"C" is for Campaign Recaps and Statistics

 In the following article I will give you a rough recap of my current campaign and some hopefully interesting stats like the number of deaths and the treasure recovered.

Player Character Accomplishments

The initial campaign was pitched as: “You are prisoners that get thrown into the newly established prison colony. It is called “the pit” and is essentially a 900ft deep crater in the ground. Mages only have limited spells which are tattooed onto their arms. The king wants a metal, galvorn, which is found in the dungeon adjacent to the crater. You have nothing except the clothes on your back. Good luck”

Considering the limited resources, the party has started with, they have done remarkably well for themselves. Over the course of the game, the first 2 Floors of the dungeon have been mostly scoured of treasure, the party has exterminated the resident tribe of cave goblins, and they almost died to ghouls in 3 consecutive sessions at the exact same place in the dungeon (A fact that was not engineered by me but happened through random wandering monster rolls and bad luck). The party is currently digging a secure storage/living space into the side of the crater. About 90% of the required labour is done by the enslaved remnants of the goblin tribe they exterminated. 

The party has found a large part of the treasure hidden on the first two floors of the dungeon. By my rough estimation this should amount to about 30’000 Silver, not counting magic items. This calculation may be somewhat inaccurate because I switched the campaign to the silver standard halfway through. It also does not account for all the experience the party has amassed over the campaign. The fact that I use a stripped down version of class experience from the 2e DMG as well as RAW 2e monster experience which is higher than B/X or 1e, plays a large role in this, I think. I will detail these rules in a later article.

Surprisingly there have not been many deaths on the player character front. Here is a list of the 5 deaths and their causes so far.

1. Pokus, a large gangly wizard played by T., killed by a shadow the party did not detect in session 9. Ate a crit in the surprise round, which killed him instantly. If he had survived, he would have been the first level 2 wizard in the game.
2. Sinatra, a 3^rd level human Fighter played by Na. She got eviscerated by ghouls in an almost TPK, after the party recklessly explored the vast graveyard cave, adjacent to the camp.
3. Velverosa Idrian, an elven wizard/thief (I think at 4^th level of thief and 2^nd wizard, I can’t find the character sheet right now), killed  in session 19, with a brutal critical while fighting in the camps arena. She had 4 HP and a cultist of the crow goddess crit her with exactly 14 damage, this took her from 4 HP to -10 instantly. She did not even have time to bleed out.
4. Veriditas, a young human Fighter played by St. He got executed for murder in session 26 after being caught red handed by a group of camp guards. This should be a lesson to all players who want to enter a blood-pact with an evil sword.
5. Zefix, a 5^th level druid played by A. He died to a system shock check he incurred due to being attacked by a live force draining monster. He missed his 88% system shock check, by 2%. I am convinced that he would have survived if he had not said something akin to “why am I rolling, I am dead anyway” before rolling his dice. 

Player Attendance and Levels

Over the course of the campaign the group has both grown in numbers of potential players (from 5-6 to 14) and shifted organically to an open table format. This has obviously led to some players pulling ahead in experience and in-game knowledge. I have done a rough count of the attended sessions per player and ordered them from high to low. The names are abbreviated.

1.  T. attended 24 sessions and has the longest unbroken streak from session 1 to 23.
2.   P. attended 14 sessions, had the highest level wizard at some point. 3^rd highest streak at 5 sessions.
3.   A. sits in 3^rd place with 12 attended sessions, was also in the possession of the highest level spellcaster, Zefix a 5^th level druid, before dying in session 26.
4.   M. and Na. attended 11 sessions. Na. has the second highest streak at 7 sessions.
5.   S. attended 10 sessions before his character got executed in session 26.
6.   N. attended 6 sessions.
7.  Ma. Mo. and St. attended 5 sessions.
8.   F. L. and Se. attended 2 sessions each.
9.    Lu. attended only 1 session.

There has been both experience gained, and experience lost over the last 28 sessions. Here is a ranking of both alive and dead characters per their total experience. The italicized characters are henchmen.

1. Aelf total experience 21428 XP split into fighter 6680, mage: 3769, thief: 10979
2. Grover ca 13k XP; elven bard   small update: the character has 14474XP
3. Lemi, halfling thief at 9999XP
4. Lem, a human fighter at 6656 XP
5. Bol-Duke, half-orc berserker, 6288 XP
6. Varghild, a human fighter at 5338
7. Arne, human fighter at 4735 XP
8. Elda, a human fighter at 3964 XP
9. Simsala Slim, human wizard at 3700 XP
10. Uludag, a human Fighter/Priest with 3444.5 total XP
11. Morda, a Priestess of Hood (The god of death), at 3284 XP
12.  Bob, a dwarven fighter at 2597 XP

All other characters are either below level 1 or 2, or I don’t have an exact experience count for them.

The dead characters are ranked in the following way:

1. Velv, thief/wizard 10969.5/3902.5
2. Zefix, half-elven druid, 8494
3. Veriditas, human fighter 6916
4. Sinatra, a human fighter 4070
5. Pokus, a human wizard, just under level 2. 

Out of game Time vs In-game Time

We have played for 28 sessions over a period of about 11 months. The bulk of these sessions, 25 to be exact, happened in the months of September 2022 until March 2023.

“In-game” however much less time has passed: The arrival of the first group of player characters in the adventure location, the campaign is happening in, is dated to the 7^th of July 1023 AM (Anno Makosh = Year after the founding of the now fallen human empire). The current date is the 18^th   of November 1023 AM. I switched from the real-world calendar to a custom one (with 4 seven day weeks per month and 13 months) at the first of September, mostly because I kept making mistakes in the normal calendar.

This means that we spent exactly 130 days in the campaign. If we consider the fact that the dungeon was entered in all but 3 sessions, a dungeon expedition was mounted every 5.2 days on average.

Houserules

• The silver standard, inspired by Deltas excellent post about the subject. http://deltasdnd.blogspot.com/2010/05/money-results.html
• Training rules adapted from the 1e DMG but at a rate of only 150 Silver per week of training, instead of the 1500 gold pieces Gygax proposes. I also got rid of the rating system that determines the length of training. Now it simply takes longer depending on the level.
• An abbreviated and amended adventuring gear and weapons chart, custom to my homebrew world: I will cover this in a later article in more detail.
• The Berserker class, mostly inspired from the complete barbarian’s handbook.
• The dungeon crawl procedures, which are quite neutered and hidden in 2e, have been changed to be somewhat closer to earlier versions of D&D, B/X and AD&D 1e to be specific. I will cover the extent of my changes in the next article “D is for dungeon crawling”
• Half-orcs, which are not in the core 2e books, have been adapted from one of the 2e supplements, it might have been Greyhawk, but I am not sure. 

Overall, I am very happy with the campaign, and with the fact that I got to share it with my players. This has been my first “serious” attempt at running an old-school dungeon-crawl, created by myself and not out of a module.

If you made it this far, thank you for reading, and I hope to see you in the next article: “D is for dungeoncrawling.”