#RPGaDay2021 - Day 23 - Faulty Memories, Improved Legends

Day 23 of #RPGaDay2021 tests my brain with "MEMORY".  I won't need to recall most of this topic, as I'm calling an audible and reprinting most of my #RPGaDay2020 Day 8 post from last year:

For (nine) 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. 

Talanth Blackashe, still hopefully being tortured by orcs

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 Croesdes. 

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. 

Thirty years ago next month, I was starting my senior year of high school.  For the ensuing decade, I participated in a ton on gaming, and a could fill a tome with all the fun stories, road trips, and other disasters that came along the way.  The further I distance myself from those stories, the more things are tweaked, re-emphasized.  Sometimes they're sanitized to relay a story to the kids.  Sometimes they're edit to focus on new storylines, or omit actions that seem far more embarrassing now than they did the first thousand times the story was told.  This is how myth and legend is formed, and it makes sense that I cobbled my high school game memories together in the same manner.