Playing through An Old Classic now with the new re-print - Against the Slave Lords

Sorry for the long absence with the blog but real life got in the way.  My dad died last year and I'm still taking care of my mom's estate in the meantime (she had a stroke in 2007 and I've had my hands full dealing with that for the last six years) not to mention work obligations.  Anyway, I'm not trying to make excuses or anything but I'll get back to blogging about old school games in the near future.  We are currently playing in a B/X D&D game for the "A" series otherwise known as the Slavers series.  Our GM is using the WOTC re-release of that series and we are currently playing the new introductory module that was added to the new book.    We are currently 3rd level or so and are about to enter the Slave Pits of the Undercity.  Stay tuned for future recaps and campaign info updates on the current campaign as it unfolds...

The current campaign is set in our GM's world of Moog in the outlying regions beyond the City of Vermistdadt which was the setting for our previous Swords and Wizardry White Box city campaign.  I'll post more info on the current setting as well as more becomes available in an effort to help the GM flesh out the campaign setting info.  The World of Moog borrows heavily from the old Warhammer Fantasy Role Playing game and miniature combat game default world.  It is a gritty Swords and Sorcery type of setting that reminds me a lot of Fritz Leiber's World of Lankhmar where his awesome Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories take place.  The City of Vermistadt is a lot like the City of Lankhmar but with Warhammer types of gods and denizens (sort of a mashup) and the land of Moog can be roughly equated to Leiber's world of Nehwon coupled with influences from the Warhammer setting as well.  It is a fun setting to play in for a Swords and Sorcery type of game and often includes certain elements that might be considered a bit gonzo which adds a bit of dark comedic entertainment to the setting.

You can read a few older recaps of the Vermistadt White Box games which are posted posted at the blog here http://iguanaslair.blogspot.com/2011/08/entrance-to-hollowheim-and-demise-of.html
and here http://iguanaslair.blogspot.com/2012/03/lock-stock-and-one-smoking-wand-of.html.

Averlorn Campaign - Adventure Module X1 the Isle of Dread

Recaps from 9/14/12 and 9/22/12 Averlorn Sessions

Part I - the Voyage

The Brotherhood of the Black Crowes had a new assignment for the group.  A map had recently been found by some adventurers and it was discovered that when heated, the location of a distant jungle island called the Isle of Dread showed up on the parchment.  There was also an account that indicated that a vast sum of riches and even a huge black pearl were hidden in a long lost City of the Gods located somewhere on the island.  We were assigned by the Brotherhood the task of finding the huge black pearl to give to the God King as a present, but were allowed to keep other treasures where found there minus 10% for the Brotherhood for arranging passage and setting up the whole expedition.  Several of our group were not used to sea travel and were ill for the first few days but eventually found there sea legs.  During the sea voyage, the ship was attacked by a very large bird of prey that killed a few sailors before the group finally managed to hit it with several magic missiles and arrows and finally, Ragnar’s sleep spell which brought it down.  Afterwards, we made it to Harbor Reach without any problems. 

The group brought aboard a quantity of trade goods to trade with the locals at the island upon our arrival.  When we boarded the ship the Golden lass, we noticed that Captain Jerran Colbertis had similar ideas, as he had stashed aboard the ship a large quantity of wine to trade in the port cities along the way since otherwise, the ship would have been empty sailing from port to port which would have been a wasted opportunity to trade some goods and make some money.  So once we arrived in Harbor Reach we decided to do likewise since it was known that good wine was made in that city but not necessarily in our next port of call which was the City of Zarathus.  Zarathus was another coastal city within the Kingdom of Ertris further to the south of Harbor Reach.  So when we finally arrived in Zarathus, the group managed to find a buyer for the wine and both the group and the Captain sold their wine to some merchants in a deal arranged in the Crippled Ape Tavern, a quiet little inn frequented by traders.  Once there, we made some inquiries as to what might be available in the islands and what they might want in trade, and used the profits from the wine sale to buy even more trade goods to trade with the natives of the island.

We sailed from Zarathus and had to outrun a violent storm by tacking along its edge but eventually made it to the Isle of Dread unharmed.  The isle was located in or near the Great Banks to the southeast if Zarathus.  When we arrived, we found the natives of the village of Tonnora to be very friendly and eager to trade with us.  We found out that they had ample supplies of ivory, coffee beans, and a beautiful and rare type of teak wood with a bluish purple color to trade, but they really lacked raw metal ore and glazed pottery and were eager to try and set up some sort of regular trading between our peoples.  We offloaded the trade goods and they loaded up the ship with about 5,000 g.p. worth of the ivory, rare wood, and coffee beans that they could gather or had on hand which we could sell for a tidy profit once back home or on the way there.

