Tuesday, October 8, 2019

AD&D 2nd edition settings...I miss you

Oh TSR, how I miss you. Here several years into the reign of 5th Edition and WoTC is clearly firmly entrenched with Forgotten Realms, but in a way I hope they never touch some of the other beloved settings because I know how thoroughly they would screw them up. 

2nd edition AD&D is best known for the numerous settings launched, specifically through the use of boxed sets. Dragonlance, Ravenloft, Dark Sun, Greyhawk, Birthright, Planescape, and Spelljammer. We all had our favorites that appealed to us, but I remember the days of envisioning a campaign or characters set in all of these settings. I tandem with the table top RPG setting splat books, TSR also published numerous novels with each setting. The Dragonlance Chronicles (Hickman and Weis) are what plunged me into the hobby in the mid 80's and Dragonlance will always be my first love because of that. 

To this day nearly 30 years later, these same box sets sit on my bookshelf awaiting more usage, which brings me to the point of this blog. I've been working up my next campaign...err....well what to actually do for my next campaign. I don't believe my group will finish all the way through Masks of Nyarlathotep and I don't think I have the stamina to run that much CoC through Roll20. So I want to start on another D&D campaign soon...I had been leaning towards doing a mega-dungeon, specifically Rappan Athuk from Frog God Games or the excellent Barrowmaze, but my group tends to enjoy the story based campaigns which brought me back to these beloved 2nd edition campaign settings.

So which to choose?....honestly I'm leaning towards Planescape. It is so open ended that I could toss just about anything I want into it, but as a DM you definitely have to scale it down to be usable without melting your brain with all of the possibilities a Planescape campaign could go in. I'm thinking maybe starting some where on the Prime Material plane and getting the group to Sigil, eventually working towards the "Dead Gods" module published in the late TSR era by Monte Cook. Let me know if you have any experience or thoughts on Planescape from your games, I welcome any input.

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