Leaves from The Green Man

I am strongly considering using  Dwimmermount  for my planned open-table, episodic D&D for Grown-Ups megadungeon.  It has wonderful depth, both in terms of levels (vast spaces to explore) and in terms of the way it integrates the history of the world into the dungeon itself and uses the history and secrets of the world to drive exploration.  Alex Macris from Autarch games did a phenomenal job of taking James Maliszewski from Grognardia 's sprawling vision and integrating it all together. That said, I am a GM and like most GM's I still find myself wanting to tweak things, particularly around the setting... and herein lies a challenge, and perhaps the area where Dwimmermount's strength becomes its weakness.  Dwimmermount is so (beautifully) integrated with James' particular world of Telluria that it is challenging to just pick the dungeon up and drop it into your own world (I gather that Alex Macris originally planned on converting Dwimmermount to his own...

To recap, my goal is to get myself straight back into my hobby, and to get my friends into an adventure, all despite the fact that we are time-poor and my friends find it hard to commit.  I want to set up an episodic play space in which varying players and their characters can meet to adventure (open table) but where the threads all ultimately tie together into a satisfying shared story created between them.  A megadungeon seems like a great option for this: an adventuring environment that is both contained but also immersive - a great combination of manageability for the GM while allowing lots of meaningful choice for the players. Each play night a different party assembles in the nearby starting base (ala B2 Keep on the Borderlands) and plumbs the depths of the megadungeon for a session, before falling back to the safety of the base (hopefully) laden with treasure, tales of derring-do and tantalising hints of the riches and secrets yet to be revealed.  Most old s...

After reflecting on what worked and didn't work in  my last  campaign and reading some of the wonderful web-wisdom that is out there, there seems to me to be three key factors which I think would be useful to fit D&D into a busy thirty-something life. 1.) Episodic play 2.) Sandbox and/or mega-dungeon style 3.) A simple(ish) rule-set Episodic Play This is the most important one.  Lots of people want to play but it is very difficult to get them together at the same time and place with any regularity.  Lengthy adventures and plots requiring the presence of the same group of people at every session are just not a reality.  I think that's the partly the reason why "D&D Lite" boardgames like  Last Night on Earth  appeal so much to some of my friends.  As a GM who loves the world-building and evolving, continuous (player-driven) narrative of a campaign, board games don't quite fill the D&D void, but I like the  Last Night...

I'm a grown-up now, but I miss my Dungeons & Dragons.    When I was first whisked away into worlds of fantasy adventures by  First Quest  (and that audio CD!) back in 1994 my friends and I had all the time in the world to put away our schoolbooks, grab our dice and venture off on fantastical adventures. Now, in my 30s I have the itch to get back into gaming and I am particularly excited by the "Old School Renaissance", recapturing something of the feeling of opening that first box and those old scribbled maps and the covers of those dodgy 80s fantasy VHS cassettes which were always a bargain at the video hire shop (why did the movies never live up to the promise on the cover?). However and juggling work and partners and babies it just seems too hard to get a band of stalwart heroes all together at the same time.  While this isn't an uncommon experience, there also seem to be lots of people out there fitting wonderful campaigns into grown-up life wh...