If you are playing Castles & Crusades, this is an easy one. The modules Troll Lord Games put out are very character-based, with travel, exciting locations, light to moderate dungeons, roleplay, mysteries, and lots of problem-solving.
They feel exactly like how we played the Forgotten Realms in the 1990s and give me that feeling of playing through one of the novels of that time (which we skipped). We always did this mixed travel and story gaming here, which felt more pulp-action, very character based, and with fantastic set-piece dungeons that were more movie sets than the typical OSR mapping hazards.
And Toll Lord has a ton of these presented in a sort of "adventure path format" with five paths you can get to play through, plus one Celtic-themed and many standalone adventures.
I don't have many fond memories of Forgotten Realms modules in the 1990s since most were book tie-ins, many were railroads, and we had fun with whatever the basic set included. I could easily take the characters we loved from the Realms and drop them in here, use the ones from the modules, and have my own world free from the messy history of the Forgotten Realms, plus publisher-supported adventures out on a regular schedule - for this world.
I feel that is my reason for wanting to make the jump away from a "classic gaming" world and move on to a new one. I could keep living in the past with the old Forgotten Realms boxed set or use my time, money, and attention to support a new project with a ton of great art, work, and design put into the adventures and move on. They are writing adventures for this today, and people are making a living off of these, like fresh produce - and the classic stuff will always be there, like canned goods.
I would rather play and share in a space that is a living, actively producing community.
I loved the boxed set collections of the A-Series, they come with maps and all sorts of cool stuff, and they are premium collections and sets to have. There are quite a few of these in print, and they are not that expensive to get them in print with PDF.
The only thing I would add to this world is a classic mega-dungeon to anchor the world. There is a blog that chronicles the classic Barrowmaze dungeon played with C&C, and they are up to 118 sessions now, over 400 hours of play, and 3 years of gaming. Wow. One of these massive constructions is enough for a world and years of gaming, and they are still not through everything in this chronicling. I love Barrowmaze, and it is 95% compatible with C&C; I may just put it in this world when I start playing as a tribute to the other blog recording this adventure.
What Do I Lose?
Well, there are a few characters I would like to keep, and most are pretty relocatable with a few tweaks. I lose the Waterdeep setting; which is not a big loss since we never really based games out of there. Neverwinter, again, is not really a significant loss since we were only up there a few times, and I have the videogames in case I ever want to revisit the world.
We based most of our games around Immersea and Arabel, and finding a nicely mapped and NPC'ed small town would fit the feeling of my game, and I am sure there are plenty of those in the Troll Lord Games modules.
One thing I always felt about the Realms was there was never a strong enough place in the world for other races, such as dwarves, elves, and others. The Realms always felt way too "human" for us, which gave it that classic fantasy feeling, but given the world, I felt a solid elven and dwarven presence was sorely needed. Plenty of drow were there, though. The world felt off-balance.
And if I wanted a reason for the classic Realms characters to be there, I could just say the original AD&D Mystra Goddess of Magic did not die during the Time of Troubles and took a copy of her heroes and left the world in disgust. Ugh. Do not make me talk about the AD&D to AD&D 2e jump and how they messed up and wrecked the world with an official module series. There were clerics of "the assassin god" crying in the street because TSR took their god away, and it just shattered immersion and made it seem like we were playing through a module called "The Satanic Panic 1990: TSR Censors the World."
This is why a lot of the big games these days still suck. They go mainstream, and the mainstream pressures kill the game. The game, because of Wall Street, Twitter, and Hollywood, has to be as noncontroversial and censored as possible to avoid "bad press," and we get these watered down and censored. White-bread games are designed to cause as little controversy as possible from the current crop of complainers.
Anytime a game "goes mainstream," the game is guaranteed to suck later. It happens repeatedly, and the suits will get their hands on it and slowly ruin everything people love about the game. It has never, ever stopped - and this is not new. D&D 6E, meet AD&D 2e, your spiritual partner. 6E will probably be a good edition (we loved 2e), but we knew the game was heavily censored because of pop-culture influences such as Stranger Things and the D&D movie.
And I hope Wizards can break the even-number edition curse this time.
And then the final nail in the coffin for the Realms came during D&D 4, and they nuked the world, advanced the timeline, collapsed the Underdark, and shoehorned in all of the official D&D 4 cosmology races (which have become the game's identity in 5E; any world, these races). A lot of the changes just felt mean and spiteful. The Forgotten Realms was dead, at least to us.
We never adventured in 4E Realms. That place was like Twilight: 2000 to us. A destroyed world that never made the jump into the new regime, and nothing important ever happened there. D&D 4E's default "planar adventures past level 10" did not help either, and the base worlds felt like MMO starting zones.
What Do I Gain?
Well, five incredible adventure paths from Toll Lord Games. A world to drop OSR adventures in, but more of the story and location-themed ones. For the old-school dungeon crawls, I may want to save them for a world built on that type of adventuring, such as a Greyhawk-style world.
Why do two worlds? Why not put everything in one? Just have one world to rule them all?
We always felt a thematic difference between Greyhawk-style worlds and Realms-style worlds. Realms-style worlds are story-based, with sweeping movie plots, fewer mazelike dungeons, and plenty of interesting characters. They have a pulp feel, like classic swords & sorcery adventure movies.
Greyhawk worlds are lost deep in mazelike dungeons. We don't need plots, characters, or pulp action. All we need to know is great treasure is sitting in that hole, and we are taking it for ourselves. Certain OSR adventures are more Greyhawk, and others feel more Realms. If I found those story-style adventures, I would add them to this world in a heartbeat.
Barrowmaze is the exception, but since that dungeon's layout is more distributed across a large area, it feels like a better fit for a pulp game since the dungeons you can find in that massive space are episodic and can have stories woven into them as "the reason to go in" such as a kidnapped priest, lost artifact, or other story reason an important NPC can come up with. I would "pulp it up" to make the mega-dungeon less a grind and clear and use each location as a story setting that ties into events in the greater world.
And since I am playing C&C, I can pull in adventures and dungeons from other OSR games easy.
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