Interest Check: Grand Duchy of Karameikos Campaign

Greetings, adventurers!

I'm trying to gauge the interest for a dnd campaign in the Grand Duchy of Karameikos. It's one of the more well-established settings with the Mystara campaign world, dating back to the Dungeon & Dragons Basic Set in the early 1980s. Karameikos (formerly Traldara, before the recent Thyatian conquest) has a long history of diverse cultures. It is a very young and rapidly evolving realm—an untamed frontier with vast, unexplored territories, deep forests, and dangerous creatures lurking just beyond the cities’ borders. The land is wild and full of potential, but also rife with peril for those brave enough to venture into its unknown corners. You can read more about the setting on the game forums if you're not familiar with it.

What to Expect:

● Mature Themes: This campaign will explore difficult moral choices, political intrigue, and personal ambitions
● Political Intrigue: The Grand Duchy is a land of shifting allegiances, from nobles to guilds to foreign powers
● Exploration and Adventure: The land itself is a vast, unexplored frontier, with dense forests, wild creatures, and ancient secrets waiting to be uncovered. The wilderness is untamed and full of danger, providing endless opportunities for exploration.
● Character Development: Your character’s journey will be shaped by both external challenges and internal growth

Let me know if you're interested. And also, if there is any version of Dungeons & Dragons that you would prefer to use for this campaign? I’m open to both 5th edition D&D (or 2024) - but that would require plenty of rules, class, and race restrictions to maintain the integrity of the setting. We could use the classic 1st Edition for which the setting was originally written. Or something else, if you have a better suggestion.

The links in your game forum are all dead-ends
I feel that the themes are very generic and broad specked. Is it just the setting you want to explore, or do you have an adventure/plot in mind already?

I moved all the threads from the subforums to the main one. This should fix the access issue for the links.

As for the theme and plot: Karameikos is deeply divided along religious, cultural, and ideological lines, with tensions between rival factions simmering beneath the surface. There will be an existential threat that threatens the realm at some point, and it will be up for the players to either unite the fractured factions in a desperate bid for survival, to champion one group’s cause over the others, or to exploit the chaos for their own ambitions.

Just gonna pop in and suggest S&W, a beautiful recently updated OD&D retroclone.

I would also highly recommend picking one system to advertise. Lots of people are going to be deeply entrenched on either 5e or OD&D, and those come with different game expectations and design intents. Heck, even OD&D players have strong opinions about allowed resources.

Posting interest.
I’d love to play AD&D, as homage to the original, but am happy with any edition, clone etc.
Cheers. :)

Oo. Definitely interested.

I would be interested in an OSR/NuSR system - something old-school-ish, but streamlined and tweaked. Alternatively, I've had a hankering for a 2nd ed game lately.

Damn, this is tempting, but not sure i am going to have the time.

Choosing a system is always a matter of tastes. Osric would be the best for AD&D, but SW is a really nice system and also OSE Advanced.

Tentative for S&W.

Just popped in to say, if you are going to use 5e, you might want to take a look at this and this.

I'll be interested in a game on old Mystara sure thing!
Don't really care about the system.

I have to read more about the setting, but I am very interested in a AD&D1ed based game if that is the rules you will be using.

Thanks to everyone who showed an interest in the game. I will open up the recruitment thread tomorrow, to anyone interested in joining

We will be using the OSE (Old School Essentials) rule set, which is streamlined, simple, and features easily accessible basic rules available for free. The Grand Duchy of Karameikos Gazetteer introduced skill proficiencies, which we will incorporate to add more flavor to our characters. Along with some optional rules for multi-classing, we will have enough flexibility to create a wide variety of heroic character types (a Ranger can be a Fighter/Rogue, a Paladin Fighter/Cleric, etc).

Reads well, looking forward to the ad!

This isn't an application as I'm full up on games as is. I just wanted to share that OSE also has an SRD available which has some stuff missing from the Basic Rules document (i.e. high level spells).

https://oldschoolessentials.necroticgnome.com/srd/index.php/Main_Page

Interested in playing Adventure in the Grand Duchy of Karameikos! This would be my first game on this site so I'm a touch lost in some ways.

I have the following OSE downloaded:
* Advance Fantasy Reference Booklet v1.2
* Basic Rules v1-4

And I have:
* Advance Fantasy Players Tome v1-3

Are these downloads good enough for play?