So why exactly did I want to play a B/X D&D campaign in Kalamar?
Well, the B/X part was pretty easy. I'd already introduced a group of young players to a mix of Holmes and Mentzer's Expert set, but the lack of legal copies of the rules was hampering to some. The release of legal pdfs of B/X made it possible to not just play a good retroclone of D&D (as good as Labyrinth Lord is), but actually introduce the next generation to the game I grew up with.
All I needed was an initial setting for the campaign.
Here, I have to admit, my "gamer's ADD" was the main problem. As I got back into reading the old fantasy novels that I hadn't given away (precious few of the ones I kept were "game" novels, thank God) and started picking up some of the works in Gary Gygax's famed "Appendix N," I found myself veering back and forth between possible settings for the game, from a kind of fantasy version of ancient Israel lying on the borders of a magitek/steampunk empire, to a Borderlands campaign (ala B2: Keep on the Borderlands) set in a medieval Poland based heavily on Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions, to a gonzo fantasy campaign based on Grimm's fairy tales and the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon show . . . I just kept jumping around from idea to idea, map to map. Had I the time, I might have even tried to patch them all together Golarion-style (and my hats off to Paizo for that setting, btw), but the responsibilities of work and family (including a new baby) just weren't giving me that time.
It probably didn't help my limited time that I was during that same period immersing myself in the writings of the various blogs and boards of the OSR: Grognardia, Bat in the Attic, B/X Blackrazor, Blood of Prokopius, the OD&D Discussion Boards, Philotomy's now-defunct site, etc. Had I been able to obtain legal copies of Gary and Dave's original rules, I don't doubt for a moment that I would have started up a game, but alas, I missed the window of opportunity there.
Eventually, it came down to the old addage, "Fish or cut bait." I could spend years studying OD&D, data-mining the rules for clues about its assumed world, philosophizing, endlessly editing my own house rules, and endlessly creating still-born campaign worlds . . . or I could play.
The re-release of the B/X rules settled the rules issue--I could house-rule and create new races and classes to my heart's content, but I had a basic ruleset to start from--but I still had the problem of needing a setting.
I needed a world with a lot of different cultures and situations so that I could indulge my gamer ADD (transitioning the characters from region to region instead of coming up with a new world every week). That leaned against doing Greyhawk, which is pretty much a swords & sorcery mirror-universe of Europe. That's not bad, of course, just not what I needed to satisfy all of my cravings at once.
The Forgotten Realms was a second choice that came to mind. I still have all the materials of my original gray box, though I sadly lost many of the add-ons in subsequent moves. (Losing The Savage Frontier hurts the most, I think.) My biggest problem with the Realms is that after literally decades of novels and modules and a vast overarching metaplot . . . I really don't see any way to make it my own. Granted, I could've just declared that nothing after the gray box was canon, unless I wanted it to be (I liked many of the early novels), but . . .
So that led to me digging back out my Kingdoms of Kalamar material and reading it over. And despite some of the names not really scratching my Tolkien/Greenwood itch, I found myself falling back in love with the setting again.
To be continued . . .
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