The other thing we discovered was that the natives had a matriarchal society – the women ruled the tribes but the men were still the warriors and held positions of authority like their spokesman Augma of the Hawk Clan.  There was also a witch doctor that eyed us suspiciously but we didn't really converse with him.  The village was one of many on the main island and nearby islands, but this one in particular was located on the southern tip of the main island in order to guard a massive stone wall across a narrow peninsula of land that separated the human inhabitants on this end of the island from the many dangers further inland.

The wall looked like it was a thousand years old and the natives said it had been built by the gods.  The wall had four huge seventy foot tall by a hundred foot square towers interspersed at regular intervals along its length, and a massive gate straight out of the movie King Kong, and was built to protect against the great beasts and rampaging humanoids found further to the north of the island.  The area beyond the walls had been cleared for a ways to allow archers to keep the wandering creatures from the island from getting too close to the walls and assaulting them.  Beyond that was another line of defense which had often helped to keep the larger predators away from the walls – the tar pits.  Augma also said the villagers regularly visited the tar pits in order to collect the tar for waterproofing the thatched roofs of their huts and for other uses, but rarely ventured any further than that.  When we asked him to pinpoint the location of the City of the Gods on our map, he pointed to an area in the northeast of the island before the island narrowed down to a point further to the north and east.

Within the town itself, we noticed that there was a central pyramid and four mounds at each of the cardinal points surrounded by a circular wooden palisade.  We were told that the ancestors were buried within the mounds and that there was one such mound for each of the clans (such as the Elk clan or instance).  We asked Augma about the ancestors but he didn’t want to talk about them – he said something about bad juju.  When we asked if they had had any recent visitors from the mainland the leader said some other visitors had arrived earlier in the spring that spoke a different language and also said that they had been forced to land because their ship had been damaged in a storm.  He also told us that there were cannibals living on some of the outer islands as well and to be wary of them.  When we asked him about the City of the Gods he said that his people believed that the gods actually lived there and built the place.

Part II - the Isle of Dread

So after the trade goods had been distributed and loaded aboard the ship, we provisioned ourselves and prepared to set forth further into the island beyond the great wall.  The villagers agreed to provide us with some porters and a guide for a nominal payment and we loaded up and set forth into the teeming jungle.  About halfway to the tar pits we set up camp for the evening and shortly into the first watch there was trouble.  Lorinar and Rollo were on the first watch when the camp was attacked by a large group of Rock Baboons!  We did our best to alert the camp but they were on us before everyone could even wake up and defend ourselves.  Several of the characters were wounded and four of the six porters were rent by the savage beasts limb from limb and killed in a grisly fashion.  Lorinar somehow managed to get a sleep spell off and managed to stay unscathed in the fray, but nearly everyone else in the group was wounded by the time we managed to slay the last of them.  At this point we found out that our guide Quyoga had some healing abilities since he also helped us to treat the wounded.  We also noticed that he wasn't quite like the other natives – he was Sea Blooded! (from Realms of Crawling Chaos).

So on the following day we resumed our journey and eventually made it to the tar pits…

Next session…

It was a fun session.  Tony rolled up a Sea Blooded fighter/cleric/shaman dude to play so we we would have a bit of healing - he turned out to be our guide which made it believable.  The first potential encounter was at night during one of the watches when a group of zombies came close to the camp - Quoyoga went into the woods and said he would take care of it and Lorinar saw him leading the zombies away!  At that point we were thinking they really were into ancestor worship because he said the "ancestors" are restless or something along those lines.

We continued our march through the hills and eventually into the jungle again and on another night, the group was nearly attacked by four gigantic bears (the biggest ones in the monster manual) so we decided to flee that encounter after Lorinar and Ragnar managed to slow them down with Stinking Cloud and Web spells.  One failed its save and was incapacitated by the cloud and the others had to go around or through the web but the spells bought us enough time to get away.  Unfortunately, our hasty withdrawal meant we lost a week or so of rations which were left behind, though that was better than becoming bear food ourselves!  These bears were huge and probably would have run us over and tore us to shreds!  So after that we kept going and entered an area of limestone hills that had caves everywhere and our guide told us not to go into the caves.  He said there was a tribe of white apes somewhere on the islands that drove the original inhabitants out but we weren't sure what was in the caves so we heeded his advice and continued on.  After that, we had another encounter during our watch with a pair of saber tooth tigers that were also huge and very hungry!  This time they were on us before we could get our stinking cloud and web spells off and it was a tough fight but we managed to slay them and only took a few wounds. 

