Pictured - Mona and I at our big SCA wedding with the kids, Ash was had turned 12 then and Em had just turned 7 earlier in the month, John was still 9.
My name is William Dowie. I am a 43
year old white man from the rural northern edge of central New York
state, on Lake Ontario. I am a giant history nerd, in college I
majored in history with a focus on Classical Antiquity and the
European Middle Ages, I minored in Medieval and Renaissance Studies.
I also took a bunch of Anthropology courses, but not enough to count
as a second major. I am 6'6" tall and I have worked as a
substitute teacher, short order cook, bouncer, machinist and
convenience store clerk, just to name a few. I speak French passably
well, Spanish slightly less so, and can usually guess my way through
written Italian or Latin. I have tried to teach myself Scots Gaelic,
much less successfully, but can pick out a number of written words on
sight and sometimes recognize words when I hear them. Oddly enough I
can pick out Welsh words now just as easily when they are cognates to
the Scots Gaelic words I know, I see patterns in language easily.
I am married to a wonderful woman named
Mona and we have three children; Ashli (19), John (17) and Ember
(14), who were literally left on our doorstep when they were 11, 9
and 6 respectively. We live on a small, mostly forested plot of land
in New Haven, New York - which is north of Syracuse and east of
Rochester, nearest to the smaller city of Oswego, NY - where I
continue to scheme ways to homestead and get off the grid, mostly
because I hate the high cost of electricity in a county with three
nuclear power plants, and I want healthier food than I can buy from
the store, with the bonus that it'll be cheaper too. I have been
frustrated in my attempts to clear my land because it's a lot harder
to do than you would think, I have a lot more respect for pioneers
now, especially since they did it with no power tools at all. I also
have some valuable lumber that I can't seem to get anyone to harvest
because my lot is too small and the presence of my house and the
power lines along the edge of the road make it too difficult to be
worth it, so apparently I need the price of Cherry to rise back to
the level it was before our economic collapse to attract loggers.
I have been playing board wargames and
D&D since 1980, when my friend Chris introduced me to both the
week that we went to see Excalibur together with my dad. We played
SPI's Sorcerer that weekend, because he had brought it over to my
house and played D&D with him DMing before the week was out using
the Holmes Basic rules. I went out and bought a set as soon as I
could save up the money, maybe a month later. For a long time after
that pretty much all of my money went into my D&D habit in some
way or another, books, modules, Dragon Magazine, "official"
Grenadier miniatures.
I found the SCA while the local group
was doing a demo at the Sterling Renaissance Festival in Sterling, NY
back in 1983 when I was 14, I have drifted in and out of the SCA ever
since. I am currently missing Pennsic for my 41st time in a row.
Something always comes up. Not that it matters anymore, I have passed
my fighting prime and I don't think it's coming back no matter how
hard I try. I keep resolving to make it to fighter practice more
often and get back into my "Crown Tourney" rhythm, but that
just isn't going to happen at my age anymore. I don't heal quick
enough to fight six days a week anymore. That and I can't afford the
gas money for the hundreds of extra miles per week I'd be putting on
my minivan to go to all of the extra fighter practices and events.
Still, I have made a lot of good friends in the SCA over the years
and some great memories, I am happy to have been there for what I did
and I wish I could do more still.
1985 was the year of the release of the
1st edition AD&D Oriental Adventures book, it's one of those
books that you either love despite it's warts or you hate because of
them. I love that book and it's probably because it's the only AD&D
book I ever pre-ordered at Twilight Book & Game Emporium in
Syracuse, NY - a sadly long gone FLGS. Despite the fact that the glue
cracked on the binding causing several pages to become loose
literally the first time I opened it, I was determined to get my
money's worth out of it. Before my friend Tim left for Basic
training in the US army the next year I took over DMing duties from
him, which I had only rarely done before, and we played an epic OA
campaign. I have played in one pretty epic OA campaign, as a Steppe
Barbarian named Chanar Ilkhan, and DMed a few more since. One of my
current projects is rewriting the OA book as I think it should have
been.
As a side note, I was really
anti-Rokugan because they changed the default setting in the 3e
version of the Oriental Adventures book to Rokugan from Kara-Tur, and
that made me, by default, anti-Legend of the Five Rings. I had been
strongly attracted to the setting through AEG's Clan War miniature
battle game prior to that, but hadn't bought into it at the time
because I could not find at least one other person that was willing
to also jump on board with me and had been burned by miniature games
that way in the past. Now I am happy to say I have come full circle
because I started buying old Clan War miniatures on EBay for my OA
campaign and ended up getting the rules, which made me interested in
the setting, which made me interested in the RPG, which got me to buy
the new board game, which led me to buy some CCG cards too. I have
even read through some of the published fiction, and, until it was
shut down recently, was playing in a Facebook app version of the RPG
called Emerald Empire. I really hated the 3e version of Oriental
Adventures.
