1st Level?

Then you should read this primer from dangerous Brian-

http://dangerousbrian.blogspot.com/2011/01/1st-level-party-survival-guide.html

Excellent advice for newbies to D&D and good stuff even grognards might have missed.

Star Fleet Battles

Back when I was a kid I was a huge Star Trek fan. I discovered the show when I was in kindergarten. I may have seen a few animated episodes before then, but didn't really make the association. For the record I started kindergarten in September of 1974. I remember coming home from school, sitting down in front of the TV and looking for something cool to watch. It must have been raining or something because back in those days kids played outside. Anyway, I found Star Trek and was captivated,it was probably my first introduction to science fiction and I have loved it ever since. I even made my dad take me to see Star Trek: The Motion Picture when it came out and I loved it too.

As an aside, I don't think that ST:TMP gets enough trekkie love, sure it pales in comparison to the later original series cast movies, but they forget what it was like to not have any new Star Trek for so long, plus we were dependent on the whim of broadcasters for when we could see the old stuff. I was fortunate that the Canadian tv station we got (when the weather was good) ran syndicated Star Trek every day after school at 4:00PM until after I was out of high school. Thank you CKWS!

The point of all of this is that I loved Star Trek. I picked up Star Trek fan magazines when I could find them and when I could afford them. Same thing with Star Trek novels, of which there were far fewer in those days and the quality was all over the map. When I found a Star Trek game in the early 1980s I was pretty psyched and bought it. I was already a regular wargamer and had been playing D&D for a couple of years too, so the rules were not too complex for me. Me and my buddies (and one of their dads) started playing Star Fleet Battles pretty regularly.

I got the volume 2 boxed set in January of 1986. I remember it clearly because it is wrapped up in the memory of my Grandfather's death. My friend Tim M. went to Twilight Book and Game Emporium in Syracuse to pick it up for me and brought it to my house the day after his funeral. That Sunday also featured Superbowl XX, in which the Chicago Bears absolutely destroyed the New England Patriots.

I don't know what happened to my original Star Fleet Battles boxed sets. I think Tim might have my Volume 2 set, borrowed decades ago for whatever reason. But I just got a copy of my first boxed set, pictured above, off of EBay and when my Daughter Ashli saw it she said she wanted to learn to play.

I call that a win.

Mushrooms ARE cool!

Just a quick note today- Ashli started an in character blog if anyone is interested. You all can find it at-

http://muthroomsarekewl.blogspot.com/2011/01/so-i-set-myself-on-fire.html

Carry on.

:)

Monday AAR- TPK #3

Just kidding. Close though.

Sister Brangwen (Mona) and Ruby (Ashli) met with an elf named Heian Galanadel (Victor) who had a map to an ancient elven citadel buried beneath a ruined temple.

For those of you playing the home game, I used the mini-megadungeon Dyson's Delve. I was a little behind in preparation because I had been setting things up on the campaign's Obsidian Portal site, blogging here and a bunch of other little projects.

John decided not to play for reasons I can only guess at, so Drisnir was absent from the party, back-storied out with a tale of a prostitute he'd fallen in love with and wanted to make an honest woman of. Em's character was absent and got no such story to explain why, which was odd because we knew she wasn't going to play for much longer. The party picked up a hireling named Lorenzo (which made me decide I need to keep a sheet of campaign appropriate names near me while I DM) to act as a torchbearer/porter on the expedition.

The expedition started off quite well. The party ran into no random encounters during their four days of travel north on the old Iron Trail and their were no planned ones. They had no trouble locating the old Temple of Epona that sat atop the dungeon complex. They quickly found the entrance to the crypt area. The goblin guards were no trouble for them, nor were their hobgoblin superiors. Ruby took them both out in a single round with her mad archery skillz. They made their way to the crypt area and made pretty short work of dispatching the zombie in the sarcophagus, except for Ruby fumbling a burning flask of oil and getting some minor burns.

