the success of the canton.

Initially available playable lineages: standard D&D races, but determined via life-path (I’m open to homebrewing life-path content for nonstandard lineages).

Tone: folkloric fantasy

Troika!

Creation is an uncountable panoply of spheres, each separated from another by an expanse of humpbacked sky. The gulfs between spheres are crossed by golden barges and giant space whales. Troika, City of Interstices, sits at its center, a patchwork jumble of different spheres, different physics, and different people. In Troika, just navigating the post-office can be an epic adventure.


System: Troika! (a rules-light system with a British old-school flavor; a pdf of the rules will be made available)

Tone: odd multiplanar science-fantasy

Roll Our Own

Hey! Let’s make a campaign! We’ll pick a genre, play some world-creation games to flesh it out, and then run a campaign in it! It could be great or terrible!


System: In This World…, A Quiet Year, Microscope, eventually settling down with whatever system seems most appropriate to the world we’ve created.

Tone: TBD


Apparently, the words "blacklight poster gonzo fantasy" struck a cord in the middle-aged hearts of my players, and so we went with Operation Unfathomable.


Jason Sholtis has a great brain for juicy D&D nonsense. His Dungeon Dozen blog was one of the highlights of the G+ Golden Age of OSR discussion, and the two books that came out of it, The Dungeon Dozen and The Dungeon Dozen 2, are gorgeous sources of inspiration. Operation Unfathomable is his big dungeoney adventure, and Odious Uplands is his wilderness region expansion of the setting. Both are as packed with weird and magnificent ideas as the Dungeon Dozen.


I ran Operation Unfathomable several years ago, using Knave as the ruleset. Knave pairs really well for the tone and playstyle of OU. We burnt through PCs, which was fine and fun, but we soon found ourselves with a party of people who had no connection to the original mission. They were just wandering the Underworld to see what they ran into. OU is rich enough to support that kind of play, but I missed having a central arc.


Between that and the different sensibilities of my current group of players (who are less inclined to view their PCs as disposable), I decided to run the adventure with 5e so they'd be more durable.


Here's the player packet I put together to introduce people to the milieu of the game before character creation, including 5e write-ups for Citizen Liches and Wooly Neanderthals as playable lineages:


Unfathomable Player's Packet



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