Friday, November 28, 2014

All Orc Campaign

I have always had an infatuation with playing fantasy cliches in reverse - playing as a tribe of kobolds trying to protect their colony / mine from adventurers or the evil cultists trying to take over / end the world. Most recently, the conversation between Barbarossa and I has been based around Orcs. This turned into a pitch for a full-length campaign.

When you think about it, playing the tropes in reverse makes the GM's job remarkably easy... or tremendously complicated. When your protagonists are not just the bad guys, but visibly, irredeemably the bad guys (orcs), then the whole of the setting becomes a sandbox adventure. Every human village is a dungeon to explore, a target for conflict and profit. The diverse races and tribes of goblins, hobgoblins, gnolls, trolls and other ecology of the D&D world create innumerable unique situations and politics out of situations where human player-characters would have just attacked by default, and this is before any actual dungeons, lost artefacts, and so on the GM would sprinkle into their campaign.

So we've been kicking this around for a while, and because Barbarossa and I were the ones who initially came up with the idea, I've kind of been holding onto it as something I wanted to play, rather than run. As I'm usually Forever GM, it's been sitting in the wind for a while. Until our Aussie friend showed up. The Aussie is a regular in our skype-run weekly game, and he'd mentioned loving the way AD&D ran and was interested in trying to run it himself sometime. Yessssss.

So it is with great pleasure I get to announce that our orc campaign is a go, and will get to run this weekend. I will keep you up to date on the details, and maybe even some play reports.

Until then,

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