Unfortunately the party then dithered a bit on which direction to go and got their first wandering monsters. Five firebeetles. The firebeetles won initiative and attacked the party, scoring rapid hits on the heretofore unhittable Heian. Heian dropped to unconsciousness, followed shortly by Sister Brangwen and then, despite her mad archery skillz, Ruby too. Only Lorenzo stayed standing to save the day. He took out the two remaining firebeetles with flaming oil. He then retreated to the Hobgoblin captain's room with the wounded, spiked the door and waited for Sister Brangwen to regain consciousness so she could start casting healing spells on herself and the others.

Tactically the party played better than they have in previous weeks, I think the channelizing effect of the dungeon setting helped immensely there. It sucks that a random encounter nearly took the party out (technically it did take the party out, Lorenzo is a hireling after all and was only fighting as a last resort to save his own hide). Mona forgot to level Sister Brangwen with regards to spells, which was a huge factor. I think she keeps forgetting that she isn't a fighter, despite the ecclesiastical name. Ruby owned the battle field with her archery, not so much with, one of Ashli's favorite tactics, flaming oil. Heian was not too bad, being lower level than the others made life a little more difficult, but I had given him xp=1/2(party avg. xp), which made him a level 2 fighter. That's an old house rule we had from the 2nd edition AD&D days when we had a new player join the game or an old PC died and was, for whatever reason, not resurrected.

Next Sunday John has assured me that he will be playing, maybe not with Drisnir, but playing anyway. Drisnir would be helpful being a level3 fighter, but John says he has lost interest in that character. Lee may make her first appearance in the campaign, but if she does we have to wait to start until after she gets out of church and makes it here, which sets us about two hours behind schedule and Victor often has to leave early; so I guess we'll see how that works out. If Lee plays, Em will probably want to play. Whether or not she plays her current character is unknown, but if she doesn't work on her character this week she won't be playing. I hate it when she tries to join the game at the last minute and holds everyone up while she rolls a new character and equips it.

I also created an NPC mage to join the party, because apparently no one wants to be stuck playing a first level magic-user, but the lack of spellcasters is not great for the party as a whole. I guess it'll be decided whether Gwendolyn the mage joins the party or not based on whether Lee wants to play a magic-user. I suspect she will want to play her half-orc fighter Eema. She made Eema back in October and we started to play a bit, but then that new campaign never even saw a real session of play because of work/school commitments.

Miniatures and D&D: My Thoughts

Ah, Grenadier's AD&D line, my first love. Like a lot of people my age, my first introduction to the use of minis with my D&D game came with Grenadier's official AD&D gold box line of miniature figures. My first box was the Dwarves set. I foolishly traded them away for some inferior unofficial minis so I could have a greater number of figures for my game. I immediately regretted that decision setting a pattern for my ownership of miniatures that continues to this day. I did manage to purchase a bunch of the other sets over the course of time though, coordinated with the other guys in my neighborhood D&D group so we could avoid too much overlap.

I had, ultimately, one large boxed set (5002 Monsters), and four small boxed sets (2001 Wizards, 2002 Halflings, 2004 Hirelings and 2007 Females). Tim M. (the regular DM) had one large boxed set (5009 Dragon's Lair) and six small boxed sets (2003 Dwarves [the reason I never replaced mine], 2005 Fighting Men, 2008 Thieves, 2010 Denizens of the Swamp, 2011 Orc's Lair and 2012 Dwellers Below), which I just fact checked at http://www.dndlead.com/Grenadier/Grenadier.htm .

We didn't have anyone else buying minis in our group (yet), and we preferred boxed sets to blisters since you got more bang for your buck, with a couple of caveats. I, for example, had terrible luck with the boxed sets between broken unfixable minis that clearly came from the mold messed up (Werewolf from the Monsters, Druid with dart from the Wizards), missing parts (again with the monsters, my poor wingless gargoyle, ) or just the wrong mini (Halflings box gave me the halfling thief from the thieves set instead of the slinger). It's like they had a 10% quota for messing with me. Only the Dwarves that I traded and the Hirelings came as they should have, I don't count the Females, they were a birthday gift.

