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The World of Georic 1989-Present

Sunday, August 28, 2022

#RPGaDay2022 - Day 28 - Style Sunday: Roll 1d8+1 Tag That Many Friends With Your Favorite RPG Cover Art

Day 28 of #RPGaDay brings up another interesting concept "Style Sunday: Roll 1d8+1, tag that many friends with your favorite RPG Cover Art"

So, with a roll of 9, let me tag on social media: Charles, George, Scott, Crazy Darryl, Mary, Wooly, Nichols, Hoyce, and Balls onto two of the early D&D favorites,  the covers of Dragon Magazine s #136 and #137, the first two issues I ever purchased.

The imagined fate of Talanth Blackash - Dragon #136
Issues of Dragon and the few rulebooks and modules I owned in high school were the early inspiration for my high school DMing. There is a back story waiting to be filled in for every figure in the Lamia's throne-room, and there are just too many questions for the lone rider and his steed, staring at the snowy mountains beyond. 
Commander HouseKarl's "Retirement" - Dragon #137 by Keith Parkinson

It did not hurt that there was a great set of random city-building tables in #136 and a very decent random weather generation tables in #137, plus a host of other usable materials.  

This high school campaign, is the basis of almost every D&D/AD&D/Hackmaster session I've run for the past thirty years.   A few years ago, when I tried to compile those adventures into something coherent, I was forced to use an unreliable third-party, Elsderth Millbottom, former scribe of the Viscount of Verbobonc, to communicate what were essentially "after-action reports" of what happened after the party left.  This allows me to move events, tweak things, and even make Charles' elf/half-elf potentially a different person with a different name (With no surviving notes, it was his elf,  Scott's drunken warrior and stupid ranger, George's busty mage, Mellandria with special appearances from Crazy Darryl's crazy cleric, Mary's way-too-reasonable cleric, Celeste, and Wooly's anachronistic warrior Ned Overland.   Scott and Charles characters' full names are lost to history).

It's amusing that I mentioned this for the last two years, for Day 8 of #RPGaDay2020 and Day 23 of #RPGaDay2021.    With some minor edits to refer things to this year, here are my comments from those previous years.  

For (ten) 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. 

(Four) 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 in-game.

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, but all those previously visited locations still existed in-game.

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 this past June, I graduated from high school.  For the ensuing decade, I participated in a ton of 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.

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