What am I playing right now

I guess this is more an exploration of why I am playing what I am playing…

A little over a year ago my long running game ended (what would turn out to be) abruptly.

One player got busy, then another moved away, then I got busy, then 2 more had life changes.

Oddly Covid is what breathed new life into gaming for me. I made an off hand comment on social media, and a week later I had 3 players on Skype for a game.

This game came together quickly, was going to played over video chat (which was all new to me), and 2 of the players were all new. I knew I needed something easy to get into and run, something without the need for a battlemat to run combat.

So, long story short, I broke out my home made retro clone and stripped some of the fiddly bits out. The system, which we call “Redbox Revisited” (So Original), started almost 20 years ago and has seen several major revisions as my sensibilities changed.

Currently it consists of the standard 6 abilities scores with unified modifiers, Humans, Dwarves, Elves, Hobbits, and 3 classes (Warrior, Sorcerer, and Rogue). Resolution is your standard d20 plus modifiers vs Target number. The spells currently use Delta's OED Book of Spells, which is very nice distilling and standardizing of original D&D magic user spells.

I will probably post more about the system and its past and future iterations another time.

Having no idea if this was going to work, or last, I wanted to use something basic and self contained as the setting. So I pulled out Dyson’sDelve (link) which is a nice small set of dungeons stacked atop one another. I also grabbed his Baraloba maps and plopped the whole thing into Hyperbora, using the events of Taken from Dunwich as a hook to explore the delve.

We are now three months in, the characters are about to hit level 3, and confront one of the big bads. I can’t say how much longer it will go for, but it really informs how much you can distill the game down and still have a good time.