#RPGaDay2022 - Day 10 - When Did You Start Game Mastering?

Day 10 of #RPGaDay2022 keeps the nostalgia rolling, "When Did You Start Game Mastering?"

Funny thing, This question is a rewording of Day 2, #RPGaDAY2014 "First GM Gamemastered."

Even funnier?  Eight years later I still got it wrong on the first write-up. 

My go to story is that very early in high school, to relieve the DM/GM duties of our friend Charles, I volunteered to run an AD&D 1st/2nd Edition game.  I decided to swing for the fences and run T1-4, Temple of Elemental Evil.  

We were horrible role-players, and since I ran the Village of Homlett like a text-based video game, few leads could be followed and they never really made it to the moathouse.  Some hand-waving later, and we spent the better part of the summer going room by room under the Temple.  At some point the group tired of the fight, reckoned they killed enough significant baddies and got enough sweet loot that they up and left their strategic corner of the dungeon. 

Funny story, being the continuity-conscious DM I am, they left the Temple of Elemental Evil for the nearby confines of Shadowdale... in the Forgotten Realms (FRE1).  That was far worse than anything Greyhawk, so we moved on to homebrewed one-shots and Dungeon Magazine adventures.

There are no journal entries at that time, it was 89/90 and who knew this mixed up world would still be active with hundreds upon hundreds of active play hours.  In the past few years, I've recollected and revised the stories of that original campaign into the Lost Dispatches of Feraso, The writer of all these letters to the Viscount of Verbobonc, Elsderth Greyhawk, has a story-driven knack to walk into areas right after the original campaign party had left, and was forced to deal with the aftermath.  Nulb and the Temple are discussed in episodes #14 and 15.  Further discussion about Homlett and the Moathouse is later on in the series, and deals with another campaign  group (Campaign #5) who looted the moathouse, but simply agitated the monsters within. 

The truth?  Pulled straight from December 2, 2014:

It was actually a year earlier, where I ran Gygar's Castle out of the Mentzer Red Box for a classmate named Paul.  I remember little of it, except that I put lots of lizards in the lower levels of the dungeon.  We never played again after that one time, so it was pushed into my subconscious.

Elemental Evil vs. one-player one-shot?  You can see why my brain chose that one.