Last weekend, the gaming group I have recently infiltrated finished up our first little trek through fantastical Stone Age Earth (Glaciers & Glyptodons). I'm obv biased because I GM'ed the adventure, but I really do like some of the details I'm left to think about with the game.
Before that, though, let me note some of my own shortcomings as a GM and adventure designer that became obvious during play...
As someone who feels like I take a fairly combat-centric approach in understanding what RPG rules (especially old school rules) are meant to provide for us, I think I might just not be very good at combat! There was at least once in running a skirmish that I was ready to jump right back to the PCs' acting a second time in a row, without even giving the enemies a chance to move, attack, etc. Possibly related to this: I think I tend to load up combat encounters with way too much same-yness, so that they just amount to slogging through attack rolls until we see how the numbers allow things to play out. I say it's possibly related because I also think that part of my issue with running combat is realizing how monotonous they have a chance of becoming and immediately trying to compensate for that by speeding things along as quickly as possible - even if it means I lose control of the order of battle in the process.
Ah, well, lots to reflect on in that rambling...
The game had some huge positives for me, though! First, as a setting I'd been wanting to tackle for a while, the Paleolithic holds a lot of promise for further adventures. The PCs were set up as inhabitants of a region known simply as The Valley, which I intro'ed with this image...
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| Stolen from HERE... |
...and which hardly got any attention except as the background for the adventure's setup. The Valley has a lot left for exploration...and coupling this notion with another area I need to improve on as a GM (the balance between sandbox play and railroading), I would really like to work out some hex crawl guidelines for Glaciers & Glyptodons that go beyond the few wilderness encounters I prepared for this first adventure and provide players with more of a chance to feel like they're interacting with a truly open and dangerous world.
With that said, I do like the high points of the story that was told with this adventure, as the PCs were summoned by the Hidden One (read: Denisovan and/or Elf) Drelon to go on a quest to investigate and possibly destroy a metal(!) ring found near the coast to the west of The Valley. Here's Drelon...
I definitely went as LotR-esque as possible with this setup to emphasize the Stone Age Earth/classic fantasy connection I wanted to see in G&G (heck, "Drelon" is just a barely-rearranged Elrond...😐). However, I was also able to work in another trope I've kind of obsessed over for years at this point...Atlantis! In this adventure, the players were ultimately led (read: railroaded) to the nation of Atlantis, named as the "Island Home" of a dying race of Saurians who possess magic and metallurgy beyond that of the mammalian humanoids that existed during the era.
The end result was a small party of Hidden and Sturdy Ones (Elves and Orcs) helping to defend Atlantis from an invading band of Humans, which nicely set up an invitation from the Saurians to the adventurers to bring more of their kind to the ancient city. This fits into a little mythology I've worked into my headcanon in which explorers/escapees from a multispecies, magical Atlantis serve as an origin for other fantasy realms. It's all stretching, I know, but I don't get a chance to run this kind of stuff very often, so I pulled out as many stops as I could in satisfying the stories I've been telling myself for years...!
Finally, my biggest takeaway from G&G is probably how happy I am that I tried the combo of races in the style of 5E and classes at a LightBox power level. I can't quite put my finger on why I like it so much. Maybe it's that extra bit of flair that 5E races give a character, compared to the...ahem, lighter treatments they're given in Swords & Wizardry Light. Or maybe it's because it lets me look at all of those 5E race options out there in a new light...or even just because it makes Ravnica easier for me to visualize running. Whatever it is, I'm excited to explore it more moving forward, and it seems like an approach that could unite a number of the mini-projects that I've thought about and then ignored on this blog over the years, from running Ravnica, to Light City, to Underground Elemental Beastfighting, to Project 5.5. I'm even tempted to cobble together my own little Fantasy Heartbreaker to ground the other projects. Hopefully more to come on this...!
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