#RPGaDay 14

 Day 14 — Best Convention Purchase

At last year’s Gen Con, the bourbon chicken at the Cajun Grill in the food court of Circle Center Mall. It was really good. Also, I bought a new Batman shirt.

Reality: I don’t go to many conventions. I’m trying to change that.

(Archive post from the personal blog.)

#RPGaDay 13

Day 13 — Most Memorable Character Death

Probably the first one, just because it was the first one. Aton (elf fighter/magic-user), killed by a giant tick in the moathouse in the Village of Hommlet adventure. (Pro tip: 1st-level elf fighter/magic-users don’t have a whole lot of hit points.) This would have been in about 1982.

Some twenty-six years later, I was DMing the first part of Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil as a play-by-post campaign. One of the players was my friend Dave, who was the DM who had killed Aton with a giant tick back in The Village of Hommlet in 1982. He didn’t remember any of it. I gave him some grief about that. He responded with the following:

In the ruined kitchen, the party takes a few moments to install the brass plaque that they have brought with them, putting a gleaming polish on it before they observe a moment of silence. It reads, “Aton - Fighter, Philosopher, and Man About Town.”

So I finally have some closure.

(Archive post from the personal blog.)

#RPGaDay 12

 Day 12 — Old RPG You Still Play/Read

I’d have to go with “pretty much all of them” on this one. Owing to the details of my relative geographical isolation (I live in a rather small city in the middle of the Canadian hinterland, about five hours north of Vancouver) and having spent much of the past couple of decades engaged in the time-consuming activity of raising well-adjusted children, it’s been years since I regularly gamed as much as I’d like to. That’s been changing slowly over the past year or so (particularly with the help of Google+ hangouts), but I still spend way more of my gaming time reading and writing RPGs than I spend actually playing.

Old RPGs that I’ve read in the past year (either for pleasure or research) or that I’m in the current/ongoing process of reading include: Traveller (the original box-set books), original D&D, AD&D (including the core books, Oriental Adventures, and a ton of adventure modules), Dragon magazine (the AD&D and early 3rd Edition days), Call of Cthulhu d20, Conan (TSR and Mongoose), Elric, Middle-earth Role Playing, Runequest, Empire of the Petal Throne, and Lejendary Adventures.

(Archive post from the personal blog.)

#RPGaDay 11

 Day 11 — Weirdest RPG Owned

That’s a tough one, only because I’m not normally in the habit of digging into or picking things up just because of their bizarre factor. As with fiction, there are plenty of good weird games — but there are a greater number of games that use weirdness primarily to cover for a lack of real content.

So from the limited selection, I’d have to go with the Red Dwarf RPG. It’s a remarkable work for its painstaking attention to detail and the way the complex ruleset creates a really cool framework for playing out the types of stories seen in the awesome TV series. But having done all that, it’s a weird work because it’s hard to imagine going to the trouble of learning a complex ruleset in order to play out slapstick space adventures.

(Archive post from the personal blog.)

#RPGaDay 10

Day 10 — Favourite Tie-In Novel/Game Fiction

Ed Greenwood, Dave Gross, Erin Evans, Erik Scott de Bie, Ari Marmell, Gary Gygax.

Gygax in particular deserves a lot more respect as a fiction writer than he usually gets. His story sense sometimes wasn’t as sharp as the editor in me wishes it was, but his ability to capture setting and character with a rich, nuanced prose shows off the influences of the fantasy writers he loved, and gives some fresh context to the inspiration that many of those writers had on Dungeons & Dragons. 

(Archive post from the personal blog.)

#RPGaDay 9

 Day 9 — Favourite Die/Dice Set

This one’s easy. My favorite dice are my dice. My first dice. My only dice.

In the early spring of 1981, I bought my first dice at a store in Vancouver called Dragon’s Lair (Broadway near Cambie; if anyone else but me remembers the place, I’d love to hear about it). These were the days when sets of dice didn’t exist (at least I never saw them); you bought them exclusively as singles. My first set of dice were an old-style d20/d10 (0–9 twice), a d12, a d6, and a d4, all in transparent emerald green (what were called “ice dice” back in the day). My first d8 was purple transparent, just because they didn’t have the green in stock to complete the set. In subsequent trips to Dragon’s Lair, I picked up the green d8 and eventually added a new-style d20 and a new-style d10.

I don’t know the manufacturer, but these are the same style and hard-edged, unpainted goodness of the Gamescience dice you can still buy these days. I used to fill in the numbers with crayon for long ages, then finally got around to painting in the numbers a few years ago. When the paint starts to flake, I paint them again. The only distinguishing feature on them is one weird thing about the d4 — one of the “1” marks along the bottom is an “A” for some reason.

Though I now own a whole lot more dice than these, these are the dice I’ve used for every single game of D&D I’ve ever played. For thirty-three years now, the old-style d20 is the only d20 I’ve ever rolled for any of my PCs. (I use the new-style d20 when I’m rolling as a DM.) When I’m rolling 10d6 lightning bolt damage in my current Pathfinder game, I roll my original d6 alongside whatever assortment of newer d6s are at hand. When I’m rolling the result of a cure spell, my original d8 is always in the mix. My magic missiles always include my original d4, which means I occasionally do A + 1 damage. I’m still not sure what that means.

(Addendum: Since first writing this, I have learned that the A on my d4 means it’s a first-gen Armory die! Thanks to Jon Peterson for geeking out about this stuff.)

(Archive post from the personal blog.)

#RPGaDay 8

 Day 8 — Favorite Character

Morgan, AD&D fighter, rolled up sometime in the fall of 1980 (S 18/96, I 14, W 13, D 18, C 16, Ch 13) and inspired by the Travis Morgan character from Mike Grell’s comic The Warlord.

Back in the AD&D days, your favorite characters tended to be the ones who survived past third level, because the game lent itself to characters dying and replacement characters being easy to roll up in equal proportion. Morgan was not only one of those surviving characters, he was also my first character, and his extended career was no small feat considering some of the killer dungeons my friends were working up at the time. And the fact that in the earliest stages of our play, we weren’t really down with a lot of the more subtle points to the rules. Like, for instance, did you know that you really shouldn’t take 4th-level characters into the Steading of the Hill Giant Chief? We didn’t. It was messy.

Not only did Morgan the D&D character survive his various campaigns, he also migrated into fiction as the character Morghan, who appears in the story “The Name of the Night” in A Prayer for Dead Kings and Other Tales. Morghan has a few more stories he’s set to appear in that I really need to get around to writing one of these days.

(Archive post from the personal blog.)