Origins

When thinking about why I want to write a blog I find my reasons leaning more towards the creation of a journal that may or may not be of interest for people to share and discuss opinons and ideas for the betterment of the writer and the reader as a whole. Although the motive sounds very noble it is truely birthed from the frustration of finding few sources that I like as a reference to D&D and the fear of slipping into a groupthink mindset when it comes to role playing.

I suppose like most traditional beginnings they should begin at that point as well. I began playing D&D about the age of ten, giving me roughly two decades of consistent play under my belt, although I do not lay claim to secret or special knowledge or even 'old timer' status. My first exposure was in the Boy Scouts playing D&D with the older boys at night or during storms, huddled in horrible little damp green tents. It was fast and dirty, played diceless and in retrospect; quite crudely. We would have an ad hoc DM running shorts that would last an hour or two with loosely consistent characters with no real stats, equipment or conceptualization of the rules. The adventures were elementary; some would use the adjuctive 'pulpy' but I hold pulp literature in higher regard than the prepubesent fumblings and escapades that occured.

After several months of playing this way I came across 'the big black box'. This was the fifteenth reprint of the Basic set, containing the D&D Rules Cyclopedia, a horrible DM's screen a handful of dice and a start up adventure/dungeon. With this acquisition I felt that I was now in the big times! After all I had rules, and knowledge of these rules and the ability to back them up was power. Soon I had begun running sessions at Scouts, and would always fill a pocket with dice while packing for the weekend, just so that he weekend went smoothly.

While character sheets were still absent, the Rules Cylcopedia and a thorough background in reading th works of Robert Howard, Ursala Le Guin and Anne McCaffery gave me a working basis for what would form my beginning campaigns. This went over horribly. My friends were not interested in running a consistent game, craving the modular free-for-all that had been our game up until then. But all the same I got to whet my teeth on running one shot adventures, as weather permitted.

This pattern continued until Junior High School were the influx of new friends lead to the formation of an honest to goodness campaign. It was ran by my friend Tim and the players included myself, Tim's younger brother Dane and Nathan. I still remember having everyone over to my parents' basement, getting Big Foot pizzas from Little Caesars and playing once a month or so. Although I cannot remember my character's name, I do know that I was a wizard, and our first major opponent was a Dark Naga. Nostalgia applies some rosiness to this memory I am sure, but it felt more like what D&D should have felt like to me than my previous experience. We played off an on until the end of High School when the natural ebb and flow of life seperated our little group.

However during High School I had also joined up with three more guys due to the relative infrequency of my primary group's playing schedule. This included Jason, Chet and Chet's younger brother Andy. Jason was our DM for a portion of the time, and he was a fairly decent one, having learned under his older brother, who only has gotten better with age. We branched out into various other games; the old d6 Star Wars, GURPS, Palladium Fantasy and Rifts. Nathan would sometimes join us from time to time as schedule allowed, and many times it was just Jason and myself. Campaigns lasted from three to six months, being played once or twice a week, usually until the DM at the time 'ran out of ideas'. Adventures were fairly modual although I can point to the beginnings of sandbox style play for our group, these concepts were not fully utilized until later.

At the end of High School and the start of College, most people had cone their seperate ways. I had attended a local university that my family had very strong ties with (the 15th member of five generations kind of ties) and Jason stayed local as well, barring his brief stint in the military and his Mormon mission to Brazil. It was at this time in 1997 that I discovered online games for D&D. I joined the community of Thardferr under the handle of Jhandar. Which wouldn't you know , after a bit of searching, Thardferr is still limping along and can be found at http://www.thardferr.info/index.php. I managed to play in DM Barkeep's game for a brief time but got lured to the side of being a DM and launched into the role. I DMed steadily in Thardferr for nearly four years, with a good deal of that time devoted increasing the depth of the setting documentation.

Thardferr was a great world to play in at the height of its day. However, like all good things, they rarely last. The premise behind the campaign world was a shared space in which several DMs can run concurrent campaigns while there was the steady march of an overarching plot line. This is a wonderful sounding idea in theory, however it was horrific in practice.

