I’m planning to see whether I can use *The Gathering Storm* by Adrian Bott, the first book in *The Drow War* trilogy. It’s written for D&D 3E and I’d be using the material for my Halberds & Helmets house rules, that is to say, a B/X D&D, with established characters around level 5, and players bringing two or three characters on an adventure, for a total of around 10–15 characters per session.
I’m considering to blog my notes as I go through the book. What can I say, I like a structured approach. I think it helps me focus. And if I pull it off, it might make a nice resource for somebody else to read through, and an interesting window into the mind of another referee preparing and adapting about thirty adventures (if we ever get that far!) for their game – and perhaps it’ll get me back into the groove given that I put one of my campaigns on hiatus.
I put one of my campaigns on hiatus
⚠ *Spoilers!* ⚠
With all that in mind, let’s start skimming this 256 page book! 😀
Page 4 has a summary of the ten adventures in this book. That’s how it’s going to be: each book has ten adventures with player characters ending on level 10 by the end of the first book, on level 20 by the end of the second book, and then things get turned up to eleven as player characters go up to level 30 by the end of the third book. Or so it says! I’m excited.
The summary on page 4 tells me what I need:
All of this is very exciting.
Pages 5–11 talk about the various regions of the setting, which I don’t need. Pages 12–13 talk about the drow and the elves of the setting, which I don’t need either, I think. Pages 14–19 talk about the pantheon, which I won’t use. Pages 20–22 talk about the Starborn, which is that the player characters are reincarnations of ancient heroes or something like that. I’m definitely not going to use that. Let’s hope the adventures still work!
My earlier campaigns in the same setting used some place names from the *Wilderlands of High Fantasy* (Lenap, Ghinor) and ignored a lot of the setting material, too.
Page 23 talks about nodes, which is definitely something I already have, and victory points, which is important to the overall flow of the campaign, which I love.
All right, that’s 23 page skimmed and not too many notes taken. 😀
Next up: the starting region, the starting village, and the starting adventure. We’ll see how much of that we can use for a party of 10–15 characters of levels 3–5.
#Old School #RPG #The Drow War