Well, alright. I really let this thing get away from me.
But I'm gonna take another stab at this--so first let's do a catch-up on where I'm currently at, gaming-wise...
The DCC CrawlJammer game ended a while back--it was going pretty well, but after some scheduling conflicts caused us to take some really big breaks and then losing a player completely, I didn't have the drive to keep going. It's tough when you've got a long-running game because all of the PCs really feel like main characters at that point. To lose even one can really throw the entire flow off.
From there, I decided I wanted to play something Completely Different. So, I cracked open my copy of the 7th Edition Call of Cthulhu Keeper Rulebook and got to reading! I might do some kind of review of that book in the future, but it seems like there's a ton of those out there already--so no hurry. I will say that I enjoyed it a lot, but did find the shift from D&D based rulesets to CoC to be pretty overwhelming at first.
I ended up using ONLY the Quickstart Rules in our very first investigation--which meant that we ran The Haunting! After that, with some more experience under our belt, we ran the first adventure in Doors to Darkness, a book of adventures for first-time Keepers. And I think that also went really well! I found that I had to do a lot of improvising to keep up with my players, but we all got a kick out of it.
We've established a group of investigators, funded by one of the PCs with a VERY high credit rating, and have agreed to run CoC on occasion when we're between other games or just want a change of pace.
From there, I worked up a 5e game using Frog God Game's Lost City of Barakus. I'm mostly running it as written, but with the caveat of changing the name of the primary city in the book (Endhome) to Dennovar--which is a city in WotC's Red Hand of Doom--so that I can expand the campaign and transition into the events of RHoD when I feel that we've run our course in the Lost City campaign. Barakus was written/intended for PCs of level 1-5 and RHoD is best suited for levels 5-10. Both of these books were written for 3.5/Pathfinder, so the translation is a little bit of work, but it's largely pretty easy.
I'm really enjoying this 5e campaign so far, which is a bit of a surprise to me. I've found myself pretty bored with 5e games in the past, as a player. Mostly because it seems like there's so much stuff the players have to think about that combat becomes a slog. B/X style characters may be simple but at least they move quickly! Either way--so far, my players are all doing a pretty good job of being mindful of what they can do so the game is moving quickly. But they're only 2nd level--time will tell.
I intend to write up session summaries for my Lost City of Barakus campaign--I've got rough versions already written for my own notes, so it'll just take a little finessing to get them to a place other folks might actually want to read. At the time of this writing, we're playing weekly and this upcoming Monday will be the 4th session. I expect the PCs will earn enough XP to level up again at that time.