The first and largest of the troubling spots was the mere world concept of Thardferr. Thardferr had just three years previously expelled a magic powered force of invaders that had conquored the whole continent and held power for the last eight years called the Syth. The Syth per the write up, were fairly big advocates of the Russian policy of scorched earth policy and used the magic to liberally raize known pockets of resistance. However against these odds a brutal gurilla campaign had pushed back the invaders and order, and the rightful heir to the crown was rethroned. As a reaction to the magical power wielded by the Syth, magic was outlawed unless in the hands of the Imperial Mages Guild, and even then public usages of magic where prohibited by law and would lead to the possibility of stonings even against sanctioned guild members.

This created the largest stumbling blocks for a shared exsistence world. DMs would argue that the world was not a still smoldering plague and famine ravaged hellscape as described in the history section. Their usual justification was the dilligent efforts of the IMG (Imperial Mages Guild) at using their spellcraft to rebuild cities and the shattered world. Perhaps they envisioned this being done at night and the IMG being a kind of sprite like organizations, since they made it very clear that casting magic in public was illegal and came with painful consequences from the terrified commoners.

While this issue is problematic to say the least, it is merely the tip of the iceburg regarding the community as a whole. Attempts to clarify, establish and document lead to the DMs and more of the vocal players degenerating from intellectural discourse to dick waving which was all fun and games until people started loosing eyes. Unfortunately the mechanism for positive change that I proposed, the Thardferrian Counsel, degenerated into a vehicle for witch hunting people for socio-political gaming reasons rather than an effort to provide depth to the game. While I do not think my efforts were Jeffersonian at all, it was sad to watch the train wreck happen.

All in all however, the experience was over all a positive one, and I did connect with several players and DMs which were wonderful sounding boards for ideas. Perhaps the greatest of which was Cecil, operating under the handle of Nyr. He is a wonderful man and a great mind to work with and I feel truely grateful to have gamed with him. Cecil began to run his home-brewed campaign of Archian (http://archian.org/), a world ordered and ran by mages, and I jumped at the opportunity. I played a young, guilded summoner named Eandil Cobbler which is one of my favorite characters I have ever played.

By mid 2000 3rd Edition D&D had come out and been recieved with little fanfare from myself and my good friend Jason who had returned from overseas and we began dicussing historically accurate gaming, picking the concept of the 13h century England, just after the Children's Crusade. Working on a GURPS based system we worked on digging up as much information as we could to try and simulate the life of a knight-errant.

Eventually time ended the campaign as well as my time in Thardferr. Neither which I regret as they were both very formative. From 2000 until 2002 I took a rest from role playing. Finishing my undergraduate and setting up my career took the front seat for me for the time. However it was not long until I stumbled back into playing. I had brought the 3E books to work as reading material on what little down time I could muster and one of my coworkers noticed and asked if I played. His name is Jones (referred to by the fact that he had a first name shared by quite a few people at the facility), and he played in a bi-monthly Rifts game which I would soon join. The trajectory of Jones will be a topic for further posts, so I will not delve into it too deeply here, however the Rifts game was interesting to say the least.

Jamey was the GM and the other players were 'Hippie' George, Josh, Skylar and Skylar's girlfriend/wife who's name escapes me. Now in defense of the campaign, I was warned previously that it was a 'high powered game'. This was not quite accurate. The game was one of those games that hardliners (of which I include myself, rightly or otherwise) speak of in myth and legend to justify draconian stances and to caution players of the dangers of what can go wrong in a game. It wsa Monty Haul to a level at which I was unaware was possible. People LITERALLY had golf bags full of artifact level weapons! If you are familiar with Rifts' magic system, it required freqent castings of Invincible Armor and a common offensive spell utilized from round to round was Annihilate, yes a 14th level spell was a common attack, repeatedly in a fight.

