Gygax 75 Challenge Overview and Week 1: The Concept

Ray's Workbook and my brand new Moleskin purchased just for this project

Overview

I love podcasts and I’m constantly looking for new ones to listen to. Recently I’ve been listening to a bunch of podcasters who are part of the audio dungeon discord. Many of these podcasts feel like audio versions of D&D blogs from back in the day. While all of these podcasts have something interesting to share I found myself particularly inspired by a series of episodes by Ray Otus from Plundergrounds on the Gygax 75 Challenge. I strongly recommend going to listen to those episodesnow.

The long and short is that Ray took a cool article Gygax wrote back in 1975 on how to make a D&D campaign and broke it down into easy to follow steps. Ray compiled these steps into a nifty little booklet with examples and advice. What I like about this approach is that it gives you an easy way to achieve measurable goals that can be achieved each week.

My Campaign Journal—Week 1: The Concept

After listening to Ray I was inspired to create my own campaign using his method. So I downloaded his booklet. I wanted to document the process on this blog so check back in for the next five weeks to see my thoughts on how thats going in.

Step one is to create a pitch for the players. Because this is still a work in progress and parts of the writing process will take place later on the pitch is a little bare bones at present. That being said here is mine:

The campaign uses the Swords and Wizardry complete rules and can be summed up as Dungeons and Dragons fused with Alexander Dumas’ Three Musketeers novels. Player characters are free agents seeking fame and fortune, not heroes fighting for King and country. The characters have been drawn to the Human Port City by rumors of plunder and adventure to be had in exploring the ruins of an old island fortress located a few miles out to sea from the cities docks. However the dangers of the dungeon pale in comparison to those who choose to stay in the city and attempt to navigate the webs of intrigue woven by the Great Church and the King, local nobility and the interests of foreign agents.

There is more to this step but in the interest of trying to keep things as spoiler free for the time being I’ll leave things here. I do plan on going more into detail about my thoughts and feelings during each of these steps later on. I hop you continue to follow along!