The Proof Is In the Fun
So this weekend I talked my group into taking a detour from D&D 5e to return to an old friend of ours: Savage Worlds. Not for an established setting such as ETU or Deadlands, both of which we love, but to try out a horror one shot from a friend of mine called Camp Terror.
So we fired up Savage Worlds and had us a brutal, throwback horror adventure.
Welcome back, friends. Last week, I laid the ground the work for this series, a recap of one of the best campaigns I've ever ran. Now I'm going to pour over my notes and go back to the very beginning of the campaign, and run through the adventures we played through, starting with Freshman Year.
I put a lot of thought into just how I wanted pace this, as I knew I wanted the campaign to have time to "breathe", and so I made the decision to aim for 13 adventures per school year. The idea being that it would be 3 adventure per half semester, with one adventure taking place on break. This meshed well with the idea of ETU's advances coming at the end of mid-terms and end of semester. This incorporated every Plot Point adventure from the Plot Point Campaign, every one of the original 12 to Midnight Adventures, the Class Ring adventure from the ETU GM screen, Owen Lean's Horror for the Holidays, and a number of my own creations, some using the Adventure Generator and some just crafted whole cloth.
Some of my notes are a little light. And we started this campaign 6 years ago, in person, at my dinner table, before moving online to Roll20...and we played The Curse of Strahd in between. So my memory may fail in places.
And again, be advised that spoilers will be unmarked.
Late last year, my group finally finished East Texas University: Degrees of Horror, the ETU Plot Point Campaign for Savage Worlds.
This is the first in a series of articles in which I will take a deep dive into my campaign, including what worked, what didn't work, what we kept, what we changed, and so on.
It will contain heavy, unmarked spoilers for the campaign, so read on at your own risk.
But I'll provide the tl:dr up front: East Texas University is one of my favorite RPG settings ever, and the campaign is one of the two best I've ever ran (alongside Necessary Evil), both of which I attribute to both stellar writing from the authors of the settings (cheers to Ed Wetterman, Preston DuBose, and Clint Black), as well as to my amazing players (Kenny, Jack, Ellie, Brian, Russ, Chrystal, and Tommy - not me, but the sole player who participated in both campaigns).
