Session 0: How (and why) it all started!

    WELCOME 

    Howdy adventurers and welcome to my blog!

    I am GoldDigger and I took the liberty to share my thoughts and experiences after I ran a ADnD/OSRIC campaign. Basically the campaign is still running, in a few days we will play session 36 if I am not mistaken (I am not). I hope that they could come to use for someone and if not, I think that they will help me looking back at them as time passes by. But let's start with the basics.

     WHAT IS THIS BLOG ABOUT?

     That's a fair question! I am basically a guy who entered the hobby of TTRPGs through 5e. Even to this day, 5e is the TTRPG that I have played the most, however I am sure that in a few months OSR will have surpassed it, since I am running an OSRIC campaign and participate in two other ADnD campaigns, all of them being weekly. I decided to make that shift because while I had a great time playing 5e, the lack of competitiveness and challenge made me search for something new.

    That new thing of course was the OSR community. I 've read many rulesets and blogs, reddit posts with countless responds etc and I really fell in love with the concept. Soon enough, I joined a few discord servers and after I downloaded many free rulesets and bought some that weren't free, I started playing! I tried many systems, mainly Whitehack, OSE and KnK (a greek game inspired by odnd). After that I wanted to try running a campaign to experience how to referee an old school game. I have ran a lot of 5e but nothing OSR.

    So a year and a half ago I decided to give it a try. I picked OSRIC as the system and Tomb of the Serpent King as the module. It felt more complete in my eyes as it had tables and advices for more aspects of the game and since I was inexperienced it would be more helpful. The session didn't go very well, however I tried again a few weeks later with another willing party. Since I wanted to try old school gaming, I decided to use OSRIC but this time to try running an original TSR module. I picked U1 and we had a blast. The party managed to finish the module after 4 sessions and wanted to continue but back then I wasn't ready yet to try something more than a module.

    Time passed by however, and since I was a regular player in a great campaign with some locals, I decided to try again. Continuing with the strategy that worked, I wanted to test more TSR modules with OSRIC. So, I posted an add looking for players in a discord server and soon enough I had a party on my hands.

    I didn't know how all this would work out. My plan was to just try out modules, so it should be a series of small adventures, perhaps with different parties. I was inexperienced and I wasn't sure if that would turn out to a campaign, plus I would have to find a way to make it work in English, which I am sure you have noticed is not my native language.

    The results were great, against all odds and my pessimism! We started with T1 and once we finished it the party wanted to continue and now the campaign is going strong!

    What I want is to write down my experiences in order to organise them and perhaps offer a few advices to guys who are in a similar position. So, you won't find gaming theory articles, reviews and things like that. You will find session reports of my campaign, where I will note down what I 've prepared, what happened, how many xp and loot the party took and what tips I can give myself (and you) from this!

    I hope you will enjoy! Let the adventures begin!!!