RPG Blog Carnival January 2013: New Beginnings

Okay, so Kobold Enterprise is hosting the RPG Blog Carnival for this month.  The theme is "new beginnings", with some starter suggestions of:

• Retcons/New Ages in home brewed or commercial settings.
• Epiphanies about projects and their new directions.
• New starts for characters, or even whole campaigns.
• Insights on the hobby, or aspects of it.

New beginnings is a very interesting topic to me right now, since I'm building a new campaign setting, experimenting with many new games at our Wednesday night group, preparing for the final session of an epic game and thus talking about what's next for that group.  I've already posted about my new campaign and some of our experiences on Wednesday night so I thought I should do something new for the carnival.

So, let's talk about Cressa the Monk.  Back in college I was in an AD&D game run by my friend George.  This was my first exposure to AD&D and my return to the D&D world after my bad experiences with the original masochistic D&D game.  I worried that the game was still the amateurish crap of OD&D, just with artwork done by the author's older, high school brother instead of his younger, middle school brother.  Nevertheless I was attracted to all the different classes available for play in AD&D, as opposed to the very limited opportunities in the Chivalry & Sorcery rules I used.  I decided on a monk, because it was totally unlike anything in C&S and had some cool abilities.  This was Cressa, Monk of Tyche (George used the Greek Pantheon for his game).  We had a great time, with many memorable moments.  Eventually we all graduated and the game became a fond memory.

Fast forward about ten years and I was invited to play in an on-going high level AD&D 2nd Edition game run by Rob.  Since I'd enjoyed playing Cressa (up to 7th level), I thought I'd just convert her to AD&D 2E.  This would be a new beginning for Cressa: new higher level, new magic items, new game world.  Well, this was my first time jumping into a high level game and I really didn't enjoy that aspect of it.  The high level spells, the piles of magic items--it just didn't feel right.  Plus jumping into a long-running campaign was slightly disorienting.  I felt like I'd let Cressa down, sort of like when you convince a friend to take a job and it turns out kind of sucky for them.

So now I'm in another game where I jumped into a long-running D&D 3E campaign, creating a 14th level cleric who is now 19th level.  That campaign has one final epic encounter with the Big Bad Evil Guys and then we'll decide where to go next.  The general consensus is that we'll start something new rather than push on into epic level territory.  So that means a new character.

I was very tempted to once again resurrect Cressa and give her a new beginning.  But I have some other ideas: a male elf boreal Sorcerer, female dwarf hospitaler paladin, male elf fighter (bow), and half-elf human ancestor oracle.  So, yeah, I think I'll leave Cressa where she is rather than forcing another new beginning for her.