[pseudo-d&d] Weird Olde New Scot Lande

[Joshua Bearden]

Here's a thing I'm doing.  I hope someone will discuss it with me.

Weird Old New Scotland is a generic d&d campaign inspired by Eero Tuovinen's special take on OSR, motivated by a desire to play in Jame's Raggi's published adventures, constrained by a lack of evening and weekend time to devote to this hobby, and finally seasoned by my love for setting games in the geography of my little patch of the world.

Eero's influence pervades much of the project, from using early modern era fantasy earth as my sandbox, to using Raggi's and other contemporary modules, and of course pursuing 'the constitutional/oral tradition' method of constructing procedures of play as part of play.    I decided to start with some minimalistic rule as a base and
develop more rules as we went along. So far we haven't actually added much to the one page micro d&d ruleset called Searchers of the Unknown (Target 20 variant). In Searchers, character creation consists of picking a name, armour, and a weapon.  The armour choice determines AC and movement rate, and one's ability to perform stunts
from climbing, to stealth, to swimming etc.  I've told the players that if anyone reaches level 2, they might be allowed to have an ability score of their choice.

Another distinguishing feature of the social context of the game comes from my time constraint.  I only play this game on Wednesday's during lunch breaks.  This gives us about 55 minutes per session.  I have not missed a session since starting two months ago.  On the other hand I've had a varied mix of players.  From a pool of 7 players I average about 2 actual players per session.  Frequently it's just me and one player. Only once did we have three.

In the down time between sessions I tinker away with my setting.  Players can email me to spend money, buy equipment and sometimes even role play a little usually simply to rouse up some rumours about possible adventure sites. Then when we meet we can jump straight into action. I keep a sheaf of OSR modules and one-page dungeons on hand to make sure there is always something to do.  I also try to keep expanding my knowledge of history so that I can populate the setting with interesting historical characters. I try to record everything on a wiki.  All my setting research goes there. I also update it with any discoveries made by the players. I don't care about OOC knowledge but if I did I'd just say that rumours travel fast.

So here's the wiki:

Weird Olde New Scott Lande


I welcome, or rather invite, questions and suggestions. So if you've got some time to kill, please snoop around and come back here and share with your thoughts.

Cheers.