Sunday’s obsession is becoming d20 Krawl

Since very few people were there on Sunday, I should explain what happened. Josh said that Doug was thinking of doing a D&D game with interchangable characters, and that got me thinking. We could distill D&D characters down to a character card and equipment cards, give it a console-ish feel and still have it be D&D.

So, I started obsessing. Since then I have made boards for a dungeon, determined the changes I will make to d20 to make this work, made character sheets (a page of feat/spell/special ability data has appeared as well) and gotten graphics for 50 equipment cards.

I hope to get the chance to run this next Sunday (August 21?). If anyone would like to get a jump on things, you can go to http://www.pathguy.com/cg35lite.htm and make a first level character. There are a few limitations:

1) Magic Users may not specialize
2) Clerics do not choose domains
3) Attacks of Opportunity will be used, but ony a very simplified version. Don’t get any feats or skills that ONLY affect attacks of opportunity. (Combat Reflexes comes to mind.)

Anything else that comes up we can work out at the game.

I’ll put a short description of the world in the extended entry.

I am calling the world “Adventurer’s Guild World”. The world is a disk floating in a sea of Chaos, which constantly tries to devour the very earth. At the center of the world is a crystal spire that generates Order, allowing constant physical laws and holding the world together. The outermost habitable ring of the world is a place where great monsters roam, magic is tremendously powerful, and the laws of the universe may change at any moment. These chaotic lands are called The Barrens. Near the Crystal Spire magic becomes weaker and weaker, and within a mile of the spire even movement is impossible. Explorers who tried to reach the tower can be seen, frozen in place or moving with barely perceptable slowness. This is the Frozen Zone.

Between these two extremes is a wide band, about 500 miles across, of normal fantasy world. Many races exist, changed from some original source by the Chaos outside the world. The inhabited areas have constant problems with monsters. Nobody knows if the Chaos occasionally spits out monsters or if they live and breed in the Barrens, but creatures of every sort seem to appear from nowhere and menace even the most central cities.

That is where the Adventurer’s Guild comes in. Adventurer’s are professional monster slayers. They train for years to hone fighting skills far beyond normal warriors and collect magical items of great power. (NOTE: the average person is far below what Adventurers call average. Their stats usually lie in the 6-7 range and they have at most 2 HP.) The Guild is also a very powerful political entity. Every town of a certain size has a Guild Hall where people can report monster incursions and request help. The Hall estimates the severity of the incursion and sends a team of appropriate experience. (Adventurers are apprenticed, trained and work in teams.)

An adventurer team has three jobs:

1) destroy the monsters and fulfil the contract.
2) Collect any money or magical artifacts the monsters have. (Adventurer teams generally take 100% salvage rights instead of a fee.)
3) Collect information about all activities in the land, monsterous and human (elven, dwarven, etc.). If political problems restrict the Guild small incursions may become large ones and all of the world may be put at risk.

For this first adventure, the Party is a group of apprentice Adventurers with their Master Team. An outlying village of 1200 people has been raided by Goblins. (Note: Goblin is any small humanoid creature.) When the team arrives (the trip takes several days) they are told that the Goblins stopped merely poaching sheep and took the shepherd boy (a 12 year old) the night before.

The Master team easily tracked the Goblins to a nearby cave, where they found the entrance to an abandoned underground complex. Tracks showed a dozen or so Goblins, so the Master Team decided you Apprentices are ready for your final exam. Your mission: Enter the complex and eliminate the Goblins, along with any other Monstrous entities. If the threat is more than you can handle, come get the Master Team. If you clear out the Goblins without getting anyone killed and without having to leave to resupply, you become a Journeyman Team and will be assigned to a Guild Hall where you will live when not on assignment.

Good Luck!