Just as I was itching to get back to writing on Nuketown, along came the perfect series of writing prompts Barking Alien’s Barking Alien’s RPG Campaign Tour Challenge! For 28 days in February, the challenge asks folks to share the details of one of their RPG campaigns.
Let’s kick things off with the Day 1 prompt:
Day 1 – Campaign Introduction and Overview What is your campaign called, what system does it use, and what is it all about?
Visit Nuketown’s RPG Campaign Tour Challenge 2026 Prompts page for the rest of our challenge posts.
Introducing Greyhawk ’76
My current weekly game is Greyhawk ’76. It started as a playtest campaign to kick the tires on the 2024 edition of Dungeons & Dragons. Was it truly backwards compatible, or was it more of a “5.5 edition”? Did we want to upgrade from 2014, or keep going with what we had? This campaign existed to answer those questions, providing a “brief” break from my then-current campaign, Elemental Apocalypse.
It’s a break that’s lasted a year, but don’t worry, folks … we’ll get back to the alternate timeline where the Temple of Elemental Evil rose … and Greyhawk fell.
The campaign is in the World of Greyhawk campaign setting, in the Common Year 576. While our 20+ year old Blackrazor Guild campaign takes place in the 590s, we chose ’76 because that was the year for Greyhawk material in the new Dungeon Master’s Guide. The DMG 2024 writers took certain liberties with the source material (the Baklunish did not shoot first during the Twin Cataclysms), so I decided to call this world “Oeryth” instead of the traditional “Oerth.”
As a game master, I leaned into the ’76 theme, relying on classic black and white line art from the early days of RPGs to capture the feel of the setting. I put together a writing playlist comprised entirely of rock songs from the 1970s and prepared to finally run a campaign set in the Free City of Greyhawk.
Thieves! Guild intrigue! Wondrous magic! Weird things in the sewers! Our group had been to Greyhawk before, staying there for several notable months that ended with the public execution of their leader (in his defense, he was under the influence of several evil magic items at the time) and the banishment of their guild from the city.
This was a chance to go back and start over. We decided the characters were all from the Plain of Greyhawk, which borders the Free City. The campaign opened mid-adventure – the PCs were hired to retrieve a lost family treasure from an abandoned mine in the Cairn Hills. Members of two grudge-filled families showed up to complicate things, as did agents of the Burrow Boys, a gang of murderous halflings who terrorize the good people of the Plain.
And that’s where the campaign took a very different path. One of the PCs, a fighter named Tiberius, died while fighting the Burrow Boy agents. The PCs ultimately triumphed (though the person who hired them died as well) and returned to the town of High Ery to mourn their dead friend.
They were greeted by Yorn, the replacement character for Tiberius. But he wasn’t just any replacement character. He was Tiberius’ father. Known informally in the campaign as “Big Angry Barbarian Daddy”, Yorn swore to kill every last Burrow Boy.
Just like that, the campaign shifted from medieval urban fantasy to a fantasy-western hybrid. Wanting to be true to the tropes my players were leaning into, I started watching westerns, including the entire Dollars trilogy. Ever since then, the PCs have been waging war against the Burrow Boys.
They’ve been taking out lesser factions as they make their way to their nemesis: Fineon Burrows, the ruthless, murderous patriarch of the Burrow Boys.
It’s been a hell of a ride ever since.
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Adventurers planning their next move. Credit: David C. Sutherland III, Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set.