Then there were the useless ones, the ones that were only good if you were planning to build a diorama. The Halflings gave us the lookouts, one standing on the other's head, the camp guard, lounging against a small tree and the lancer mounted on a pack-mule is of, at best, limited utility. The Thieves gave us the climbing thief, the thief opening the chest and the nearly useless thief with grappling hook. Just annoying. I loved them anyway though. I have a deep nostalgia for them. I would love to have them again, despite the fact that they are not up to modern standards as sculpts and they are small compared to today's pseudo-25mm scale minis (which are actually 28-32mm scale)

I sold all of mine off before the end of the 1980's because I wanted to get new minis that I could put better paint jobs on. I figured that I had like a decade of painting experience at that point and I could avoid all the old mistakes. When I first got them I had worked under the theory that I should just slap some paint on them and get them to the table. I mostly painted them with Testors model paints because that's what I had. After a few years of use they weren't looking good, so I sold them to my friends and used the proceeds to buy more minis (in theory anyway, I mostly used the money to buy beer, cigarettes and gas). My mini collection would recover eventually, but not with my beloved Grenadiers.

I have seen most of these miniatures recently, so I can attest to their primitive appearance when compared to newer minis. This leads us in to the story of Lance the lucky. Lance W., who was a member of my old neighborhood D&D group (actually 2 of them, after most of the old crew had graduated from high school and moved on he went out an recruited a new bunch to take their places, I was primary DM for the Dempster D&D group phase 2) went to Gencon about 10 years ago and spent most of his time at the auction (every time he has gone since he volunteers at the auction, he has gotten free admission more than once because of this), while he was there the auctioneers got a sealed suitcase for auction. It was late, they didn't open it up. The description of the contents was extremely vague. No one wanted to bid on it. Lance eventually bid five bucks for the suitcase. He won. The suitcase contained, among other things, a nearly complete set of Grenadiers AD&D miniature line still shrink-wrapped. Now you know why Lance loves the auction and why I call him, in this context anyway, Lance the lucky.

The funny thing is Lance had been buying old Grenadier lead all along. He had picked up the bulk of Tim's collection (although in real roundabout way, Darryl C. had bought them when Tim went through the same newer, better phase I did, Lance just managed to catch Darryl years later when he was in the mood to sell). I think he bought some of mine, and he had been hunting it at garage sales and flea markets since he got his first job. Lance even stayed with Grenadier into the 1990's as a loyal customer. Sadly Grenadier is no more. I wonder what happened to their old molds?

Scale Creep is the scourge of our time. It makes our old minis useless next to these huge minis produced today. Scale creep means that we have to either rely solely on old, no longer manufactured, increasingly expensive and difficult to find sculpts or replace our entire collections and start over. I blame Games Workshop and their Warhammer minis. I guess it's in their interest to try and get people to buy more, newer stuff all the time; and their bigger is better philosophy certainly seems to be popular, but I can't help but wonder- who gave control of the entire fantasy miniatures manufacturing industry to them? Historical miniature wargamers would never tolerate scale creep in their hobby. That's half of what the problem was with WotC's Axis and Allies miniatures line, the vehicle scales were inconsistent and not scaled to the soldiers. WotC had to re-issue all of the vehicle models redone to the proper scale to try and fix the problem and get the line taken seriously by what should have been the core audience they were marketed to.

D&D as a tactical miniatures skirmish game really irks me. Since 3e hit the market you haven't been able to play modern D&D with out minis. I really didn't care initially (when I started playing 3e, which was literally years after it's release) because I have played and enjoyed tactical miniature battles before. After a while it started to wear on me though, because all of the 3e rules are fiddly. I hate all of the conditional nonsense that I am likely to forget as DM. Attacks of opportunity were a good idea in theory, but in practice just make everyone move in a really super paranoid and weird fashion across the battlefield.

