The End of My OD&D Campaign

[doc]

Two years ago, fed up with the bloat in the RPG industry, I decided to return to the beginning and start up an OD&D campaign for my group. It was in an attempt to find more info on OD&D that I found myself on this board. I decided to run an old-school campaign that would run for exactly 100 sessions, and it turned out to be not only a great experience for my players, but a liberating decision for myself. I immersed myself in the freedom and simplicity of early gaming and as a result ended up getting rid of most of the games that have been sitting on my shelves over the past decade or so.

Now, with the campaign in the bag, it's time to break it down by the numbers:

2: Approximate number of years the game lasted.
6: The number of regular players.
30: Total number of player characters throughout that time.
10: Number of characters who survived beyond 2nd level.
2: Number of characters who were maimed and retired.
1: Number of characters who turned Evil and betrayed the party
7: Number of characters who survived to the final confrontation.
4: Number of characters left standing after the final confrontation with X'aal the balrog to survive the campaign.
8: Average level of surviving characters.

Next campaign: Carcosa!

Doc

[coffee]

That's great to hear, Doc!

Hope you'll keep similar stats for Carcosa and share them with us in a couple of years.

Fight on!

[Zulgyan]

Excellent! Have an EXALT. Even though I was not able to get an OD&D campaign running, I did one year and a half of one-shots with different people and I also found it very very self-educational.

I have since gotten rid of a lot of my RPG library too.

[doc]

Thanks, guys. I'll definitely provide the final stats for my Carcosa game. Right now it looks like it will consist of five or six seperate adventures each set in a different area of the map. I am trying to give it the feel of an old pulp-novel series with each adventure being complete in itself and having names like "The Wastelands of Death," "Blood Pits of Kethelnesh," "Return of the Old Ones," etc.

Doc

[sham]

Must've been a memorable ride from 30 to 10 and down to 4. Level 8 sounds about right for 2 years of weekly sessions. Well played, sir.

If you can recall, at what point did you design the final confrontation? Was it plotted out early on, or did it emerge from the ongoing story?

Good Luck with the Carcosa campaign!

[Fandomaniac]

Very cool and interesting statistics, have an EXALT from me as well.

[doc]

Thanks for the kind words everybody, and for the Exalt, Fandomaniac and Zulgyan.

Sham, I knew I wanted the final fight to end with the balrog from the beginning, simply because I wanted to avoid the whole "fight the big dragon at the end of the game" cliche. In the very first session the characters stole an artifact from a hidden temple that was the only thing keeping X'aal imprisoned. Once they took it out of the temple, he was released from 8000 years of confinement, but the party had no way of knowing until much, much later.

I threw in clues throughout the entire campaign that something big was stirring in the West and attracting followers, but it was so far removed from what the characters were doing that it took a while to register that something important was going on. In the meantime, they explored the game world, gained allies and made enemies, and generally became a part of the world around them. Slowly, over time, they started to piece together what was going on and the secret behind the "warlord" X'aal. They spent months in game trying to track down the Daemon's Heart, a gem from the beginning of time that would help contain the balrog, only to eventually discover once they found it that it was the gem they had stolen from the temple and pawned off to the thieves guild the very first night they played!

Doc

[sham]

Aha! Very cool. Great idea, Doc. I assumed it was something along these lines. Masterfully done massaging the sessions to the end you had in mind all along without making it feel overtly narrow.

One of my old campaigns began with similar ambition, but fizzled out after many years before the PCs found the clues that would lead them to the final dungeon. I didn't have as tight a game plan and let them fuddle around with all manner of adventures, assuming they would eventually make it to the "end". They got close but we began a classic campaign after player attrition and never went back to the older one.

[kesher]

Doc, that is just too freaking cool. Very inspirational.

Thanks for sharing both the story, but also the numbers. I think stats like that are actually an important way for us to see what this "oldskool" play looks like, campaign style. I'm gonna go back and start compiling the numbers for my own campaign...

[calithena]

That's great stuff, doc. Thanks for sharing.