My choice of characters was a Temporal Mage, a fairly powerful mage by Rifts standards, since I was warned that it was a 'high powered game'. When I was told by Jamey that he would 'help me out' and make me an Ancient Chang-Ku Dragon Temporal Mage, so that I would fit in better, I remember shuddering. But by this time I was starved for role playing and I sacrificed morals for fun like the junkie I am. We were eventually joined by Brian, Dave and Melissa as 'Hippie' George, Skylar and his wife left, and after a string of equally geared mini-campaigns I siezed control of the situation in a relatively bloodless coup d'etat.

I began running a Wild West Rift's game at this point since that was the system everyone was most familiar with. Player-wise I kept Jones, Brian, Dave, Josh, Jamey in player form, and begrudgingly took on Melissa and her sister Pam. There was a relationship issue between a few of the players which would come to a head down the road which would cause problems, but it felt nice to be back at the helm.

Brian played a Techno-Mage, Dave a Psi-Slinger, Jones a Justice Ranger, Jamey a Summoner, Pam a Fire and Brimstone Preacher, Melissa an Operator and Josh played a Gambler, Gunslinger and finally a Cyberknight. Josh had a tendancy to die, twice at the hands of common sense due to poor poor choices (read point-black use of RPGs and the like) and once at the hands of our Justice Ranger after screaming out 'My honor must be satisfied!' at an unarmored and lightly armed NPC while boring a hole through his chest with a very high powered energy pistol, killing him instantly in front of a hundred witnesses or so. I fully stand behind Jones' decision to hang Josh for murder after that one. Josh, being a trooper, was okay with it.

This game ran from early 2003 until late 2005 and was one of my favorite games to run. During this time we had a marriage in the group in real life between two players, which led to the self imposed exile of another player due to spurned romantic reasons, as well as one player developing MS. This is another game that will likely see a great deal of exposition and has been very influential in tweaking my style of DMing. Concurrently Brian was running a 3.X D&D game that I did get to play in for a brief period, but the game did last a couple of years without me in a setting of his design.

In late 2005 we picked up another player who was great friends with Brian and Dave; Buddha. This obvious nickname was again enforced due to the fact that when two Brians live under one roof communication can get difficult. I began a Champions game along the theme of Naruto/Ninja Scroll. This game had it's ups and downs. The big issue was the variance in what people felt to be 'ninja-like'. You had people who would burst into fires which consumed their whole bodies when they used any powers along side people that could turn invisible and have a 95%+ chance of passing non-penalty imposed sneak rolls. The group did not mesh well as characters as they divided into the ninja vs. anime camp and the setting did not ever really gel. And in all honsety the setting was merely a cardboard cut out of a world, which I always disliked, but never fully developed and probably never will.

In 2006 we switched back to a fantasy setting with Earthdawn. Melissa and Pam dropped from teh group due to lack of interest, which was fine. Josh had gotten married and moved away, and Jamey was still in exile. Jones had also gotten married but remained a part of the fold. We picked up another of Brian, Buddha and Dave's old gaming buddies Ernie to round out our numbers. This game survived for two years, through my own wedding planning and wedding. However work stresses reard their ugly head and the game came to a close in 2008.

All of my gaming group and I kept close, with Ernie running a 4th Edition game and hanging out in general. It was after the release of the Watchmen movie and several wonderful Batman films that I decided to start up a Dark Champions game focusing on vigilante super heroes fighting against crime, villainy and the Nazis set int he 1940s prior to the outbreak of WWII. This game has ran from early 2009 to current, although the final nails in its coffin are comming down. Through no real fault of its own, as there is meat on those bones worth the time, it is just that I truly feel that D&D and UFA is my home as a DM. And so for the last several months I have been working, reading and writing the beginning of a campaign that I intend to become 'my' setting.

This blog is intended to serve as a blackboard for ideas as I post both what has already been written and discuss what is influencing what is guiding my writings currently. I am not sure when full blown play will begin in this campaign, but world building is half the fun for me. So I encourage any and all readers to follow along, point out what they like and don't like, comment, critique and share their perceptions along this journey of mine.