Day 8 of #RPGaDay 2020 and "Shade" is thrown at us to work with? My love of Shadis Magazine? Throwing Shade at other players? Keeping things in the shadows?
I tend to look at this prompt like I do painting minis. Everyone seems to focus on the highlights of a spectacular figure, but proper shading brings everything to life.
For eight years I've been slowly cobbling together the various campaigns in my homebrew world of Georic into a series of actual plays. Starting with my original Hackmaster game in 2001, I've popped in and out of the campaign timeline. I've usually had some form of a player or party journal to help me reconstruct the tales.
Two years ago I began an ambitious project to collect my high school game ('89-'92) into some coherent form, with only vague recollections, copies of the source material (modules), and absolutely no help from my fellow players.
I wrote the Lost Dispatches of Feraso in the voice of Elsderth Millbottom, a new character, who simply had the penchant of dealing with the messes left behind from a certain Talanth Blackash and his compatriots, a drunken warrior, a stupid ranger, and a busty mage. I reconstructed adventures, re-tallied treasure and magic items, and developed a few new plots along the way.
I also rekindled my love for the campaign world in areas I've never revisited.
To be honest, the high school campaign was a mess of whatever cool thing I could buy from Waldenbooks. I started the whole thing with the Temple of Elemental Evil (not the moathouse) and when the players tired of it, I moved to FRE1 Shadowdale without blinking an eye, and the campaign continued on like that. When high school ended, I pushed all of that to the side and focused primarily on a new dominion in the game world, the Kingdom of Crosedes.
Revisiting those old games allowed me to correct some continuity issues, but I spent most of my time researching and interpreting the old materials and converting it to fit the eccentric Kingdom of Ras-Prythax that sits in my Euro-Fantasy world as the Holy Roman Empire. Things are not the same, but I can fit the Viscounty of Verbobonc as a neighbor of lands that are recast versions of Arabel and Shadowdale, and they fit alongside existing domains that have touched my more modern campaign runs.
I also found a sensible place for a green-dragon run pirate city and further developed my love of half-orcs while keeping my hatred of elves to a practical (regional) level.
If we ever return to a true fantasy game, I still doubt that we'll even visit Ras-Prythax or The Weissmach, but I'm far more confident I can pull some interesting tid-bits about them to embellish the game, rather than just names on a map.
I tend to look at this prompt like I do painting minis. Everyone seems to focus on the highlights of a spectacular figure, but proper shading brings everything to life.
For eight years I've been slowly cobbling together the various campaigns in my homebrew world of Georic into a series of actual plays. Starting with my original Hackmaster game in 2001, I've popped in and out of the campaign timeline. I've usually had some form of a player or party journal to help me reconstruct the tales.
Two years ago I began an ambitious project to collect my high school game ('89-'92) into some coherent form, with only vague recollections, copies of the source material (modules), and absolutely no help from my fellow players.
I wrote the Lost Dispatches of Feraso in the voice of Elsderth Millbottom, a new character, who simply had the penchant of dealing with the messes left behind from a certain Talanth Blackash and his compatriots, a drunken warrior, a stupid ranger, and a busty mage. I reconstructed adventures, re-tallied treasure and magic items, and developed a few new plots along the way.
I also rekindled my love for the campaign world in areas I've never revisited.
To be honest, the high school campaign was a mess of whatever cool thing I could buy from Waldenbooks. I started the whole thing with the Temple of Elemental Evil (not the moathouse) and when the players tired of it, I moved to FRE1 Shadowdale without blinking an eye, and the campaign continued on like that. When high school ended, I pushed all of that to the side and focused primarily on a new dominion in the game world, the Kingdom of Crosedes.
Revisiting those old games allowed me to correct some continuity issues, but I spent most of my time researching and interpreting the old materials and converting it to fit the eccentric Kingdom of Ras-Prythax that sits in my Euro-Fantasy world as the Holy Roman Empire. Things are not the same, but I can fit the Viscounty of Verbobonc as a neighbor of lands that are recast versions of Arabel and Shadowdale, and they fit alongside existing domains that have touched my more modern campaign runs.
I also found a sensible place for a green-dragon run pirate city and further developed my love of half-orcs while keeping my hatred of elves to a practical (regional) level.
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| One of the dreamt of fates of Talanth Blackash, also the first issue of Dragon I ever purchased |
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