Deep Carbon campaign - Session 1: the Prepening

Session 1: We made characters.

That was our whole first session.  I felt bad about it.  My brain was all sleep deprived and slow that day, so I wasn't much help speeding things along.

I'd forgotten how long character creation takes in 2nd edition.  I probably should have made some pregenerated henchmen beforehand.  Having everyone make multiple characters just took way too long.  All the players flipped through the splat books and picked out kits for their PCs, and that slowed things down for sure.  Proficiencies took a while to sort out too.  The henchmen didn't get kits or proficiencies and had to make due with secondary skills instead.  It all took up way too much time, and we didn't even run an encounter that night.  Oh, and I decided to try out some Last Gasp Grimoire style encumbrance, so making all those item squares took extra time as well.

I made some 2nd edition character sheets for use with the new encumbrance system.  These are mostly just copy/paste mashups of other peoples work.  Honestly, I don't even recall where that character sheet came from originally.  I did some redesign work to make it 2nd edition compliant and must have copied over the original.

This all works mostly as described at Last Gasp.  You're unencumbered if you don't have any dead weight stuffed into backpacks and satchels.  If you are carrying laden packs and you're packed items are less than your Strength score you are lightly encumbered.  If you packed more items than your Strength and Constitution combined then you are severely encumbered.  It's fairly lenient I think considering those 15 unencumbered slots.

I'm more interested in the bit about attacks hitting items and item breakage.  Instead of opposed attack rolls as detailed at Last Gasp, I'm doing the standard d20 vs. AC thing so I ended up renumbering those item slots a bit.  If a character is hit, they roll a d6 on the Armor row to see which item was hit.  This armor row is reserved just for suits of armor, shield, and bits and bobs like helmet and gauntlets.  You'll still take full damage, but we'll also check to see if that item is damaged as well.  If the result is an empty slot then only the PC is being damaged.  If a 6 was rolled then you roll another d6 on the Loose Items row.  If that is also a 6 then you roll a d6 again on the Held & Protected row.  If you end up rolling three 6's in a row then you've tumbled out of the way in the knick of time and that hit becomes a miss instead.

I'm excited to try this out.

In addition to all the packs and item squares I downloaded from Last Gasp, I also made up this sheet of item squares to represent the backpacks themselves.  These will get stuck onto the character sheet above so that the character's backpacks have a chance of getting damaged as well.

I also found some sheets for Magic-User's Spellbooks and Cleric's Breviary that I quite liked.  Big thanks to Christopher at The Aspiring Lich for those.  They were made for Labyrinth Lord, so I changed the numbers a bit for use with AD&D 2nd edition rules.