My group has been playing for over a year but our numbers have dwindled some. We use 2e, but with some fairly heavy house rules (such as RC ability adjustments and my own crit tables) The setting is England in the year 997, though he have had romps through the Orkneys and the Holy Roman Empire. Our party currently consists of an English knight, a Danish skald, a Danish thief, and a new PC who will be joining us because the player’s old PC recently died. It is a low-magic setting (but very low level casters are fairly common in the form of hedge wizards) and historical accuracy isn’t very important (the university at Oxford is being founded hundreds of years early, there are dwarves in the mountains, the Danelaw still exists, a dragon lives in Loch Ness, etc…) As a warning, Christianity is firmly in control of England as well as all of Western Europe so PCs will be expected to act accordingly. That doesn’t mean you need to burn witches at the stake, but mind what you say and do as your words and actions may offend the powerful. The party started their adventures by inadvertently starting a Goblin War with, believe it or not, a pot of stew. While fleeing south they then inadvertently sent half a hobbit village to spidery doom, faced a bunch of teleporting nightmare demons, helped recover the bodies of a fallen paladin’s allies from a drider’s lair, rescued the son of a nobleman from bandits, burned down a wizard’s manor (instead of looting it like they meant), failed to stop a man-hunting demon (they were stomping around in the woods while it was attacking the town), dragged a bunch of thousand year old druids to the newly founded Oxford University (a bit early, but I don’t care), accidentaly double-crossed the Knights of St Edmund the Martyr (a secret society dedicated to dethroning Aethelred the Unread), got some bad advice that the man-hunting demon would appear in Bavaria on Holloween, got some good advice that the Spear of Wendel could slay the demon, were turned against each other by the hand of a charlatan-bard, were shipwrecked by the Dragon of Loch Ness, stole the Spear of Wendel from an ogre chief, sailed to the Holy Roman Empire, were attacked and defeated (save one pc) by river goblins, were rescued along with a noblewoman prisoner by that pc going all Rambo on the goblins, defeated the Master of the Hunt in combat (thinking he was the same demon they’ve been hunting all along), spent the winter hanging out and carousing in Germany, returned to England in the spring, finally went to the north and are finally addressing the problem they started at the very beginning of the campaign. Amazingly only 3 PCs have died through all this, despite my best efforts. The half-orc druid bent on turning the tide against Christianity was killed by bandits. The dwarf warrior who replaced him was paralyzed by a poisonous giant frog and mercy killed by the rest of the party who were too weak to drag him out of the swamp, and the mage went insane (and reduced in age to 15) by ingesting multiple potions and after months of insanity is now hanging out on a hill in Bavaria trying to find a way into the spirit world because he was denied entrance when the Master of the Hunt was defeated.