I played (A)D&D, tried out some
other RPGs and wargamed a lot through the 1980s and into the 1990s.
Wargaming kind of died in the 1990s (except on the PC, it boomed
there), and I concentrated on just RPGs, then just D&D. Sometime
after 3rd edition D&D came out, after the novelty wore off for
me, I realized I disliked DMing it rather intensely. I was a little
late coming to the 3rd edition party, because my D&D group was
happy with 2nd edition and we didn't switch over until that campaign
died. At the time, I had grown bored with 2nd edition AD&D and
welcomed the change, although several things bothered me from the
beginning; the faster rate of rising in level was a big one and I
missed real multi-classing. I took me a while though, and DMing for
several different groups, to realize the worst part was that it
neutered the DM. My original AD&D groups, who were familiar with
my fast and loose, shoot from the hip DMing style were OK with me
making rules calls on the fly when none of us had any idea how
something was supposed to work in the new system; we'd keep the game
moving and I could look it up later. We might even like my way
better. The other groups had people who STUDIED the rules though; at
first, every time I made a ruling I'd see disapproving looks,
eventually they got brave enough to start offering suggestions as to
the right way to handle the situation.
So I quit DMing and let one of them DM
in each group. Neither group lasted much longer. One started a new
campaign and it was just too railroad-ey, I actually started stress
testing that campaign to see what would happen if my character
deliberately did things that were contrary to the predestined
storyline. My character got punished, he made minor alterations to
his storyline, but nothing seriously bad could ever happen to us, so,
eventually, as a group we got bored and quit. The other guy just took
over my game where I left off and had me make a character that would
take his place. He had been unlucky in my game and died several
times, but I assume that was because he kept making wuss characters,
Rogues and Bards. I made a Barbarian, it was fun while it lasted, we
went from 8th to 11th level with him at the helm, then he TPKed the
party.
I took a break for a while, despaired
over playing D&D again, then picked up Hackmaster. I ran a pretty
fun Hackmaster game for a while and that was what led me to realize
that I should just go back to playing 1st edition AD&D. That was
the year we got the kids though, so I wasn't done with 3rd edition -
when they decided they were interested in learning to play D&D,
they wanted to play the newest version, 3.5 at the time. I gritted my
teeth and went with it, anything to get kids into gaming. I have been
walking them back in home games for years now, and have only recently
discovered the Moldvay Basic half of B/X myself. Back in the day I
bought the Expert Boxed Set when it came out, but I never got the
Moldvay Basic Set that matched it because I already had a Basic Set,
the Holmes Basic Set. So we've been playing that a bit lately, but my
home games are pretty much at a stand-still right now, almost
everyone that doesn't live here is too busy to come over and play,
and everyone that does live here doesn't want to play with just their
mom and dad, brother and/or sister. John is still gaming this summer,
he's in a regular 4th edition D&D game with some guys he goes to
school with and I am playing Dawn Patrol semi-regularly with Darryl &
his dad, John and Dalton. We also recently tried out the Legend of
the Five Rings 1st edition RPG here at the house. I am trying to
start a game of 43 AD and it's supplement Warband, but the start has
been plagued by bad luck and poor coordination of schedules.
I have always run my D&D games in
my own "World of Garnia" fantasy setting as a default. It's
my Greyhawk, my buddy Darryl and I have been working on this on and
off for decades, we're doing a serious reboot of the entire setting
and discussing it on my other blog. The primary idea for the campaign
is that a group of Celts fled the Roman onslaught to this new world,
the world of the Sidhe (Elves) where magic works. The main campaign
area is one where their culture has flourished. I designed it
originally using the core 1st edition AD&D rules, so there are a
lot of 1st edition AD&D assumptions in the setting, but I am
trying to make the setting system neutral so that it can be played
with any FRPG system. When we have finished the maps and gazetteers
they'll be released for use. Currently we're working on the whole
world, then we plan to "drill down" and do specific
regions. I will also most likely release the adventures that I have
written for the setting over the years, it's just finding and
transcribing all of the stuff, then updating it to match the current
standard is going to be a chore.
By now you are probably wondering where
all this "Great Khan" stuff comes from, right? Well back in
1996 my buddy Darryl and I were living most of a continent apart and
wanted to play some D&D together. He had played a lot of the SSI
Gold Box D&D games starting with "Pool of Radiance"
when it came out and we were both new to the internet and on AOL at
the time where they had a game called "Neverwinter Nights"
that ran using the same engine, but was multi-player, up to 300 I
think it was. I guess that makes it the first MMORPG, it was great
fun anyway. Darryl was more savvy than me and figured out the best
way to advance in the game was through guild membership, so we duly
joined a guild together. ERS, the Explorers of the Rising Sun, who
made us create new Screen Names, because that was your character's
name in the game, and everyone in the guild was named ERS something.
