I recently pivoted my almost-two-year OD&D open table to two different open table campaigns, this one, a sort of eldritch, dark fantasy game inspired by stuff like Averoigne, Berserk, We Are All Legends, Lovecraft, and plenty more, titled “Chronicle of the Cosmic Wound,” and a campaign of Gradient Descent. Eventually I’ll write a retrospective on the OD&D game, but for now I’ll go over Cosmic Wound’s session zero, and the hour or two we got to play before our time limit was reached.
I pitched Cosmic Wound as a dark fantasy setting I’ve been working on for some time, although “lower” magic than the OD&D game we had been playing, with a higher emphasis on stuff like Hammer Horror and some Cosmic Horror stuff. To serve this premise, as well as to hopefully address some of the open table issues I was having, I decided to turn the BRP nob on my home system WAY up, using effectively a homebrewed version of OpenQuest 3e, plus some Dark Ages Cthulhu and Mythras material in it.
My players had all voted for this game via a pitch doc where I outlined the CATS of the game – so they were at least familiar with the pitch. Here is the text of that pitch content:
continue reading