I didn't realize how much I had come to hate it until I eventually dumped D&D in favor of Hackmaster (4th edition, the D&D based one). The group I was DMing for played through a small, quick combat and it didn't occur to me to use minis for it or "battle-board" it up. It was like as a group we had some sort of catharsis. After that battle no one in the group wanted to use minis at all. We didn't and it was awesome. Don't get me wrong, we all had a long history of using minis with our D&D games, but I think they had become a symbol of the shackles of 3e and when we didn't need to use them we chose not to as a hallmark of our liberation from them. Kind of like how America drinks coffee instead of tea since the revolution.

Now minis have snuck back into my game, both because I loved them once so very much and because my kids were taught D&D using 3e (they insisted, they wanted the newest, best edition). I have bought a lot of WotC minis, both their D&D minis and their Star Wars minis. The D&D minis I bought for use with my FRPGs, the Star Wars minis partly because I love Star Wars and partly because I was hoping to entice John into my love of wargaming through a Star Wars gateway (unsuccessfully, I tried a similar tactic with Heroscape equally unsuccessfully).

I have previously mentioned D&D miniatures and their collectibility being a problem for me. It annoys me on the one hand to not know what I am getting, since I am old enough to remember buying minis that told you what was in a box, and I know that it is just a scheme by WotC to milk their customers of more of their hard earned money than a decent product should. What I have not mentioned before regarding WotC D&D minis is that they are moving farther and farther from being useful to an early edition player. New PC races are essentially useless to us, I mean we can use the dragon dudes for lizard men or draconians or something, but not what they are intended to be; the other elf looking people could be used for elves I guess, but they are not really producing suitable PC minis for some old school races (gnomes, cough, cough), not that 3e gnomes (or halfling for that matter) really looked right for old school games. They are also changing the appearance of a lot of older monsters. The Shambling mound comes to mind. It used to look like the swamp thing, now it looks like a poorly trimmed hedge.

Now, I am sure someone will point out that Otherworld miniatures has come to our rescue with awesome old school minis in a modern scale, and that's true. However they come at a premium price and they are made in England so the shipping adds to that. Now, I live in upstate NY, which is in the US, whose economy collapsed a couple of years ago. I also have 3 kids at home. I am a grown man and I can't really afford them, how are kids supposed to get them? Since I was a kid myself everyone I have ever played D&D with always wanted to have at least a miniature to represent their character. Many of those people were kids. Minis are too expensive for kids and they lack the instant gratification effect when you have to wait for them to be shipped. Plus they lack the appeal of pre-painted minis in that they are not ready to game with as soon as they arrive. Reaper is solving this problem a little bit with their new line of non-collectible pre-painted plastics, but they are typical reaper sculpts, not necessarily representing an early edition aesthetic.

Hot topics today-

D&D4e makes collectible cards part of their game.

On the one hand I don't care because I don't play 4e. When the game was released I read through the PH and decided it wasn't for me, it had gone a little too far for my tastes from the game I grew up playing. So why should I care?

On the other hand, 4e is the new D&D, it is what people associate me and my hobby with, so I am getting tarred by it's brush. I never liked the collectible aspect of WotC's miniature line for the same reason I never liked CCGs- I like to know what I am buying and whether or not it'll be worth my money. I don't want to have to spend $7000 so I can get enough trolls for the encounter I had planned. Plus they'll all be the same troll mini, that bugs me. I like diversity in mini sculpts.

Also with CCGs there is always some jerk powergamer with more money than sense that builds the awesome deck of always win. You know what "Gamer" card game was awesome? Avalon Hill's Up Front (the Squad Leader card game). You know why? Aside from it's innovative design, you got all the cards when you bought the game. Sure there were expansions released later, but they just added new nationalities. Citadel's Combat Cards were fun too. Sure, they were basically just an advertisement for Warhammer in simple card game format, but if you bought a deck you could play and all the cards for the deck you bought were included.

Religion in RPGs.

