It’s hard to believe that this entire series of articles came about based on the hurried thoughts of last minute game preparation. What has stretched out over weeks in terms of the reports on Basement 51 flew by quickly over the course of only a few days. Before getting to the opening music and the debut of the heroes of Kh’bai, though there were two more concepts I had in mind for the campaign that bear mentioning.

Rapid Growth Fund—

Because we wouldn’t have the opportunity to play very often, what with Kh’bai acting as a “fill-in” campaign on weeks when the regular game was cancelled, there would barely be any advancement. Part of the reason for the previous house rules article on speeding up advancement was to avoid spelling it all out right here.

I decided that levels would be awarded every five to seven encounters.

There would be no need to track experience points and the storyline would build-up towards the moments when the characters would level.

While part of the reason for this choice was the infrequent schedule of play that would plague the campaign, the other reason would soon make itself clear after a only a few encounters.

Point bluntly, a Dungeons and Dragons character forged from The Tome of Battle: Book of Nine Swords is capable of absurd feats of epic destruction. I assure you, this is not an exaggeration. I would rapidly adjust the EL’s involved in the opening adventure to be even a little bit competitive with the characters. In doing so, however, the XP involved, especially when split between only two players, was ridiculous.

Abstract advancement was absolutely the way to go.

These thoughts on advancement also tied into another concept of the campaign that we set out with. Serving as a test bed of odd rules, there seemed little point in just testing those rules with first level characters.

We wanted to explore them through the range of levels and the best approach to doing that was to “fast-forward” a bit at a time to get a feel for the characters advancing.

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