You know you’ve some pretty good campaign ideas when it keeps you awake at night thinking about them. Either that, or you’re just a sad, lonely git. My excuse was that I was ill last night, so I was awake anyway.

It’s a mixed blessing to do a campaign via play-by-post. On one hand, I wish I could play around the table like I did in the old days so we could play through things quicker and get through the story in a timely manner. Plus, it just feels right to hear the clink of the dice on a tabletop. On the other hand, play-by-post allows both the PC’s and the DM to take their time, think about things, and describe things in greater detail. I kinda like that.

I only have two players at the moment, with a possible third that may or may not join us. Either way, I don’t really care to have a big group. Two players is acceptable, three would be nice, but four would be the absolute most I would be willing to accept at this point. Any more players than that in a PbP, and things slow down to a crawl (especially combat). I’m certainly going to make things challenging, but I wouldn’t completely overwhelm just two or three players without giving them some kind of aid (magical items, NPC companions, etc). The other factor here concerns quality. I’m only playing with people I know at the moment because I want people who know how to spell things correctly, and who will at least be kind enough to drop me a message if they’re going to be AFK for awhile. The rate of attrition in some of the PbP games is astounding, so I don’t want to go through the rigamarole of having some random new guy create a character only to drop out after just a couple of posts.

The overall ‘goal’ for the campaign is my own idea, but continuing with the theme of modules, I’m going to string together a series of them from my Dungeon Magazine stack. I’ll be liberally changing things around to suit my campaign world, and adding all my own embelishments as I’ve been doing with Cleric’s Challenge. However, I would rather run through these modules than create every adventure from scratch. The reasoning behind that is this: I bought pretty much every issue of Dungeon before it made the switch to 3rd Edition rules, and in that time period I was only able to run three, maybe four modules from literally hundreds and hundreds that were published. This is because for a long stretch of time, it was just my friend Chaz and myself playing AD&D together, and we had to do a lot of solo styled adventures. When I was involved with groups, it was usually a specific type of campaign, so I couldn’t use the modules from the magazine then either. I played in a Forgotten Realms campaign at my local hobby store, I got involved in a Dark Sun and later Ravenloft game with some acquaintances, I played other games like Call of Cthulu, Shadowrun, Boot Hill, et al.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, I’ll finally be able to get some use out of those damn magazines I bought!