The Arthurian Twist - Arthurian Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea Campaign Set Up

Steve blew back in town over the weekend & I got a chance to speak with him about his new Michael Moorcock inspired Arthurian campaign!  This old school style campaign  merges Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea & Deities & Demigods!

So I spent the weekend with some friends at one point on Saturday playing Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea. Then Sunday I got together with some friends for a beer, once again Steve & his crew of miscreants were bending my ear about their game of AS&SH up in the upper part of  New York state. Apparently he's busted out his copy of the original 1st edition Deities & Demigods making an unholy merger of Stormbringer mythology, Celtic, & Arthurian then merging it with AS&SH. This isn't the first time I've heard this bedtime story and it goes all the way back to when I merged Chaosium's Pendragon with their version of Stormbringer. 

My apologies to the wonderful Hill Canton's Pendragon D&D campaign, but this isn't that sort of an merger. No, Steve's Arthurian campaign is a straight up crossover with the Moorcock's Warhound & The World's Pain in which  the characters are drawn into the unholy land of the machinations of a sorcerer whose seeking to block the Von Bek family in their search for the 'grail'. 

The PC's are drawn the scraying pool of an alternative version of Merlin & sent off on a mission to deal with the forces of the sorcerer. They've had interaction with the Deities & Demigod's version of Arthur and a few of his knights, the Celtic gods, & some the more dangerous aspects of Elric himself.  This version of Merlin has proven to be far more unpredictable then the PC's at first realized adhering to the 'Neutral Good' aspect of his NPC alignment in many ways. He's sent the party into harms way in Hyperborea &  Underborea a few times. The players are not sure what his connection is to Clark Ashton Smith's mythos but I know Steve and its not going to be pretty. The fact is because of the lower levels of the NPC's in Deities and Demigods they're at the absolute pinnacle of character classes in AS&SH which is right in line with that system.

I was able to weasel out a few details over beer on Sunday such as the fact that Steven has been taking many of the giants, trolls, etc. from the first edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons monster books such as the Fiend Folio, The Monster Manual, & The Monster Manual II & the dreaded Creature Catalog. There has been planar travel & run in or two with a crew of giant troll mercenaries who really loath some of the party. There are eight players in this game & all of them are experienced players with long pedigrees in New York state, Vermont, and Canada. The party is a mix of Roman cataphracts , Hyperborean thieves, Amazon warriors, outlaws, wizards,Keltic necromancers,warlocks, & cut throats. In other words the party is sort of the scum of the Earth /damned souls one and all !

Giant troll (Russ Nicholson, AD&D Fiend Folio, TSR, 1981)

There have been two party wipes so far but this seems to make the players all the more eager to get into the next part of the adventure. They're next mission is the recovery of a certain set of nails from a fortress in Arabia. More to come as I pull out more details from Steve C.