Wednesday, November 2, 2022

One Hundred Sessions and the Challenge Challenge

My Monday night Star Wars group on Roll20 took the night off on Halloween, so the parents of younger kids could escort them the the sugary chaos of trick-or-treating, but it was also a celebration of sorts.  

Last month, we completed our 100th episode of the core campaign.  We've rolled through characters, we've had drama, we've had horror, and we've had a ton of absurdity (We don't talk about the musical numbers or the Kurabandan mini-campaign that's not included in the hundred.), but it's a testament to each member of the zany crew that I've GM'ed along the way.  Now our dear readers won't get a chance to read this episode until the end of July 2023, but I assure you, there's very few original bones in my body of work, and it's intentional.  

Three years ago, I first posted about the concept of the "Challenge Challenge" :  Running games and attempting to mine as much material out of Game Designer's Workshop's house organ that I possibly could.   

As a teenager, it wasn't the new books (I couldn't always afford) that changed my campaign.   It was the monthly issue of Dragon that always skewed my perspective of my campaign,  New charts, new concepts, new "Ecology of" articles altered the way I played D&D, much more than a fresh issue of Dungeon.  Even if the various themes couldn't always be implemented, I was easier affected by them than a Level 1-3 module, then 7-9, then 12-15, plus and Oriental Adventures one.  

Fast forward, and there are such a variety of games included in Challenge that it seemed much more fun than most.  

I've written this before, but upon compiling the list of usable material by issue and by system, I realized that Challenge started with Issue #25.  After setting the Traveller scenarios, NPCs, equipment, and metaplot for use in my Star Wars campaign, I rediscovered the location of issues #1-24.   Those are all labelled for the Journal of the Traveller's Aid Society (JTAS) and obviously are exclusively Traveller material I needed to convert. 

To correspond with the 100th session, I'm also happy to say I've milked ten issues of JTAS/Challenge as much as I possibly could.  Between Challenge #25-29 and JTAS #1-5, there were 32 articles I could mine/convert to Star Wars d6.  Of those, I used 24 of them within the game,  7 I couldn't use in the current campaign structure, and I have one NPC waiting to be used, and one creature awaiting the return of a popular recurring NPC to make an appearance.  

We've had discussions about trying up some of the storylines and trying a new game over the winter for a few weeks/months/forever, and resuming things in the spring, or perhaps running a different type of Star Wars campaign.  Either way, I've got JTAS #6-10 reviewed and documented for use, on top of the existing campaign plot lines, Star Frontiers and old West End modules, with the campaign calendar moving closer and closer to 1BBY  and added complications and heartbreak.

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