OSR Commentary - Dragon tree Press's Delos Campaign Setting & Veterans of the Supernatural Wars

 

One of the events that's happened over the weekend is myself & the gang of players  getting together for a beer. The biggest problem getting together has been playing around everyone's work schedule. Back in the day we did quite a bit of adventuring on the world of Delos. The shores of Delos border many pan dimensional realms . It's a place that borders Arduin, Narnia, Fairyland, Oz, and many other worlds. There is more of the touch of Faerie here. More on that in in a hot minute. Delos comes from the pens of Ben & Mary Ezzell.

From the Dragon Tree Home page : 

"Delos is a planet near neighbor to that best of all worlds which is Arduin^®, and doth much traffic therewith. However the mana here is richer and more erratic, and the Theologian Newton describes it thus:

Here they need not store nor hoard their mana for it floats rich in the air for all, and nay they cannot hoard it for it slips and slides and sputters, all in and out of the Mage and the air and the ground and the Shadows. And here they cast and cast and there is no lack...and no grievous burden on the Mage to draw it neither. But as the mana slides about so often slide the spells and so they miscarry to the shame and sorrow of all....

American mages name this mana as 'Percentage and Fumble System'. The casters have aplenty to work with but tis like steering a ship in a storm or runaway horses, and caster's skill is all to turn it as he wishes and he fails to his woe.

Like Arduin^®, Delos hath never built fireish machines but offtimes spaceships land here from the techno worlds and trade their goods or mayhap are robbed of them, and starrish beasties leave ship to roam in our woods. And here Multiversal can sell many strange goods from many strange worlds, but some they cannot sell because of the Prime Directive. And the rich living mana hereabouts offtimes sparks cross-Shadow making natural gates as those from England to Narnia, whence persons come through by mental inclining from many strange Shadow-worlds and times, by the strength of their hearts' desires."

The whole cloth idea of Amazon Mutual is that deceased adventurers bodies would be recovered for resurrection by various temples & organizations to bring the dead adventurers back to life. Adventures with or on Delos often crossed into the ' modern Earth' of our old original Dungeons & Dragons games which often involved Arduin. Delos was its own campaign setting back in the early 80's. The problem as DM Steve reminded me about tonight. The villian of our early adventure from '82 still exists. The undead  Pharoah Ka Su servant of Nyarlathotep wiped out our party! So the bastard is still out there & only two of our players were the lone survivors. This villian was a murderous stalker who would not rest until it gained its revenge. 

Flash forward to now with Veterans of the Supernatural Wars rpg that's now an ongoing campaign. Could Ka Su be behind the recent events within the on going Veterans of the Supernatural Wars campaign?! 

Can we get away with adding in these Dragon Tree Press & Adruin elements into an on going B/X Dungeons & Dragons campaigns that uses Veterans of the Supernatural Wars rpg. The fact is that variety may be the spice of life but OSR gaming thrives on consistence of play. Bottom line?! We'll have to see how this plays out in the coming months.One thing we did notice is what a genius David Hargrave's genius. Hargrave adapted so many weird tales style elemenets with Tolkien like high fantay within spiting distance of each other. Hargrave knew how to make all of these elements work together easily. That takes some incredible skill to pull this style of campaign off.