I was ERS Garn, Darryl was ERS Frodal, we were named after deities I
had created for my Garnia campaign world.
But then we realized, being ambitious
adventurers, that ERS was there to help newbies find their bearings
and, in general, be nice; and we wanted to move up the food chain in
NWN. So we decided to create our own guild, which would, even though
it was a gamble, make us guild leaders and let us take charge of our
destinies and how we wanted to play the game. We needed a hook
though, and that's where our collective history nerdity took over, we
decided to play as Mongols, because we wanted to send out a strong
challenge to the status quo in all of the guilds and it was unique in
NWN to play a culturally oriented guild, unless that culture was a
fantasy one. Mostly I think we chose the Mongols though because I was
playing them at the time in Civilization. Partly I think we picked
them because we both loved the NES game Genghis Khan*, Darryl and I
used to spend weekends playing that game together. We also both
liked the Mongol reputation for ass-kickery and conquest. Then we
studied and studied some more, at this point I think that our kids
could hold their own at a conference of Mongol Medieval History
scholars.
Anyway, the Steppe Warriors were born.
Technically, since NWN is in the Forgotten Realms, we were members of
the, at the time, recently defeated Tuigan Horde that decided to
march west rather than return east. Darryl was our first Khakhan with
his character SW Ogotai, named after one of the sons of Genghis Khan,
the reasoning was that he could afford to be online more often
(remember this was when you paid/minute of use) because I was in
school at the time, and he was a better recruiter. My character was
named SW Jagatai, also after a son of Genghis Khan. Ultimately Darryl
resigned the position of Khakhan and I was elected to fill it. We've
had our highs and lows as a group, and we're pretty dormant now, but
I have been Jagatai, Khakhan of the Steppe Warriors since 1997 on the
internet, so when I named the blog and when I created my initial
Blogger account, I just naturally went with the same motif. My Yahoo
email address is still SWJagatai at yahoo dot com, created in the
same era. Back when I was sure we were going to leap from AOL's NWN
into the expanding universe of MMOs I registered three domain names,
steppewarriors.com, steppewarriors.org and steppewarriors.net; I used
to joke that they would soon be followed by steppewarriors.edu and
steppewarriors.gov. Clearly things didn't turn out as well for the
Steppe Warriors as I had anticipated in the late 1990s.
Ultimately, I am pretty pleased with my
alternate persona. In doing the research to properly play a Mongol
character I have learned a great many things about the Mongols and
other steppe peoples. I have eaten a bunch of Mongol food, drank
Kumiss, shot arrows from a composite bow (not while mounted though),
been in a yurt and made friends with a bunch of people that I
otherwise probably never would have met. When I think about how it
could have gone another way, if I'd been playing a different
Civilization that day when Darryl and I were talking on the phone, or
if he and I hadn't played so much of Koei's Genghis Khan together and
he hadn't been as receptive to the idea, or maybe it was the fact
that he had played in one of my epic Oriental Adventures campaigns
that made him cool with the idea. If Darryl hadn't signed on for
Mongols, we might have been a Samurai guild or a Viking guild or a
Celt guild, they were all infinitely more familiar to both of us at
the time; or maybe we'd have gone with something lame like a Dark Elf
Ranger guild, who knows?
At any given time I usually have more
irons in the fire than is wise, so many of my projects get
back-burnered until I get back around to them. Currently I have on
hold an Oriental Adventures campaign that just kind of fizzled when
it was starting to get good, I had converted the Temple of Elemental
Evil for OA and made it the Black Temple from OA1. I have a B/X
Viking campaign that stopped when two of my regular adult players got
new jobs. I have a B/X conversion for WW II that I spent a lot of
time working on last summer, but my regular group, which is mostly my
wife and kids and family friends, was lukewarm about play-testing it.
I'd say it's an early alpha level right now. I am working on a total
rewrite of the 1st edition OA book, kind of recasting it in a form I
find more desirable. I just started learning the L5R RPG, I am GMing
and the party is about 1/2 way through the adventure in the back of
the book, I still haven't found the fumble rule. I have announced
several times, prematurely, the start of my 43 AD campaign, so while
that should be starting soon, I am going to not say when just in case
something happens again. Mostly though, right now, getting a lot of
my time behind the scenes, is the reworking of my old Garnia campaign
world. We've made some interesting progress on it. I also have a
bunch of OSR stuff piling up on my to read list, making me wish I had
bought hard copies rather than pdfs because I mostly hate reading off
my monitor, but that's where my copies of "Lamentations of the
Flame Princess", "Carcosa", "Vornheim",
"Adventurer, Conqueror, King", and several other major
releases are sitting waiting to be read.
*Out of all of Koei's strategy games
for the NES, Genghis Khan had the best multi-player play, Nobunaga's
Ambition and Romance of the Three Kingdoms were too slow, and
Nobunaga's Ambition II had the annoying "siege mode" in
battle.
