D&D 3.0 – Sylmore Campaign

Hey, I spoke too soon! I found some stuff from the old D&D 3.0  game I ran after the Mars campaign concluded. This was a really good campaign, maybe the most successful long campaign I've ever run (although there was a 1st edition game I'm still proud of).

8-2005 Campaign beginning
6-2008 somewhere in the middle
1-2009 Campaign conclusion
Sylmore_-_Midgard Incomplete notes on level one of the dungeon

A few things I remember:

• "Shorty" the grumpy gnome bard was a variant class of Monte Cook, using a point-based system that worked really well.
• The world was a medieval-fantasy version of Britain, with a Norse cosmology. Sylmore was a fortress-town near the northern border (Scotland = orcs in this game).
• Near Sylmore, some locals found an entrance to a magical cavern full of monsters and treasure. The PCs were adventurers who decided to brave the risk and seek the treasure.
• The "magical cavern" turned out to be a TARDIS-like (in that it wasn't really in normal time and space and was bigger on the inside than the outside). Each level of the dungeon (for a dungeon-crawl campaign this was) had nine areas, each based in one way or another on the nine realms of Norse mythology. So, each level had a Midgard area with earthly environment and monsters, an Alfheim area with elvish stuff, a Svartalfheim area with dark elf environment and creatures of that style, and so on. Each level "down" got progressively more dangerous, in true D&D style.
• There was a group of human adventurers, chaotic ones, who arrived before the PCs. The PCs often had to deal with the consequences of the stuff that previous group had done, and learned to loathe them. When they finally met, the PCs had no compunctions about slaughtering them.
• One of those adventurers was rumored to be the big bad guy, the Demon-King, who was carving out something like an empire for himself on the lowest level. Turned out the Demon-King simply stole the human's skin.
• The PCs' paladin got in trouble with the gods for killing an Asgardian woman and had to do a penance quest.
• The players figured out the internal geography of the dungeon after a while and learned to predict the kinds of things they would find in any given area. That came in handy when they had to fight a group of fire giants that totally outclassed them (they got the giants to chase them into an area hostile to the giants).
• The players sometime spent an entire session planning an upcoming battle. They had no qualms about doing that in front of me because they knew I was too lazy to change the tactics of whatever it was they were going to face to counter their plans.
• There was a side-quest to go rescue a monastery that was being attacked. This monastery was of vital importance to Sylmore because it was the only local source of ale!