OD&D meets Redwall - 001

The following dates back to November of 2013, so this is all history at this point and I am posting it here along with a few other posts on this subject as a hopefully novel approach. My inspiration for this was nothing to do with the “furry” stuff, but instead the Redwall children’s books by the author Brian Jacques. There are 22 books in the series and there are a variety of animals in the books, both noble (good) and common vermin (evil) and these hold true with very few exceptions. The purpose of this was to take the players out of the comfort zone of playing humans, elves, dwarves, hobbits, etc and give every player something completely different to play and play-test the ideas:

As some of you know I have been running an OD&D campaign since July of 2009 with a wide variety of player ages, background and experience. We are near to bringing that campaign to a temporary stopping point and beginning in January I am starting a new campaign somewhere else on the same planet (opposite side).

I have sent the players the following info as a starting place and invited them to provide feedback. Everything is subject to tweaking up until the campaign starts. I gave them this little starting scenario as a wild alternate to the various ways that PCs usually meet.

You all awaken to find that you have been (you assume) robbed, beaten, arrested, dressed in rags and chained up in a large dungeon cell. You awaken with no memories of who you are or what happened, you do not know if you do or should know each other or not. You have no possessions, except for your rags and you are very hungry and thirsty. You have no knowledge of what abilities or talents you may have or possess. Until you learn otherwise, assume that you are all fighting men/women. You will learn once you see your captors that survival very likely will depend on a speedy escape...

I continued to give the players additional snippets leading up to the new campaign and invite their feedback, input and suggestions.

I am planning on having no elves, dwarves, hobbits or halflings as player characters (yes, gentle readers ;) hobbits and halflings are two completely different creatures), only as non-player characters. The players will not know until they get their character sheets and until they look around the dungeon cell whether or not their character is human or something else. I am designing some new player character races and the campaign will not necessarily be humancentric. Magic will be Different and Magic-Users/Clerics, well wait and see. :) Hopefully it will be fun.

I later eliminated humans, elves, dwarves, hobbits or halflings completely from this part of the world before we started playing, I just did not want to give all of that away to begin with.

Another snippet:

Once you (each of you) are fully awake, groggy, with a splitting headache, but awake, you look around at the others chained alongside you and realize that you don’t recognize anyone and you do not even know what these creatures are. Looking down at yourself you realize you are not sure what you are for that matter. A door opens and some guards walk into the space in front of your cell. Large muscular looking creatures with a harness holding their weapons and insignia over a fur covered body, both feet and hands are clawed. You take note that the claws look very sharp as do the fangs that show when they "smile". They point at you and seem to be insulting you, but you cannot understand their language. This goes on for a while, then something from outside the cell that sounds like a command, results in all of them leaving. The minimal light in the cell dwindles to nothing. You are very, very hungry, but your thirst is impossible to ignore, your lips are dry and cracked. You realize that those guards are not going to be bringing you anything and that no matter how you ended up here, you seem to have no value to your captors/jailors.

This was the lead up to the game and the players did not even have character sheets at the beginning of the game, but only received those with minimal information as they started to discover things about themselves.