Wednesday, November 18, 2020

As an introduction

Welcome to It's Always Sunny in Castle Greyhawk. I plan to use this blog as a repository for my drawings, house rules, musings maybe play reports and dungeons, and whatever else I feel like sharing.

I discovered the OSR scene back in 2018 and I've been lurking the blogs ever since, but I never really interacted much with the community up until some months ago, when I started posting in the osr subreddit.

The first time I "played D&D" was back in the early '00s in Mexico City when I was around 10 years old. One of my friends had played a few sessions of 3e D&D and V:tM in the campaigns of his older brother's friends (who were probably around 14 or 15 at the time), but since he was also around 10 or 11 years old, the older kids only really invited him to play when one of the other players couldn't make it. So my friend (who didn't really have access to the rulebooks) came up with an ultra-light system made up of half-remembered and improvised rules and offered to DM a campaign for me, my brother, and another common friend. It was a lot of fun, but sadly we only got around to playing a few sessions before scheduling problems killed the campaign. 

I didn't play again until December 2017. I was talking with a different friend, and he casually mentioned that he had always wanted to try out D&D. I told him about the game my childhood friend had ran for me and how much fun it had been and how I had always wanted to play again, and so we asked another friend if he'd be interested in playing with us and he said yes. At first we picked up 5e, since it was the most popular and easily available system out there. We played with the Basic Rules that you can download for free in the website and with a free dice-rolling app for our cellphones, since we didn't have any physical dice at the moment. I ran Matt Colville's Delian Tomb and we had fun, but it was a very different experience from the one I remembered so fondly from my childhood. The system was too complex and crunchy for my taste, and by level 3 fights lasted for hours and I wasn't enjoying it much anymore. The most fun parts were when the PCs just walked around a city talking to NPCs and coming up with crazy harebrained schemes and we didn't have to interact with the actual rules of the system.

A few months later I somehow accidentally stumbled upon B/X D&D and the OSR scene, and I quickly realized that the older rulesets and playstyles appealed much more to my sensibilities and taste than the modern ones. So after some convincing we switched to B/X, although nowadays what we're playing is probably closer to OD&D.

The name of the blog comes from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, as you might have guessed. I picked it because lately I've come to embrace the farcical, picaresque and waggish aspect of the hobby. Most of my players have a tendency of playing miserly murderhobos and coming up with wildly foolish plans that rarely ever work, so it seemed fitting. As for the Greyhawk part, I don't actually use the setting *per se*; it's more of a metonym for any pseudo-medieval fantasy setting with swords, castles, wizards and elves.

Thanks for reading and all the best.

from the dndmemes subreddit



5 comments:

  1. Welcome! It's nice to have you. Enjoy your games.

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  2. You can never go wrong with Castle Greyhawk, even in name only ;)

    Allan.

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    1. The premise of Gygax's game definitely was a huge inspiration! In my current campaign I'm explicitly trying to emulate his original campaign's structure (tentpole megadungeon next to a town, and the slowly grow the setting around it), I just can't help putting my own spin on everything :)

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  3. "I just can't help putting my own spin on everything"

    That's the sign of a true DM. :D

    And welcome! It's always nice to see people discovering the joys of older editions. Although I love 5E, B/X will always be my "perfect" version of the game. It's so much easier to - as you aptly put it - put our own spin on the system without breaking it. :)

    BTW, regarding your user name: is that Morse code? Looks vaguely like "Tiemat"...

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