INTO THE WOODS

I went through a foot high stack of my D&D papers yesterday. This were all my notes and work on the Midlands campaign going back to 2003. There were rules mods, computer projects, game running notes and adventure materials etc. My campaign got swallowed by a mega dungeon, but I needed that learning experience. Of course, there was no way to take players from the start to level 12 at the terminating end of the campaign in 2 or three years anyway. Midlands campaign is unique because I have a beginning, the middle and the conclusion fleshed out. What makes it a sandbox is that the players are free to choose and act as they wish while the time ticks and runs through its course. There is no railroading or a story arch; what we have instead is the sweeping flow of events, like a war, but not quite, that will wash everything away or now; so that characters may never come across the antagonist, or they may, or they may join forces with it.

I am almost ready for the game. I have two dungeon sites in mind, those are easy. It is fun to write out the story line, and that itself is an adventure for me, without combat or hex exploration, or the dungeon crawl. I had a four hour one on one game session, with one of my players, whose character almost got killed, who spent a month in game time recuperating in a village, almost no hit points and no capacity to fight. These were all role playing encounters of meeting people, befriending them or not, and making decisions about what to do. I just laid out a social encounter table and a bunch of NPC's and the story took off on its own. The player had the excellent common sense to avoid all of the scripted pitfalls, and then some, and did quite well for himself. He paid the local smith a good sum for a high quality blade, then went to look for some bones (were used for their calcium to make high quality steel during the dark ages), and by a dint of a randomly generated event, he risked his life and found some special stuff that made for a magical weapon, in the creation of which the player role played participation. So, that part is the only one that needs doing before I can run the next session.

Then there is the trio of the humongous projects that I got:

1- I want to do a system, where all the game data is inputted, and the computer configures and prints out a character sheet with a stat display configured to a specific character class. I have laid out a DM's display, where each character's skill checks and to hit and be hit rolls are pre-figured and laid out with all of their unique bonuses and penalties applied, so I just need to look up the stat and roll as I am telling the story. Still working on it.

2- I am creating a database of all the monsters from MM1, MM2, Fiend Folio and all of the AD&D 2nd supplements. It is searchable by level, terrain type, and creature type.

3-I have yet to start doing a similar thing for all of the spells. Different spell groups (Magic User, Illusionist, Wu Jen) and schools of magic will be tied to specific regions and cultures of the game world and specific wizards guilds etc, for the players to have to search for via adventuring.

I already have some sort of a computer generated character sheet, so I am good to go, if I relax my perfectionism and desire to have everything completed.