Fresh off the heels of #RPGaDay, and having been reminded of the RPG Blog Caravan's existence, I decided to take a crack at the topic for September 2023, "Archaeology and Anthropology."
The carnival itself is a great concept, but as I worked on my idea, this simply snowballed into complexity, nearing ridiculousness. My own experience might explain why a number of the entries I've read over the years were full of "intelligentsia and pompousness."
As I continue to rework my topic into something as simple as what was suggested, I began delving into something even more ridiculous: Assembling the actual plays of years gone by.
About a decade into gamemastering, I realized that not only were player journals/notes helpful, but a party journal, with a rotation of unreliable character writers essential for continuity and attention spans. beginning with portions of my AD&D 2E "Ballad of the Pigeon God" game, and moving forward, either written journals or recorded sessions were kept. Using the blog as a clearing house for those campaigns, I've managed to keep continuity, with limited canonical rewrites. However, a large portion of the early years, which I'll denote as the "High School game" and the "Army game" were fading memories, even though they forged the basis of future campaigns.
When I set up my "World of Georic" homebrew campaign, it was a mis-mash of anything I had on a high school kid's budget. Campaign worlds were raided for ideas, adventures from Dungeon Magazine dropped in random locations, followed by an assortment of modules that paid attention to the appropriate party level than the appropriateness within the campaign. Still, as teenagers we rarely cared.
But to complete the narrative history of all my games (roughly 1990-present), I needed to piecemeal information together. Heck, some of the players relied on their character nicknames so much (Drunken Warrior/Stupid Ranger), that names were lost for all eternity.
To abate these problems, I established the campaign would be told through the second-hand eyes of a completely fictional narrator. Elsderth Millbottom was a scribe, formerly in the employ of the Viscount of Verbobonc, who corresponding one-way with his experiences traveling the World of Georic. It just happened that these "Lost Dispatches" dealt with indirect run-ins after-the-fact of a certain Talanth Blackash and his adventuring party of fools and miscreants.
But rebuilding the events of the campaign, plus all the magic items would prove a chore, especially since I no longer owned most of the products I ran almost 30 years ago.
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| Ned Overland, the one character connecting two campaigns, decades apart in-game. |
For my greatest feat, I would need to work things into a completely new campaign map. As I mentioned, I had little care of a group tackling the Temple of Elemental, then moving over hill and dale to have adventures around Shadowdale. The first actual map of the greater realm wasn't realized for five years, and since then, I've adopted the Epic of Aerth setting for Dangerous Journeys as the fantasy-Earth equivalent to base things off of.
So how does one do this? Here's a few avenues:
Re-purchasing your museum collection: Thanks to DriveThruRPG, I started buying the pdfs of those old module I know I used. T1-4 Temple of Elemental Evil and FRE1 Shadowdale were two of the big items that started the run. I now have digital copies of some classic (and not so classic) adventures if someone ever wants to play.
The museum always kept a small collection at all times: Luckily, I still own a decent collection, particularly of items from my teens which I attached a certain sentimental value. I still have a good pile of AD&D and BECMI D&D adventures and many were used in that first decade.
If the British Museum is all cultural plunder, why shouldn't my project have some?: While I'm equating dubious sources of pdfs to hundreds of years of archeological pillaging, and there should be no excuse for pirating, some things I used back in the were just not available digitally, at least legit during my research six years ago. I may or may not have acquired items through less than reputable sources, half of which no longer exist, the other half, well...
Oral History is like mouthwash, it fades over time: After playing for 25-30, even the most enthused players' recollections falter. Names forgotten, memories evolved, actions from one campaign blurred over to a completely different game (that wasn't even mine). My players barely remember what happened last week... with notes! Discerning the diamonds from the coal from the culm takes some work.
Categorizing the plunder: Why did I want actual copies of the material? For a classic FRPG where treasure and magic items affected XP. This old-school system was rife with inequality, which in the re-accounting was quite apparent, as the magic-user, Thendara (aka "The Busty Mage") accumulated an arsenal, and was the only character to reach Name Level. Heck, in my story, Elsderth "Greyhawk" Millbottom does a good job obtaining a nice collection from all the after-effects, leftovers, and missed treasures as he came upon the aftermath.
When in doubt, wing it: Even with a reconstructed library to work with, a combination of a teenager's early campaign world mixed with a new campaign map forced the creation of a lot of continuity flavor text. Fan-hosted Greyhawk maps and material were mined with ruthless aggression to flesh out the narrator's backstory, the Viscounty of Verbobonc, and many of the other dominions within Ras-Prythax. While it was the focus of my high school game, I only returned to Ras-Prythax, my version of the Holy Roman Empire for one story, so nothing ever got fleshed out.
Most of the details I would have missed in high school and the army were also filled in using random generators, like the Fantasy Name Generator.
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| Elsderth, our unreliable narrator, only dreamt Talanth suffered for his crimes |
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