Playing with other people's toys

I'm still running my Labyrinth Lord game every other week or so. The group started in the Keep on the Borderlands, which I placed in Greyhawk on the southern edge of the territory controlled by Verbobonc. So far, the group has dealt with some bandits, a group of marauding orcs, a small ban of lizardmen, and the mad hermit. They've explored some of the ruins of Quasqueton, discovered a pair of towers with an extra-dimensional gate connecting them, and travelled to a neighboring town in search of information and more spells for the magic-user's spellbooks. Most recently, the halfling thief came under the effect of a geas spell and took the party off in the middle of the night to recover some water from a ruined temple to heal a reclusive wizard as payment for those spells. They've gained a few allies, turned away from others, wiped out some enemy factions and let other enemies live to fight another day. The group is starting to realize that I will let them do whatever they want in the sandbox and that the world will just keep reacting to whatever they decide to do.

So far for this campaign, I've used parts of three printed Basic modules from TSR, one TSR AD&D module, three adventures from Dungeon, a couple of 3E splatbooks, the World of Greyhawk folio and boxed set, a couple of references from the Living Greyhawk campaign, a little background from three different 2E boxed campaign supplements, an antagonistic race from Mystara, and maps from all over the place. And that's just from a few months of gaming!

Earlier tonight, they started exploring some catacombs under a ruined temple dedicated to Pelor and encountered some immature chuuls and a few other creatures in thrall to some unknown evil. I based the surface map on the ruins in an old adventure from Dungeon magazine ("Orange and Black" from issue 66). The catacombs are based on a map that someone posted on the Old School Gamers group on Facebook a couple days ago. The NPCs in this particular arc come from the Thieves World books that were published in the 80s, stories of settlers in Indiana and Kentucky around 1775-1800, Neville Chamberlain, a couple of Lovecraft stories, and an old Moon Knight comic. The chuul and the elder evil the party ran away from at the end of tonight's session came from one of the later 3E splatbooks.

I had plenty of ideas for what was going to be in the catacombs a few weeks ago. Today I decided to sit down and write it all out and expand it using the random dungeon stocking tables from the LL book. I stocked the dungeon and wrote everything on a single page in about 3 hours this afternoon. I was able to do that because I borrowed freely from so many sources and just ran with whatever seemed good at the particular time I was stocking each room.

It's not a developed and polished dungeon. It's fairly simple, really. But the players seemed to have a good time playing, and I definitely had a good time running. If I had worried about polishing everything and trying to create something completely new, I would have driven myself crazy and had nowhere near as much fun. I've seen plenty of people come down against using published adventures and stolen stories and characters. I am definitely coming down the other way. I'll take anybody's toys I can! As long as I can keep things fun and interesting, who cares where the ideas originated. My players and I are having fun with the Frankenstein's monster of a campaign we've created. That's all that matters.

Once the players get through some of the things they're doing now (and assuming I can get permission from some of the mappers I've borrowed maps from), I'll post some of what I've done so you can see it. In the meantime, I'm off to check out more stuff to incorporate into the game.