Matt B Blogging

00. Introducing Rae and friends

Starting an Old-School Essentials (OSE) Advanced Fantasy Campaign! Assuming my character(s) live long enough for it to be considered a campaign. OSE can be very brutal - especially for low level characters.

I also recently bought and printed out the 2nd edition of The Mythic GM Emulator, so will be using that for almost everything else.

I remember getting Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st edition as a kid, and having no one to play with, so tried playing solo with a half-elf fighter/magic-user. In honour of that, or just nostalgia's sake, I want to play a half-elf. I used dndcharacter.com and kept rolling a character until I got the prerequisite stats you need to make a half-elf in OSE.

I used the random background and other traits, and used Mythic to generate a name. So, introducing Rae! Or Raeba Maferagul (Ray-ee-bah Mah-fer-ah-gool), a bloody and towering half-elven shipwright. Old-fashioned, a tad dishonest, and in a lot of debt. Good enough for a call to adventure!

I used Mythic Fate Questions to figure out the nature of the debt:

Is Rae the owner of the Shipwright business? 50/50: no
Is it owned by her family? 50/50: yes
Is Rae responsible for the debt? Certain: yes

I love watabou's generators, specifically the Perilous Shores generator, so used that to come up with a setting for my adventures. The map is bigger than this, but just focussing on the home town, Highbridge, which is on the coast - being near water seemed important for Rae's job as a shipwright. And let's head to the Tomb of the Evil Witch to find treasure to pay off that debt.

Cove of Evicept

Going it alone seems foolish, so thought some retainers might be nice. Rae's charisma limits her maximum number of retainers as 4, so I rolled a 1d4 and got 2 retainers foolish/greedy enough to come along. More rolls on Mythic for their names and traits. Introducing:

So, following Mythic GME prep, I can see 4 characters:

  1. Phalax
  2. Westy
  3. The loanshark
  4. Maferagul Shipwrights

And two threads:

  1. Pay off 500gp debt
  2. Loot the Tomb of the Mad Witch

So, let's start the first scene, right up in the action, inside the first chamber of the Tomb of the Evil Witch!