Campaign Commentary - Tegal Manor, Castles & Crusades, Mercenaries, Spies, & Private Eyes

So yesterday I reported about my interactions with Timothy Brannan & Jason Vey both of whom are close friends of mine. I can say that I've interacted with them on a regular basis & talked with them. You can read about that right over here. Now for some months I've been running a Castles & Crusades game campaign. To me Castles & Crusades is the OSR done right but the game or neo clone remains controversial in some hobby circles. Its simply BS to me as a dungeon master & my players.


Now that being said I've been using my planar traveling version of the classic haunted house Tegel Manor. The manor is moving into a 'Lost world' location & simply put the reasons for this are economical.


 I'm going to be pulling from many of the public domain  jungle comics & Pulps   from my youth that adopted uncle made sure I read as a kid. A really solid read through is the Brothers of the Spear article by Mark Carlson-Ghost. Now contrast this with the  "Tales From the Code: The Near Extinction of Sheena"  January 25, 2013  By Joe Sergi.  There are some very interesting dichotomies when it comes to the jungle & lost world genre. My campaign setting is gonna focus on the fundamentals of the genre itself as we see from the Lost World genre entry 0f wiki ;"King Solomon's Mines (1885) by H. Rider Haggard is sometimes considered the first lost world narrative.^[2] Haggard's novel shaped the form and influenced later lost world narratives, including Rudyard Kipling's The Man Who Would Be King (1888), Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World (1912), Edgar Rice Burroughs' The Land That Time Forgot (1918), A. Merritt's The Moon Pool (1918), and H. P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness (1931)."
For part of the background I've busted out my Conan D20 books By Mongoose games  to convert & use with Castles & Crusades. There is some lag in certain areas but over all the material looks pretty cross compatible but more as we get into the conversions later on.



Now it seems I'm gonna take some heat for not including in the Amazing Adventures ! Rpg but that's just not true. Pulling from the the Amazing Adventures Manual of Monsters is monster resource that I've used numerous times for games. There are several dragons, serpent, & Lovecraftian creatures I'll be pulling into this game. 

But, but, I can already hear the gnashing of teeth that this style of plane or campaign setting isn't OSR or old school enough. Again this is pure drek & I've already heard that why are you not using X1 Isle of Dread  by David "Zeb" Cook and Tom Moldvay? Well the reason is simple my players know the module way too well. If you don't think that this is OSR enough well I want to mention that Dungeon Crawl Classics adventure  Dungeon Crawl Classics #84: Peril On The Purple Planet pulls lots of influences from both the Lost World Genre & the Sword & Planet pulps respectively. There's a great thread on Reddit about third party DCC supplements that goes deeper into this. 

One of the influences that I'm gonna be pulling from for an old campaign idea that I got for a 'Stranger Things' sort of NPC group from the original Mercenaries, Spies, & Private eyes rpg. Allard Electronics has had its hands into all kinds of interesting deals but back in the Eighties Stormhaven was the center of some very Lovecraftian stuff. Rick Loomis is a friend & he's suffering with cancer there's a go fund me & a very solid bundle of Holding for Tunnels & Trolls as well as Mercenaries Spies & Private Eyes. If you find it in your heart please contribute. Thank you. 

Right now Allard Electronics Tiger Team explorers are in the manor and they might run into our PC's but there's another vile villain already within the manor making his way to execute the PC's. But there's more going on behind the scenes.