An Untamed Land

 

I haven't posted on here for a while - because I haven't played roleplaying games in a while. Real world responsibilities have caused me to put my Odd Jerusalem campaign on hold - only two sessions in. 

But recently, while preparing to resume that old campaign, I've begun to run another campaign for a different, smaller group. As part of my ongoing project of becoming more intimately familiar with the OSR as I develop my own set of house rules, I've decided to run the classic Keep on the Borderlands - an adventure I've never actually played myself. 

As soon as I started reading through the adventure, I knew that I want to take it in a sharply different direction though - I've grown incredibly tired of orcs and gobbos and bugbears and what have you. So I took a couple of buckets of ancient Canaanite literature, ancient Mesopotamian literature, tanakh (the "Old Testament" as the gentiles like to call it), sword & sorcery fiction, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind - and started to paint over the existing adventure in Bronze and teal dye. The result: 

Outpost on the Untamed Lands. 

Made using Bing Image Creator

 

I've decided to run the game using The Black Hack (second edition), with some heavy modifications:

  1. Revamped the experience system to make it somewhat more traditional (mainly as a way of encouraging the players to find gold): experience is rewarded for finding valuable treasure; for finding exploring new and dangerous places; for completing certain missions; and for vanquishing particularly powerful foes (no xp for a pack of bandits)
  2.  No wisdom stat. Charisma is now the primary stat for Clerics, to symbolize communion with their gods - and with their flock. Things such as listening and looking are handled by INT (which makes up for INT being "weakened" as a stat by me not allowing knowledge rolls at my table)

Of course more alterations may be added, and I haven't bothered to include smaller changes (like added spells and such). 

Here is the tale of this campaign (will be updated as the game progresses):

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