Sure it is always there, omnipresent in D&D. A cleric in every party. But does religion ever matter? In my experience no. I have had some players that were really into playing their cleric as, say, a priest of Thor. All anti-giant and combat oriented, cool right? Sometimes. Sometimes it just doesn't work though, largely because, in my opinion, religion in D&D is by default Catholic. That means that being a serious heathen worshipper falls outside the scope of how the class feels. It really shouldn't, there is nothing mechanical about it, it's just that, as designed, the Cleric was supposed to be like a crusader knight. Later this was superceded by the Paladin, but every cleric is still Odo of Bayeux out there wielding a mace so as not to spill blood.

As a DM I have painstakingly created a realistic pantheon of gods and religious observances complete with holy days, based on my mad anthropology and history skillz, only to have it be completely ignored as essentially campaign world flavor text. Helpful for me as DM to set the stage, not so important to the players unless there is a plot hook embedded in the harvest festival. Even clerics (usually) seem less than interested in the day to day, season to season rituals of their religion.

Why is this? I think it probably has to do with the increased secularization of our society. Nobody I play with now or have played with regularly in the past is terribly religious, so they probably don't think about it often.

Missed my anniversary

I missed my one year anniversary with this blog.

For a recap- this blog has covered 3 separate campaigns in the course of 1 year.

First was an AD&D1 campaign set in my own world of Garnia that lasted four or five sessions before ending abruptly in the middle of what was most likely the final combat encounter of the adventure when my wife Mona paused to make dinner. That was my post apocalyptic Garnia game. Oddly enough, we will be restarting this one next Sunday.

Second was a Rules Cyclopedia game where I figured the more rules light version of D&D might keep the game flow going for the kids, particularly John and Em. That didn't really seem to matter to them particularly. I held John's attention but not really Em's. Em died about half way through Castle Caldwell. Ashli died literally on the second to last hit of the last encounter because of a failed save vs. poison. John and Ash were both pretty psyched about actually finishing an adventure though. We planned to do the Castle Caldwell dungeons in the next session, but we never had another session of that campaign. I have really got no idea why that was, but it might have had something to do with either Ash getting ready to join the Army reserve or Ash training for SCA heavy weapons combat or both. We pretty much spent the summer getting in shape, training sword and shield and then moving back to my old property and cleaning it up and repairing things. After school started up again we were really busy all the time. John was in football, Ashli is in Marine Corps junior ROTC and National Honor Society and pretty active in both as well as being in the Army reserve, so we really had to wait for the weather to get cold before moving on to gaming again.

Third was my extremely short-lived Oriental Adventures/Ruins and Ronin hybrid campaign. I was looking forward to it for weeks and it really was my baby. I had been subtly prepping everyone on a diet of cool feudal Japanese stuff during our evening family TV viewing time. It lasted a total of three sessions, all in the month of December and we only made characters during the first. Two TPKs in two weeks apparently killed the enthusiasm for the mystic orient.

It's all OK though, in a year I have discovered the OSR which led me back to my gaming roots and my family and I have had some good times with gaming. This year seems to be well on track to having a D&D game every Sunday. I only wish I could connect with someone local that was into wargaming, all my old wargaming buddies have left the area. I haven't been able to get so much as a game of Axis & Allies going with the kids. By the time I was Em's age I was already experienced at getting my butt kicked at numerous AH and SPI games :)

Riches and Glory!

You’re no hero.
You’re a reaver, a cutpurse, a heathen-slayer, a tight-lipped warlock guarding long-dead secrets. You seek gold and glory, winning it with sword and spell, caked in the blood and filth of the weak, the dark, the demons, and the vanquished. There are treasures to be won deep underneath, and you shall have them.
Return to the glory days of fantasy with the Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game. Adventure as 1974 intended you to, with modern rules grounded in the origins of sword & sorcery. Fast play, cryptic secrets, and a mysterious past await you: turn the page…

This is the opening text of the Goodman Games Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG webpage, and it got me thinking. My buddy Lance used to deride these “new” players (particularly after the advent of Vampire: the Masquerade; not necessarily causal, just saying) with their need for character motivation. He'd say, often, “the only motivation we needed was riches and glory” or “we quest for riches and glory”. Riches and glory were the only motivation we needed, we didn't need an angst filled back story for our character. We were there to play and our ultimate motivation was to be the biggest, richest bad-asses in the campaign world. Even Lance's paladin Bordan had a wealthy bad-ass fixation, which is hard to do given the wealth restrictions on paladins, but he was very legalistic about them and got certain dispensations from the DM (Tim) on occasion (usually in connection with the campaign arc he had surrounding the quest for the 10 holy swords).

