Playing Games, Part 8: Just When I Thought I Was Out...

Nobody does Pacino from Godfather 3. They all do
Silvio doing Pacino from Godfather 3. 

Several years ago, I was employed by a homeschooling family as their creative arts teacher for one of their kids; a smart, funny, creative young man who was a little shy and needed help with his verbal and language skills. When he was younger, I was initially reading comics with him, which we both got a kick out of. Now that he was older now, he was into video games and Skyrim and all of that stuff. So, I thought, let’s kill a few birds with one stone and try Dungeons and Dragons first edition. He really took to it, and I re-discovered, I did, too.

You can get a LOT of mileage out of
this module. We all did, right?
Mostly we were just waiting for
the Temple of Elemental Evil.

I kept our investment low, since I had the old AD&D hardcover books and enough dice to kill both of us in a rockslide. A few printed pdf pages and we were off to the races, running T1, The Village of Hommlet.  I ran it off-the-cuff, adding tons of things not in the module in the interest of keeping my student’s interest. Some of those off-the-cuff ideas got written down and saved for later, because they were quite fun and interesting.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was back on the junk. I hadn’t looked at my AD&D books in literally twenty years. I’d sold the hell out of D&D 3.5 materials in my Chessex days, and working in comic shops, but I’d never played any of it. I thought 3.5 was a cash grab—I mean, when I discovered D&D, there were three books. And then five. And then seven. And by then, we thought, this is overkill. Who needed a second monster manual? *Rant Mode On* And I’m sorry, but the Tarrasque is without a doubt the stupidest, dumbest, most unnecessary monster made for a game where the dragons are supposed to be the stars. The Tarrasque is the Deadpool of D&D. *Rant Mode off*

Of all the terrible ideas fielded by TSR
in the day (and they fielded a LOT), this
Ridiculous I-Don't-Know-What wins
first prize for sheer What-the-Fuck. 

Third Edition was a beast, man. After your three books, there was the specialty book for the character you wanted to play, and if you were a GM, didn’t you feel that you needed all of them to make sure your players weren’t trying something stupid or illegal? And then you needed a campaign setting.  Well, here’s the Forgotten Realms, which was spiraling out of control, with boxed sets and supplement books. And then there were feats. Feats upon feats. And when those feats weren’t enough, there were epic feats.  I know people loved it and played it until their ears met, but it just seemed to me, an old fogey, from the outside looking in, like a willy-nilly power-fantasy pyramid scheme.

I was relieved to find that 4^th edition was more streamlined, at least, as far as introducing new players to the game was concerned. I bought my geeky niece the boxed set one Christmas, along with a giant bag of dice. We cracked it open and I was surprised to find Reflex rolls and Fortitude rolls on the page. By this time, of course, the d20 rules was the game’s operating system. I just hadn’t looked at it in so long, it was confusing—and by the way, the 4th edition “starter set” did a piss-poor job of explaining the new stats. It’s no wonder that 5^th edition came along. They really needed to fix the problems with 4^th edition.

In fact, I was so curious about how they were going to fix 4^th edition that I bought the new 5^th edition books and the starter set, too. You know, purely for academic reasons. Not because I was interested in playing again. Not me, man, this stuff is for kids. And it was right about then that Dungeons and Dragons celebrated their 40^th anniversary. That triggered my always simmering cauldron of nostalgia, and my interest promptly boiled over. I fell off the wagon. Hard. I took a deep dive into everything that was out there, online, and being discussed. My hobby, the one I helped start with my time and my allowance, had really grown up. There was now a vocabulary—more of a jargon, really, that was first appropriated by computer gaming and then re-appropriated back by the tabletop gamers—that explained these concepts that we were all aware of, but had no words to describe. 

This shot of Thorin, on a giant armored war goat, was
the point in the The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies
when I said, "I have GOT to start playing D&D again!" 

In the middle of all my immersion, as if on cue, my employees (high school students and college students all) expressed an interest in playing D&D. They loved fantasy and Lord of the Rings and the Chronicles of Narnia and Magic: the Gathering, but they’d never played D&D. We had just wrapped up showing The Hobbit trilogy at the theater and I remarked to them how much it made me want to play Dungeons and Dragons again. Well, they wondered, aloud, tentatively, would I be interested in teaching them how to play?

“On one condition,” I said. “We’re going to do an old school campaign in an old school world. No Tieflings, no Dragonborn, none of that Frou-Frou stuff. You’re going to have to deal with goblins and animated skeletons and pick locks and bend bars and lift gates and stuff like that. Deal?”

“We don’t know what any of that means, so ‘yes,’” they replied.

The flag and seal of Riverton, one
of the five City-States of Thera.
I am pretty sure I put a lot of
unnecessary details in the setting.

And that’s how I started writing my current game, set in the world of Thera (unscramble the letters; I'm sooooo clever). I stripped away everything out of 5^th edition that wouldn’t have been in Greyhawk, and then I re-imagined Greyhawk as a collection of five city-states, each one lording over an area of the New World. The builders of these great cities came into the New World half a millennium ago, having been forced out of their lands by the goblinoids. In this “New Land” they settled, and never mind the indigenous people that already lived there.

Over time, the five city-states evolved into their own unique identities, and now with the goblinoid menace looming in the southern mountains again, the people have turned their gaze East, through the Silverback Mountains, where a pristine land, untouched by evil and the vagaries of men, is rumored to lie. Now begins a mad dash to see who can forge a path through the mountains and establish a colony and trade routes, for that city-state will undoubtedly benefit the most.

From back in the day. Some of the art is still quite functional.

This is the political situation I put the new players in. There’s a trading post in the wilderness, a haunted keep, old adventurers who were once friends but are now at cross purposes, a demented priest, lots of creepy monsters, and all of the good stuff you want from an initial foray into Dungeons and Dragons.  In fact, a lot of the things I designed for the campaign had a shared muscle memory with many of the modules and articles I'd consumed in my youth. 

We played the heck out of 5^th edition. I wrote a lot of stuff for the game. I’m still writing stuff. I did a lot of reading and found a ton of amazing resources for new and old players. Now we’re here, at my blog. And coming up, I’m going to post some of my content from my game. But not until I tell you what I really think about Dungeons and Dragons 5^th edition. I’ve got some more vintage oldies to wax rhapsodic about, too. And I’ve also got some opinions about the state of the hobby, and the people in it. Hopefully, when you read that stuff, you won’t bolt for the hills before I publish my homebrew content and my designer notes for making an epic campaign with character agency and consequences that resonate.

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