I'm a performing musician in the eastern United States, so every now and then I get to try my hand at making flyers. I've also connected with a large amount of people thanks to gigging and podcasting, and many of them play some sort of tabletop RPG (usually D&D.) So, I wanted to kick something off where we can play some games adjacent to our gigs -- many of which are just a few blocks away from my house.
An opportunity surfaced to talk about how our campaign differs from the common notions of old school play, so I figured I'd use it as a springboard to publish some thoughts about our campaign in 2023.
The theory here is that certain encounters won't exist off of the roads, or at night, and the modifiers should reflect that.
I've been reading through the Gygax 75 project and thought maybe it's best if some of the Parn information is presented here via that format. You'll notice that the "the concept" is mostly kept to the DM, so we'll start off with the week two plans -- "the surrounding area."
Parn was initially conceived with Dungeons and Dragons 3.x in mind, so our first ideas for cosmology -- specifically religions -- were to fill in each part of the alignment grid with an appropriate deity. We had a couple of ideas that we felt really strongly about, and a couple more just to kinda fill in the blanks. We've reduced the importance (and size) of alignment in our games from 9 options to 3 (Chaotic, Neutral, or Lawful.) Where did our pantheon start, and where is it now?
My partner and I started trying to flesh out Parn in 2012. The goal was to have a persistent campaign world shared between all of our OSR games. In the first incarnation, the game was a single PC game run for my partner, who at this point played Camelia, a half-elf Bard. We generated characters, and the town, using the D&D 3.5 ruleset.
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| A crudely drawn, MS Paint Parn Township |
We wrote up several campaign documents at the time, from our ideas on the cosmology of Parn, to other humanoid playable races, and our goals for the game. We were (and still are) really more focused on the non-combat aspects of the game. First and foremost, interaction between characters, but also exploration, resource management, and a theme of building rather than destruction. Camelia worked quite a bit to put her adventuring money into expanding and enriching the town.
