Friday, February 7, 2014

The Box

Maybe Some Things Shouldn't Be Drawn
Welcome to the D&D 40th Anniversary Blog Hop Challenge!

Day 7: First D&D product you ever bought.  Do you still have it?

It was the nifty Holmesian box with rulebook, dice, and, the B2 module.  I chucked the box pretty soon after buying it.  It was just in the way and the sides had split with me carrying it around everywhere.  I still have some of the dice, but as for the rest of the contents - well - they are lost to time.

- Ark

Thursday, February 6, 2014

Death Cubed

Welcome to the D&D 40th Anniversary Blog Hop Challenge!

Day 6: First character death.  How did you handle it?

I just rolled up another one.  Dime a dozen and all that.

:)

- Ark

Wednesday, February 5, 2014

Urlik Banork

Welcome to the D&D 40th Anniversary Blog Hop Challenge!

Day 5: First character to go from 1st level to the highest level possible in a given edition.  (Or, what's the highest level character you've ever ran?)

My first character of note, after a slew of hopeless cannon fodder, was a wizard named Urlik Banork.  He was modeled after Gandalf - and I started him as a gray-bearded old man, not some young punk whippersnapper.

He got amazingly high in levels - not from my skill, or even luck, mind you.  Urlik was in multiple campaigns, had multiple DMs, was a Mary Sue NPC sometimes, and sometimes us kids would just narrate adventures with no DM and assign our favorite characters levels on a whim.  Not that, in the early days, we really understood - or cared to understand - all that AD&D had to offer.  We were playing for fun, and all of our characters ended up being '50th level' - whatever that meant.

Urlik was adamant about being Lawful Good and really hated Orcs - so much so that he got his buddies together, raised and army, and wiped the Bone March clean of evil.  At that point, we were only playing with those characters as narration, but still, it was fun to redraw the maps of Greyhawk.

As far as an actual character I leveled up to the tippy-top of the level limit?  Um - never, I'd guess.  At least not the honest way. :)  I was too busy DMing.

- Ark

Tuesday, February 4, 2014

Here There Be . . .

Welcome to the D&D 40th Anniversary Blog Hop Challenge!

Day 4: First dragon your character slew (or some other powerful monster.)

I DMed through most of my early D&D days, and of those characters I played back then, I don't recall ever slaying a dragon. In fact, the first dragon I slew wasn't until WOTC was bringing out the Essentials line, i.e. D&D 4.5.

The Boy and I were playing pre-gens for some sort of demo WOTC was doing. I remember I played the magic user who had the newly revamped magic missiles that auto-hit. And so, our first level PCs went up against a baby dragon.

Okay, now that I think about it, my pre-gen died in a burst of dragon breath. The whole party did, actually, now that I remember it.

So, um, I never did slay a dragon. Dammit.

- Ark

Monday, February 3, 2014

The Tower of Zenopus

Tower of Zenopus with the Stone Mountain in the background.

Welcome to the D&D 40th Anniversary Blog Hop Challenge!

Day 3: First dungeon you explored as a player-character or ran as a DM. 

The first time I ever player D&D, I DMed - as explained in my previous entry.  I just turned to the back of the blue book and began running my friend through the Tower of Zenopus.  I don't actually recall reading the adventure beforehand - and for years after, I couldn't figure out why there was a giant skull at the top of the tower, and an ancient domed city down below.

There was a lot of confusion about the rules - but we pushed through.  I seem to recall the most horrible monsters were the Green Slime and a randomly rolled Gelatinous Cube.  There was a lot of pc death.  We didn't realize that the party should contain more than one adventurer.  But it was tons of fun.

It's funny how a simple little game could grab my attention and never let go - even after all of these years.

- Ark

Sunday, February 2, 2014

Horror Noir Bayeux Tapestry in the Works

Our gaming group is continuing to play GURPS.  The players seem to like it - it's simple enough to not get in the way of a good story, but complicated enough to handle all of the really weird ideas we come up with.  Oddly, we are still running with the game that I only set up as an experimental venue - that of Horror Noir.

The characters are agents of the Directorate of Esoteric Affairs, a British agency founded to fight and contain weirdness of all shapes and forms.  They've fought zombies in London's Chinatown, undead ghost babies and evil cultists in Scotland, and protected an ancient Egyptian Mummy from a Parisian Gargoyle over the skies of France inside of the Hindenburg.

The party is made up of a tough-as-nails British police investigator, a kung-fu master from China, and a wiley South Afican monster huntress.  Also included in the mix as a Brazilian Mati Hari who was turned into a succubus after interrupting a demon summoning spell, a black-and-white horror film starlet who got waay too intimate with an actual, real life vampire on set, and an American gumshoe who tussled with a werewolf a bit too closely one night.  So, yeah, half the monster hunters have turned into actual, real life monsters over the years.

This time out, five DEA agents vanished on the way to Transylvania, and our intrepid heroes have been sent to Romania to find out what happened.  Below are the visual notes from one of the players.  She plays the South African monster huntress, and has done a great job.  I am fully expecting a complete Bayeux Tapestry workup of all of their adventures soon. :)




Awesome, eh?

- Ark

Fezzes are Cool

Merlin never looked so suave.
Welcome to the D&D 40th Anniversary Blog Hop Challenge!

Day 2: First person who you introduced to D&D.  Which edition?  Their first character?

So from the last post, my introduction to D&D wasn't incredibly informative.  But I was in love with the idea of what Dungeons and Dragons might be, so I acquired the Blue Box from the book store in the mall and dove in.

I guess you could more accurately say that Doctor John Eric Holmes introduced me to D&D.  It was his words that flowed into my brain, telling me finally, really, exactly what D&D was.

After perusing the blue box rules, I decided the game was definitely something I should be doing.  I arranged a sleepover with my friend Chris, determined that we could figure the whole thing out.

Hats.  We were sure hats were an important part of the D&D experience.  After all - every hero in the blue book was in a hat, right?  So he both made wizard hats out of construction paper and tape. You have to have your priorities straight - right?  Then we sat on the floor in his room.

Chris rolled up a character, and I began to DM - and play D&D - for the very first time.

Honestly, I have no recollection of what his first character was.  There were a lot of them.  And a lot of death.  Glorious, limb rending, flesh melting death.

Can life be any more enjoyable than that?  I think not.

- Ark