I read somewhere recently, probably on an OSR blog, that the art changed between editions and became more heroic, where in early edition stuff the adventurers were depicted more like grubby mercenaries. I guess I can see the change now in retrospect. Newer editions and the vast amount of additional available material for them kind of encouraged a straight-up heroic style of play and I kind of went along for the ride on that because I like heroes myself. But I kind of miss the morally ambivalent Conan the barbarian inspired hero. Conan wanted to be rich and powerful so he did what he could to get there and ended up king of Aquilonia. But he started out as a thief and a mercenary. He had a moral code that would probably put him on the good side of the alignment chart. He had interest that included wasting lots of his (often ill-gotten) riches on wine and women.

That's the character, more or less, that pretty much everyone I played with back in the day used to play.

Followers

I knew building that stronghold would attract followers :)

Seriously though, it's nice to see someone besides the people in my game are interested in what I have to say. Thanks for stopping by and checking things out. I don't mind the added pressure of making sure I post good insightful stuff regularly at all :)

I'll try and keep posting game AARs every Monday and my musings on gaming and other stuff as they come to me, sometimes that'll be twice daily sometimes not for days at a time.

Vikings!

I am thinking that I will explore an area of my Garnia campaign world with this next campaign that I haven't really touched on too much yet- the Viking settlements based around Kaupangrfjord. I have always loved the vikings, I am partially descended from them so I guess that makes a narcissistic kind of sense. My first long running D&D character Mandark was a Northman from Soderfjord. My initial SCA persona was Bjorn Asgeirssen. My only NWN module was based on the same campaign area of Kaupangrfjord and the isles. My long running alt AOL NWN character was Odinbjorn the berserk. I essentially wrote the Viking campaign sourcebook a year before the TSR version of it came out because I wanted to modify AD&D to fit a more historical/Norse mythological framework, we only ran a few adventures there, kind of a series of linked one-shots, but it got pretty good reviews from most of the participants.

My wife Mona is the only player from those games that I still have any contact with, but she remembers it fondly. At the time she started to write/draw a comic book based on the first adventure we played, she only got a few pages in but it was pretty cool to see my game in another medium. I almost remember the cast of characters. I pre-generated them based on what the players in the game were going to want to play, but at the last minute a couple of them switched. Knut the beardless, a massive berserker under a curse, was played by Bill N. Skuli Silver-tongue the Skald was played by his brother Danny. Mona played Sigrid Lignisdottir a priestess of Freyja and Darryl C. Jr. AKA "Little-Darryl" played her brother whose name I forget, but I remember he was an alcoholic and the party leader. His dad, Darryl C. Sr. or "Big-Darryl" played a grizzled old viking named Ragnar. Jamie W. played Ivar the only experienced woodsman and the only Christian viking in the party. Lance W. played a sorcerous and nasty fellow named Magnus.

I remember that Bill and Danny traded characters for the second installment and stayed that way there after, and that Big Darryl never made it back to any of the later games, I think Lance might have made it back for one more game. Darryl's girlfriend (later wife, then ex-wife) Muriel made it into one game as Kara Grey-cloak, but that was after TSR released the Viking Campaign Sourcebook (HR1) and I significantly revamped the characters and setting to bring them into alignment with actual AD&D rules. I wish I hadn't done that. We played it more before. I did run an entire, brief VCS campaign over one summer in the early nineties though and it was fun.

