20th Year of my Ongoing D&D Campaign

I missed posting about this on the actual day last month, but May 19th, 2021 marked the 20th anniversary of my World of Samoth campaign. I blogged a bit about the history of the campaign in 2015. In that post, I showed pictures from my "Campaign Setting Notebook" which is where I kept all of my original hand-written notes, scraps of paper, dot-matrix printed pages, and drawings, some of which I re-wrote into the notebook and many that I just glued inside. Those notes and drawings will help you see how the world came into shape in the nearly 13 years that I worked on the world before actually using it as the basis for a campaign. 

Looking back through my old posts, I think I either haven't talked about how and why my actual campaign started, or it's at least been long enough that it probably bears repeating, but, after having actually worked on my campaign world from roughly 1988 until 2001, I finally had the opportunity to use it as a backdrop for a game when worked on advertising for Wizards of the Coast and was put in charge of their account by the agency I worked at, right around the time 3E had come out. Although I was familiar with earlier editions of the game, I hadn't looked into 3E at all, and none of my co-workers whom I oversaw had played the game before. One of my co-workers, Malinda, suggested that I run a game for our group so they could see what it was like, and the client sent me the 3E core books, along with the beginner's boxed set, the Star Wars D20 RPG, and the Invasion of Theed boxed set (for Star Wars) so we could get familiar with the games. I quickly began converting my old AD&D stuff to 3rd Edition, without actually realizing at first just how completely different they were, and joined a friend's 3E game as a player to help familiarize myself with the rules and style of play, and then about three months later, I started my World of Samoth campaign with module B6: The Veiled Society (originally written for what has come to be known as the BECMI version of the game from 1983) as our first adventure. 

Over the years, I've incorporated a mix of older adventure modules (B6 and also B7: Rahasia) along with a few 3E adventures from WotC and 3rd Party as well as from the WotC Website (notably, Crucible of Freya, Speaker in Dreams, the Alchemist Eyrie, the Burning Plague, and Wizard's Amulet) as well as the huge mega-campaign, the Banewarrens (by Monte Cook), and in later years, incorporated bits and pieces from 3.5 adventures from Dungeon Magazine (too many to count).  

For today's anniversary celebration, I thought I'd show off pictures from my other campaign notebook, which I used for actual game play. This notebook includes tabs for each player character, which includes a copy of their character sheet and print-outs of email exchanges I've had with them between sessions about their characters, as well as sections for my house rules, character building guidelines, history, religions, and more. I used this notebook quite extensively for about the first 10 years or so, but these days I tend to rely more on electronic records because the volume of paper was just too overwhelming and often times we didn't play at my house and lugging this huge notebook around became a chore. 

While this campaign is still "active," we unfortunately did not play at all last year primarily due to stay-at-home orders (I really don't like trying to play tabletop RPGs online) but even before that, as the DM, I did hit a bit of a funk with running the game as the characters were 19th level and I was finding it difficult to challenge them any longer in combat. When a PC can dish out 300 points of damage on a round and whose AC is so high that minions can't really hit them, combats became frustrating for me and planning for my sessions stopped being fun and became something I really didn't look forward to. I'll get back in my groove and figure out a way to wrap up the campaign, and I've already put many of the lessons I learned from running this game into the campaign I'm running for my daughter and her friends to make it more fun for me as a DM. 

The pictures from my campaign notebook are below. If you want to read more about the World of Samoth, you can click on the tag I just linked, and also in particular check out these posts: 

• Design Decisions (these get into specific game mechanics for my campaign, like my choices about which races and classes and use, how I handled magic and religion, etc.)
• Early Designs of the World of Samoth
• The First Two Session Recaps
• Early Documents for the World of Samoth 
• The Noble (a Pathfinder PC class I created for my game)
• Game World Inspirations (these all talk about how I adapted and borrowed, or was inspired by a different creation and incorporated all or parts of it into my campaign world):
• World of Conan (the Marvel Comic)
• The "Known World" (from 1981 Basic/Expert D&D)
• General Overview of Inspirational Fictional Game Worlds (books, movies, TV, comics)
• World of Greyhawk
• DL5: Dragons of Mystery
• Liavek (a shared world anthology novel)
• Shogun (TV mini-series)

In addition, you can visit my Campaign Website that includes a lot of information including session recaps and new rules for D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder (feats, skills, classes, and custom races) and more. I haven't updated it forever but the first 10 years or so of the campaign are pretty well documented there. 

This is an old drawing I made around 1988 or so.
It was based on an image from adventure module
X5: Temple of Death. I put it on the cover of
my World of Samoth notebook. 

This just gives you an example of all
the tabs I have in my notebook to keep
track of stuff. Sometimes I'm almost
too organized. 

Here's a map I made as a handout. As I recall, it's 
based on the map for Module B6: The Veiled
Society, but I changed it and distressed it a bit. 

A page from the Campaign Primer I sent to the 
players before we started, to give them context
for the kind of game I was wanting to run. My 
expectations weren't really met, as I had envisioned
a very low-magic world, something between the 
Sword & Sorcery of Conan with a more advanced 
technology of the late Renaissance. The 3E system at
the time didn't handle that style of play very well.  

Notes from a "Character Builder" I sent the players
to help them ground their characters in the world. 
In hindsight, I sent them way too much information.
There was no way I should have expected them to 
read it all. 

Another document I created to help my players 
create their characters. When 3E came out, WotC
published a book called the "Hero Builder's Guidebook."
I used that as a model and created this supplement to 
that book that was specific to my game world. It 
was really long and covered how each different class 
might integrate into each different country & continent
of my campaign world. 

A page from what I called the "Chronicles of
Morlund Estrelle." He was sort of my version 
of Eliminster from the Forgotten Realms, except
he wasn't a wizard, but rather just an historian. 
I presented in-game lore in the form of this in-world
book Morlund was writing about the history of Samoth.
I put in a ton of clues about mysteries the PCs could deal
with in the game, but quickly realized that none of the
players had read it. I no longer do this kind of thing but
instead do things like the "Job Board" at the tavern 
to provide in-game lore and clues. 

Religious Titles and mechanical benefits for
Clerics of one of my campaign world religions.

How do you all keep track of your campaign world notes and plots? Have any of you run or played in a 20-year campaign? Leave a comment below. 

Hanging: Home office (laptop)

Drinking: Tap water

Listening: "Castles Made of Sand / Little Wing" by Tuck & Patti, from the album "Pure Tuck & Patti"