The week before Origins a new campaign kicked off for my local gaming group with the Star Wars Edge of the Empire game coming to an end. There was a bit of discussion, I pitched an OSR game (Swords & Wizardry or Labyrinth Lord). Well, I sort of pitched an OSR game. I pitched a rules system. The other GM in the group pitched a full on game and dangled his homebrew world out there for it, Tellus. The rule system would be Pathfinder.

Pathfinder won out. I was a little nervous. Frankly, Pathfinder has taken on a bit of an overwhelming feeling for me. Lots of feats, wacky character races, character classes – some of the same things that burnt me out on D&D 3.5.

Don’t get me wrong, I like Pathfinder. Just a lot of my recent interests have been with the OSR type systems where things feel a little lighter. But the group had spoken!

Character Gen

I decided to put a self-imposed limit on myself and stick to just the core rulebook and the Advanced Players Guide. That helped keep things a little more manageable for me. Way fewer rulebooks to peruse and I already have strong familiarity with those two books.

I am not into the more unusual races or even character classes for the most part. So I went with a Dwarven Paladin for this game. We were allowed to have legacy characters that tied back to some of our characters from previous campaigns in this world (the current group started in Tellus back in 2005, the GM that runs it for much, much longer than that).

So I whipped up a Dwarven Paladin (thanks Hero Lab!) and started to get excited for the first game night.

The Campaign Begins

The first night has us running some errands for Lord Phillip (the offspring of a character run by a player who has since moved away). Check on the status of a village, cement relations there and just general get a feel for the lands to the south and bring some stability to the region.

Before the night was over we ended up in a quarry which I quickly recognized as the Caves of Chaos from Keep on the Borderlands. It was a fun romp and I appreciated that the GM was running some of the old school modules.

It looks to be a promising campaign!

I will post periodic reports from the campaign and how it feels putting the old Pathfinder gloves back on!