All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
William Shakespeare, As You
Like It (Act II Scene VII)
When you see me at a faire, I am playing a role, as if in a play. The
catch is, the role is that of me as myself, a pseudo-medieval bardic
character. Once upon a time, many years ago, I played many roles with
my friends, and we brought magic to our world a little bit at a time.
This page , then is a repository for some of that shared magic with a
little bit of commentary to go with it.
AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide (First Edition, Original Cover)
Gary Gygax inspired the imaginations of an entire generation through
this series of game rule books. (Don't let the cover art fool you.)
When i was a teenager, I played Advanced Dungeons and Dragons
(AD&D) as much as i could. I played other games, but I always came
back to that one. It has come to my attention that some of my
compatriots from those days may be interested in my Dungeon Master
Notes that may have survived until today. Here then are a few pieces
from the first campaigns that I ran, starting back in Virginia in about
1979. (Remember I was in my teens, and we had no personal computers
when I first started out... so what you find will often be typo ridden,
and maybe even just dumb. I invite you to do what we did, roll with it.)
Lendow's Berkshire (c 1979) was my town. I began most of my adventures
there, and my notes are just that... notes. I originally used a map
from an old Judges Guild product that basically just had random maps of
cities and villages to populate. I don't know where that one went, so I
hastily made a fresh one that sort of makes sense.
The Burial Tomb of the Eighth Blue Wizard (see "Fanus" below) (c
1979-80) was one of my first full length dungeon adventures. This
version was in my archives, but I think I may have edited it down some
years later, because I remember it being very long in its original form.
I originally wrote tomb adventure as an entry for a dungeon contest for
the Judges Guild Journal. I did not know until 2013 that it had been
published as the centerpiece of the Dungeoneers Journal #24 under the
nonsense fantasy language title that I had initially given it, "
Streik
Hollous."
High School Pen and Ink picture from Trendnow's Haven
Trendnow's Haven (c 1980) was a sort of a sequel to The Burial Tomb of
the Eighth Blue Wizard. I wanted to have some intelligent monsters and
puzzles that would challenge the players, so I made myself a tribe of
small humanoid creatures that could act and react against the players.
I remember generating a couple pieces of artwork from this adventure.
The stories of the Blue Mages did not end with Trendnow's Haven, but
rather sprung up briefly in many of the campaigns that I ran. They
added a sort of continuity to my fantasy world. In the 1990's I wrote a
couple of adventure modules for the RPGA, and one of them I patterned
around some of the back story of my campaigns.
My favorite adventure from those was "
Thief of Dreams." I wrote it as a
challenge to write a long module for DarkCon 4 (in Oklahoma City) for
their annual player of the year competition. The writing was supposed
to be a competition where the best submitted adventure would be
selected, but truthfully, I may have been the only submission. It was a
lot of work for the time it took.
To get RPGA sanctioning, it would have to be a module that they could
later take from convention to convention afterward. So I made some
character generation rules for DarkCon 4 for the players there, with
the understanding that the top 6 player's characters would then be
submitted back to the RPGA as the official PCs for continued play of
the module by other conventions.
For that module, we provided these
Character Sheets with extra
information and character generation rules.
More to come... as I explore my archives...
