New Campaign: Beowulf on the Borderlands

Beowulf of the Borderlands is a working title for a campaign I'm currently prepping using Swords & Wizardry White Box. I've always had this idea in the back of my head of building a campaign to run with my kids, plus anyone else who happens to be around and up for a game of D&D.

The idea would be to make a pretty standard D&D setup: A central dungeon and a small wilderness area around it. The campaign would start out bare bones but would gain detail over time as the kids explored and made their own impact on the world. Ideally, in ten years or so, I'd have this binder containing a full dungeon and campaign fleshed out by actual play via my kids and I. Sort of a D&D-geek family heirloom.

Pictured: Prop Heirloom


My biggest struggle was choosing what version of D&D to run. I have a spiral bound edition of B/X that I put together myself, a hardcover of the Rules Cyclopedia, and just about every retroclone in either print or PDF format. Plus, there is always 5E, which I'll admit is probably my second favorite version of D&D next to the various flavors of Basic.

I decided to go with White Box because it's the closest I can find to vanilla OD&D, but it's organized in a much easier-to-grasp fashion. As much as I love my original D&D PDFs, they are not exactly the best version for trying to teach D&D to someone under 10. Plus, White Box begs for house rules, and this campaign is going to have a bunch of them, although mostly house rules of a flavor-adding variety.

I'm a full-time college student, so I needed to something to give me a head start and not run the risk of stalling out because of workload. Thus, I decided to use the Caves of Chaos from Keep on the Borderlands fame...but with a few twists. First of all, I'm not using the original map from the Caves of Chaos, but this reworked version done by 0One Games. The neat benefit is that, while it's reminiscent of the original, it's just different enough to through off any Grognards that may or may not hypothetically join in the fun down the road.

Secondly, I'm not going to use the Keep itself, but rather this map by the illustrious Dyson Logos. I'll be making great use of random charts to populate both the dungeon and the wilderness around it. I'll be building it all around what I think is a pretty fun Anglo-Saxon sort of theme. Additionally, I'll be publishing my thoughts along the way here on this echo-chamber of a blog, mostly for my own reference but also as incentive to keep working on things.

We'll see how things go, but as of right now I'm pretty excited. I think the kids are going to have a lot of fun with this one.

Yes, sort of like this. Maybe no Demogorgon



NEXT TIME:
Campaign Concept (Or, What Do You Mean by Beowulf on the Borderlands?) 

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