OSR Commentary - Beer & Dragons - In the Shadow of Monsters Campaign Set Up

So last night it was beer & getting together with friends for the holidays & lots of talk about old school Dungeons & Dragons, Pulp adventuring, & OSR stuff. The most difficult part is going to be the scheduling on the part of the players. We settled on Castles & Crusades as the in house system but the setting was something else entirely.
 

Two of these players Jan & Steve were in an old campaign of mine which resulted in me findout that there was a louse in my midst years ago. We did a lot of DCC during that time period & it was an interesting ride. But now they want to bring back their beloved PC's. So I'm dusting off my science fantasy campaign 'In The Shadow of Monsters.'..  A decidedly different take on the usual fantasy D&D world. Inspired by the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Jules Verne,etc. Scanlon is a world plagued by magic, doubt, & worse.
The background for In The Shadow of Monsters places a mythic European colony of D&D races down in the bowels of the Inner Earth where they fled during the 'The End  of Magic'. Since then races of pseudo Vikings, barbarians, Europeans, all live in a massive cavern the size of Europe surrounded by an inner Earth sea. These city states are always in an uneasy series of cold wars & peaces over resources & economics of the caverns. This cavern isn't the true inner world however merely another in a series of caves, tunnels, etc. all reaching to the inner world with its true miniature sun & moon. The place is lit by phosphorescence phenomenon that mimics sunlight & lave tubes of incredible complexity.



Elves & Fey exist along side their neighbors with an incredible divide between the two races along with the ancient Pagan gods. Certain caverns lead to other worlds, times, & places. They have black powder weapons  & advanced metallurgy techniques putting them on par with Europe around 1500. But because of the strong magical influence black powder is an iffy propitiation at best. The reason why are the dragons & monsters that use these caverns as nesting sites. They dwell in ruins that were ancient when the first of the peoples were led down into the depths of the Earth.



These dragons sleep for ages & project their minds into the deepest parts of the Outer Darkness & beyond. Hunting & killing the deadly spawn of the Outer Gods that dwell there. They keep the human population safe even on occasion walking among them to take a wife. The unions of such couples become great heroes in their own right. But the dragons know that the true heart of horror lurks in mankind itself.


Chaos & worse lurk on the fringes of Scanlon, there are tribes of marauding barbarians from places like Hubris & from the other worldly caverns where dwell titanic Chaos Godlings and their unsavory cults.

There are terrible dragons dwelling under each of the major cities of the world & many of the wizards of Scanlon are predicting disaster. The signs are starting to appear in the sky of Earth & the auroras are shifting meaning the time of awakening is happening.
This is another world in desperate need of heroes & adventurers, there have been knights & other heroes who have appeared upon the surface world but they have been dismissed as insane or delusional. But now the tremors have started & heroes are starting to gather.


 So I'm going to start rounding up all of my OSR resources & they'll include :

1. The Teratic Tome from Neo Plastic Press  
2. Dungeon Crawl Classics 
3. Labyrinth Lord\
4. Mutant Future rpg  
5. Amazing Advenures rpg 
6. Castles & Crusades  

These are just a few of the OSR resources that I'm going to be using in the coming weeks I'll post more rpg campaign fodder as it comes up. This is comprise with both the fantasy & the super heroic pulp elements..