For day one, #RPGaDay2019 gives us a softball pitch we can hit anywhere we want to: First.
So let's cover the first campaign I ever ran, then cover a shamless plug, all in one post.
High School. Super-Duper early 90's. North America.
With a small gaming clique, all within a bike ride of each others' home. We worked off of the healthy gaming collection of our friend Charles. That meant lots of BECMI D&D, GURPS, and whatever board games he had accumulated. But Charles was the guy who organized, ran, and GM'ed everything.
Enter the easily swayed teenage ViscountEric.
I agreed to run D&D for the group, but I decreed it had to be ADVANCED Dungeons & Dragons. My reasoning? Nothing to do with character classes or spells, but due to the plethora of charts and a far better equipment list (They included dogs and pigeons. That's what's important!).
I'm still amazed I swung for the fences my first time out: T1-4 The Temple of Elemental Evil.
I'm quite sure I would cringe incessantly watching teenage me murder that module, but I believe it was murder by mob with the rest of my friends. We never got to the moathouse and somewhere on the third level under the temple, everyone decided they had had enough and spirited away.
Right into FRE1 Shadowdale, and the Avatar Trilogy to transition AD&D from 1st to 2nd Edition.
That kicked off the campaign that lasted most of our high school days. From that day forward, those that played remember that campaign as the one with The Drunken Warrior, the Stupid Ranger, and Thendara, the Busty Mage.
Over the years I've based most of the my F20 campaigns off of that mis-mashed campaign world. The World of Georic has brought years of joy to dozens of players (and myself).
Starting in the late 90's and moving forward, my groups have been keeping a collective group journal for notes. Written by a different character each week, it gives a thorough, if sometimes silly look at what happened.
I've managed to document my college game (1999-2000) both Hackmaster campaigns (2001-2005) on this blog, rewriting the journal entries into third person blog posts.
I started writing up the first Actual Plays for Hackmaster in January 2012, and essentially, just about every Tuesday since then has seen a post covering one of the campaigns. When I finished the Ballad of the Pigeon God, last year, I was out of primary sources, but I decided to try and reconstruct the tales of those original heroes from high school, through a unaffiliated third party.
Hence - The Lost Dispatches of Feraso were born.
Elsderth Millbottom was a former scribe for the Viscount of Verbobonc and is now a travelling freeman, who has developed a certain penchant for following up on adventures of an elf named Talanth Blackash, a certain Drunken Warrior, Stupid Ranger, and Busty Mage, and writes down these tales to send back to the Viscount. Good stuff.
It's been fun trying to not only flesh out the stories from thirty years ago, but remember the ramifications of the original party's actions, or complete inaction.
It's also allowed me to revisit area on the campaign map I don't think I've sent PCs through in at least 25 years. It's been nice to expand upon those areas that suffered cartographic purges when I changed maps around 2000-2001.
So let's cover the first campaign I ever ran, then cover a shamless plug, all in one post.
High School. Super-Duper early 90's. North America.
With a small gaming clique, all within a bike ride of each others' home. We worked off of the healthy gaming collection of our friend Charles. That meant lots of BECMI D&D, GURPS, and whatever board games he had accumulated. But Charles was the guy who organized, ran, and GM'ed everything.
Enter the easily swayed teenage ViscountEric.
I agreed to run D&D for the group, but I decreed it had to be ADVANCED Dungeons & Dragons. My reasoning? Nothing to do with character classes or spells, but due to the plethora of charts and a far better equipment list (They included dogs and pigeons. That's what's important!).
I'm still amazed I swung for the fences my first time out: T1-4 The Temple of Elemental Evil.
I'm quite sure I would cringe incessantly watching teenage me murder that module, but I believe it was murder by mob with the rest of my friends. We never got to the moathouse and somewhere on the third level under the temple, everyone decided they had had enough and spirited away.
Right into FRE1 Shadowdale, and the Avatar Trilogy to transition AD&D from 1st to 2nd Edition.
That kicked off the campaign that lasted most of our high school days. From that day forward, those that played remember that campaign as the one with The Drunken Warrior, the Stupid Ranger, and Thendara, the Busty Mage.
 |
| Thendara, the most powerful member of the party, forever referred to as "The Busty Mage" |
Starting in the late 90's and moving forward, my groups have been keeping a collective group journal for notes. Written by a different character each week, it gives a thorough, if sometimes silly look at what happened.
I've managed to document my college game (1999-2000) both Hackmaster campaigns (2001-2005) on this blog, rewriting the journal entries into third person blog posts.
I started writing up the first Actual Plays for Hackmaster in January 2012, and essentially, just about every Tuesday since then has seen a post covering one of the campaigns. When I finished the Ballad of the Pigeon God, last year, I was out of primary sources, but I decided to try and reconstruct the tales of those original heroes from high school, through a unaffiliated third party.
Hence - The Lost Dispatches of Feraso were born.
Elsderth Millbottom was a former scribe for the Viscount of Verbobonc and is now a travelling freeman, who has developed a certain penchant for following up on adventures of an elf named Talanth Blackash, a certain Drunken Warrior, Stupid Ranger, and Busty Mage, and writes down these tales to send back to the Viscount. Good stuff.
It's been fun trying to not only flesh out the stories from thirty years ago, but remember the ramifications of the original party's actions, or complete inaction.
It's also allowed me to revisit area on the campaign map I don't think I've sent PCs through in at least 25 years. It's been nice to expand upon those areas that suffered cartographic purges when I changed maps around 2000-2001.
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