OSR Commentary -B4 The Lost City By Tom Moldvay & The Legacy Of Vengence Of A Sword Dancer named Araa.

There seems to be any number of Dungeons & Dragons & Advanced Dungeons & Dragons first edition purists out there. That's fantastic! The number of people purportedly playing the 'grand game' regardless of edition is up! The 'North West Texas 2019' rpg convention just happened. By all accounts it was a huge success. Congrats to all of the friends that went. I'm really happy that it came off without a hitch. But like so many I'm not so much interested in what happened at the convention as what's coming outta of it. The OSR flows from the creative minds & backbones of the players at these conventions. Glad everyone had a great time! Meanwhile, I've been quite busy with job & work. Doing sewing machine repair work & we've been quite in demand. Getting requests for all things sewing & sewing machine related. But I've taken some time to talk with Alicia one of my players from 2009's Adventurer, Conqueror, King rpg game that we were in together. Alicia played a fourth level  Cossack sword dancer  named Araa. Much of Araa's background came from another OSR book Brian N. Young's The Codex Slavorum from Troll Lord Games.  In case your wondering if their is a loose conversion between Castles & Crusades & ACK's? Got ya covered! 


She & her husband Rick stopped in this afternoon to chat & play catch up. I mentioned cracking out the Clark Ashton Smith Zothique material & her ears perked up. Araa's got a score to settle with a Zothique wizardess when her family was sold into slavery. Since then she's been on a 'red blood' road of revenge. Its taken her from her native proto Slavic country to Hyperborea then to Zothique but her vengeance was never attained! We left our little group in a small village on the outer banks of a dead river. The wizardess is still operating out one of the numerous cavern complexes that was left unmarked from Tom Moldvey's B4 The Lost City. 

The wizardess is a throwback to the older & far more Lovecraftian animal headed cults of B4 The Lost City. The Dungeon Master's Guide to Cynidicea  A rules supplement for use in any Mystara(tm) campaign from the Vaults of Pandius site has some excellent ideas on this & other great B4 hooks that can be exploited. The lost city of the module exists in any number of realities & settings including Zothique. Why? Because the corruption of Zargon needs to be spread across the planes.

I replaced  the Yuan Ti with serpent men & heightened the roll of the Aboleth in the lower levels below the pyramid. There's lots of potential here but the Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea connection is too strong to ignore in the player's minds. But which faction is the corrupt wizardess serving? I've got to contact some other folks & see if they want to resurrect this game? There a lot of prep work that I've got to do. Then there's the whole idea of scheduling. For the moment there's a lot of watch this space that's been in the air lately.