There is a rumor of an empire, ancient and lost to time. An Empire ruled by three perfect women who could never do wrong, and who would never die. And though they were beautiful, ageless, and merciful, the kingdom that grew around the Triarchy was the most monstrous yet made. A tyranny of torture and pain that could never end while the three immortal sisters lay at its center like pearls in a poisoned shell. Until one day it did. The women disappeared and were never seen again. The Empire slowly faded and fell, leaving only a memory, like a nightmare recalled at dawn.
System and Characters
We will be playing using the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons (first edition) rules, as of about 40 years ago (the DMG is from 1979). Nothing from the eighties or later. We’ll get together and roll up characters using the “4d6, drop one dice and use in any order” method, with a re-roll allowed if you have no 16+ and a re-roll required if you have two 18s. Standard rules about allowable combinations, multi-classing, max stats and alignment.
Campaign Premise
The premise of the campaign is that you play a character who wants to explore the Maze, and is willing to work with anyone else who also wants to do so. If one character is a roguish type who stole the painting and another the paladin who is arresting them, both characters must be willing to work together once drawn into the plot.
Genre and Tone
This is a dungeon crawl, but it’s a somewhat weird one. It does not use standard D&D deities and cosmology and there is actually a large cast of characters and powers that you can learn about, so note-taking will be good. But you don’t need to know anything up front. As an old-school sort of game, death is very likely, so don’t worry too much about character backstory, just go with motivations and attitudes. The game is not a combat-fest, unless the players make it so. The maze does not have obviously noticeable difficulty levels, so, especially early on, any encounter might be with a hideously powerful creature; some wandering monsters will trivially kill a starting party.
We’ll use fairly standard rules for XP, but I’ll make sure not to penalize peaceful solutions. Not sure how fast we’ll progress. Treasure is strewn through the dungeon, as are means of trade and exchange, but you’ll have to find them. Resource management will be an issue, so we’ll check encumbrance limits.
As always, though, since the purpose is to have fun, if we find any rules that prevent fun, we’ll adjust on the fly.
Onwards and inwards!