Black Orc Games

I just want to give a shout out here to Black Orc Games ( www.blackorc.com ), makers of Hundred Kingdoms and Warband and a lot of really nice minis. I have made 2 orders with them in the past month and their minis are both of excellent quality and relatively inexpensive. Additionally, both orders have included 1 extra mini for free and my invoice had a hand written note of thanks on it. I haven't got any of the minis painted yet, but the first bunch is primed and they look great. I got their Warband starter set and it comes with the rules, paints, brushes, a cloth tape measure, 2 20-sided dice and 2 warbands (totaling 10 minis) currently on sale for $15.00.

I initially found them while I was searching for new Samurai minis for my OA game, but they have a pretty varied line of figures that could be used for a bunch of different games. Their Panthera tribe make pretty cool Rakasta, their Avalon make for good standard D&D minis. They have modern zombies, D&D style dwarves, Samurai and tons of other stuff. I could keep going on and on, but this isn't meant to be an advertisement or to replace their catalog, I just wanted to publicly state my appreciation for their company. I haven't dealt with a company like this in a while, it's nice to be appreciated as a customer and not just a revenue stream.

Oh, I don't work for them and they are not relatives or anything. I am not pimping their goods just trying to raise their profile a little. I think their catalog can speak for itself if people get there and see it.

What a difference a day makes.

My R&R/OA campaign got canceled today because my wife's parents, nephew and aunt came to visit. Victor still came over because apparently Ashli forgot to call him (or just wanted to see him) so, of course, we talked about D&D for a while (and SCA heavy weapons fighting- I gave him a helmet) during which time he stated that he'd rather just start a "regular" D&D campaign next time. Maybe he reads this blog? I don't know. Ashli had been talking for days about how she wanted to go back to playing Ruby, her Hobbit thief with the speech impediment and mushroom habit.

So it seems that we will be returning to Garnia post-apocalypse after all. I have some new ideas for that setting anyway. Poor Garnia. I have collapsed that civilization so many times before; civil wars and break-away kingdoms, the necromancer war, various barbarian invasions installing new dynasties in old established kingdoms, the troll war, the great orc war the war of the twelve. That's just the core human kingdoms too; the elves have their cataclysms culminating in the absolute annihilation of their civilization with the rise of man. The dwarves have their slow decline to collapse following the troll war. The hobbits with their lost origin and lost homelands. So many memories.

Now it begins again.

New Campaign?

Is there a new campaign beginning here? No, not yet anyway. I know the announcement that I had an Obsidian Portal account and was starting to put up my Garnia stuff was a tad confusing to some people, but I am still trying to run my Ruins and Ronin/AD&D Oriental Adventures hybrid campaign. I only started putting up Garnia stuff there because I wanted to see how everything worked there and Garnia is dead easy for me to write about; it's been kicking around in my noggin for nigh on to 30 years.

Holy cow that makes me feel old, but I just date checked myself and my earliest Garnia stuff is from right around 1980 (unless my memory is failing). I started the whole thing off as a vanity homage to one of my own characters- Garn the great. I played him in Chris's super Monty haul get rich and godly-powerful or die campaign through the spring/summer of 1980 I am pretty sure. By fall that campaign was over, and I was soon playing in Tim's much better (and much longer running) D&D campaign. However, I was already designing my own world, centered on that mysterious castle (that I had designed for my character Garn!) and with Garn as chief deity of his own pantheon. That said, I probably didn't run any games in that setting until maybe as late as '85 or '86 using instead the world of Greyhawk or D&D's Known World. I know Darryl started doing cartography and helping me to write a world history when we were in 8th grade which would have been the '82-83 school year, so I was most likely running it with that group of gamers back then on a limited basis.

Anyway, my point was, R&R/OA will still be played tomorrow and, unless there is another TPK, the following Sunday and all of the for the foreseeable future. We all really wanted to try OA again and I was in the right frame of mind to do it, kami willing everything will work out fine :)

Like Art?

If you like art you should check out my wife Mona's deviantart gallery at:

http://monelun.deviantart.com/gallery/

Pretty good, eh?

Obsidian Portal

Luddite that I am I only just created an Obsidian Portal account to manage my World of Garnia campaign. I figure it's time I started getting the stuff out of my head and into the world. Come check it out, but not right away, at http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaigns/garnia/