Excited About Starter Sets

Moving to a new city is tough for many reasons.  One of those is the loss of your in person RPG group.  Re-establishing one can be very tricky, but I've done it each time I've moved over the last 3 moves successfully.  The trick is to offer to play D&D before you let loose the idea that there are other RPG games out there that you'd like to play.

I answered an ad in a sticker shop looking for players for D&D back in December.  The group needed a DM.  I volunteered and in session 0, I suggested a campaign that would go from 1st to 5th level and end in about 6 months.  At which point we'd revisit.  Everyone thought that sounded good and we began.  This was basically our audition.  Not just mine, but theirs.  We were all testing out if this group of strangers would transition into friends that would play RPGs.

It went really well!  The D&D campaign wrapped up nicely and that's when I gave them the pitch: all three Chaosium Starter Sets, back to back.  They agreed!

Why?  For the past few years I've been getting more and more into Chaosium.  First with Call of Cthulhu, then with Runequest.  I've had some opportunities to run CoC and also run and play in RQG.  I own both starter sets (along with other books, naturally), but with the production of the Pendragon starter set I now have this weird idea: solidify my understanding of these three games and introduce my new friends to them.

Each has stripped down rules that are easy to digest, a SOLO adventure to play through, and 3 scenarios.  A perfect little package for each of them.  My plan is simple: play the CoC starter set, then the RQG starter set, and end with the Pendragon starter set.  This sequence will mimic my understanding/experience with each of the games, and will also be helpful for what I think might happen once we finish.

I’ve been lax with writing up my session reports here, but mostly because I wasn’t all that interested in reporting on how my D&D game was going.  But that is changing now.  I want to document this process and this blog is a fine way to do so.

Each Starter Set will likely take a couple months of gaming to get through, so it is likely this project will finish sometime in December or January.  There is no scheduled release date for any other Pendragon materials but currently the Grey Knight will come out next.  It supposedly will pick up right where the starter set ends (I think?  Details are vague…).  So in my mind as long as it comes out by January, we can tack that on to the end of the Starter Set.  Everything else about Pendragon is very vague right now, but when I explained what the Great Pendragon Campaign was to them, the players all had a look of intrigue and excitement in their eyes.  So who knows?  Maybe once that has been produced for 6e we will launch into it!

Once we've done all three Starter Sets, then as a group we will have preferences and desires as to where to go from there.  My thoughts are a Runequest campaign, and running that after the Pendragon Starter Set (and maybe The Grey Knight?) will be a nice change of pace.  But I'm not in charge!  It's a game group after all… we will all decide together what to play after this Tour de Chaos.