Its OK, Gary Sent Us

Tribute to the creator of DnD and the RPG hobby

I won’t hide the fact that the passing of Gary Gygax influenced the choice of game world. He was after all one of the founding fathers and, for a long time, its premier spokesperson. In a sense Gary led all of us to the world of gaming. It seemed fitting I used his world this time.

I have fond memories of getting my 1st edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons books. The sense of wonder. The sense of adventure. The sense of confusion at the words. Hey, it wasn’t a perfect system. And it seems Gary was equally quirky. I reread his “Up on a Soapbox” columns from Dragon Magazine. Some of those stories make me shake my head. Melf turning dual classed midway in an adventure. The adversarial GM mindset. Heck, he admitted he used house rules. [And I forced myself to use “weapon speed”!]

But looking back, he understood then what it was all about. Sometimes you just have to cut and paste, hack and sew at the rules and traditions. It’s because there are no standard players. The individual quirks and passions will always come out.

So here’s to you Mr. G. Thanks for showing the way.

One step at a time...

DM starts up a mini-campaign

That's how things usually start. Funny how difficult it is to take that step.

I had been toying with the notion of starting a new rpg campaign. Not that there's anything wrong with our current campaigns, its just that the "Old Guard" is experiencing schedule difficulties [aka Real Life]. Inviting some of my newly acquainted rpg buddies to a game seemed like a good idea. And since I wanted to break out of the gaming drought, I figured a short mini-campaign would be easier to prepare. Of course that was before I actually started to work on the game but that's getting ahead of myself. Keeping notes and journals online seemed like a good idea as well. Its something I didn't have when I started this hobby.

So for starters, I had to decide on which game to run. To keep things simple I settled on this criteria:

Accessible rpg system
Ideally a system familiar to most of the gamers around here. If I needed to explain the system I should be able to do it with as little effort as possible. Ideally, It should also be "gear light". I don't want to lug a small library around and I don't think the players would want that either.

That ruled out Rifts and the Palladium system. Same with Shadowrun. Too bad, I kinda like Shadowrun. And the Rifts setting is always entertaining.

Comfortable game premise
Considering all the gut wrenching drama and tales of moral ambiguity we're seeing in the daily news not to mention the special coverage in the Senate, I decided to go full out escapist. So I say bye bye to Worlds of Darkness.

Familiarity with the game world
Custom crafting a world is enjoyable but takes time. That means its either a published setting or an offshoot of a current campaign. That pretty much left me with two choices - Dungeons and Dragons 3rd ed. Greyhawk or our custom Big Eyes Small Mouth anime cyberpunk game. From the title of this blog, you know which game won out.