After that we kept going and eventually hit a mountain range which we decided to cross.  On the other side we came to a deep canyon (like the size of the grand canyon!) with a river way at the bottom.  We noticed that off to the left was a rope bridge across it straight out of an Indiana Jones movie or something!  So the monk cautiously crossed the bridge and made it about halfway across, but then suddenly three Pteranodon's appeared in the sky above and started diving down towards him!  This was their hunting grounds apparently and they were hungry for some monk meat!  Fortunately, monks are fast (they move 15") and he quaffed half of his invisibility potion, turned invisible and made it back to the side that the group was on before they got to him.  So the Pteradon's swooped in on the party and a fierce melee ensued.  Lorinar cast magic missile on one, the paladin, Quoyoga and Narsil killed another, then Ragnar cast sleep in the comical finale and slept another one, put the Paladin and Abscondias to sleep, but not before Abscondias got off a magic missile spell and killed the third one on the way down and then the wizard hit the ground for a dirt nap afterwards, since both spells went off in the same segment!  That was pretty funny but that's where we left it.  We can see the plateau where the City of the Gods is supposed to be located beyond the canyon and the only thing between us and it is the rope bridge and the river gorge.  It was a fun and exciting session - I have to say that this module is pretty cool!  It has a very Indiana Jones/King Kong/Rudyard Kipling story feel to it...

GEN CON Indy 2011 Wrap Up...

Well, I went to Gen Con in Indy a couple of weeks ago and had a blast.  Its only the second time I've ever gone and made the trip from Richmond with Scadgrad, our GM from our regular gaming group.  We met up with one of the guys in our online Averlorn game and a few of their friends in Indy.  I went to Gen Con once before in Milwaukee back in the mid nineties while I was freelancing for ICE and had a blast then too.  During that time, I played in a bunch of RPG events, acted as an assistant GM for ICE for a few of their Rolemaster RPG events and manned the ICE booth several times to help them out which was really cool and added a lot to the experience.  

Legotaur!

I have to say that Gen Con 2011 was very crowded but there was lots of stuff to do, things to see, things to buy and games to be played.  I signed up kind of late so missed out on most of the good game events but did manage to get into a few good seminars.  One seminar was put on by the guys from Xtreme Dungeon Mastery and it was hilarious - I haven't read their book yet but Tony tells me it is quite good.  It was all about throwing out the rule book when necessary, and doing what you have to do to have fun in the game which is, after all, the whole point of playing any game.

We also went to the PDF Publishing Seminar put on by Wolfgang Baur, Steve Russell from Rite Publishing and I think the third guy was from Super Genius Games but I didn't write his name down.  Tony and I went to this seminar because we have been contemplating doing some self published PDFs for a while now (he's an artist and graphic designer and a very good and creative GM and I'm a published game artist, architect and amateur writer) and wanted to get a bit of info on how to go about it and what's involved.  What amazed me from the seminar is that there are people out there (like Steve Russell among others) who actually publish PDF RPG products for a living.  They have actually turned this pursuit into a viable business and a full time job!  I never even thought that was possible but it is an interesting revelation.  They talked about all kinds of aspects of PDF publishing like frequency of publication (weekly, monthly or whatever), turning your PDFs into actual printed works through print on demand verses larger publishing runs, business aspects such as legal protection of your personal assets by setting up an LLC, accounting issues (don't overlook this important aspect of the business), price points for the sale of your product, marketing, subscription models, and distribution platforms such as Drive Thru RPG and the IPR (for Indy games) among others.  All in all it was a very insightful, informative, and well done presentation.

Joseph Browning at The OSR Booth

We also went on our daily tours of the convention floor and auction hall and visited all kinds of booths in search of  new or used game products, dice, and gaming accessories or to find out about all of the cool new games being published or produced which was a lot of fun.  I spent a lot of time at the OSR booth and checked out a bunch of new games and products from a number of established publishers and some newer ones as well.  I also had the opportunity to meet Joseph Browning of Expeditious Retreat Press.  We played through one of his modules in our Averlorn Campaign - you can read the recaps here: The Barrow Mound of Gravemoor.  Several of the guys bought new board games and we tried them out in the hotel room or the public areas of the hotel.  We also had a chance to play Swords and Wizardry White Box a few times and I have to say, I was impressed with it.  It was a lot of fun and seriously simple to play rules wise.  I was a bit skeptical about playing a 0E system at first but once you get over that and realize how easy it is, it really makes the game play fast, so we managed to get a lot done in only a few sessions.  Plus character creation is a breeze - we had new characters up and running in about 15-20 minutes.

I also spent some time networking and scouting out game companies in an effort to find some cartography work and met some really cool people in the RPG business.  I even ran into a few old friends from back in the ICE days.  All in all it was a lot of fun and I would really like to go again in the future if possible. 

19th Level Wizard from my early D&D days in the Monty Hall Dungeon

I found this character sheet while looking through the storage container that has all of my old D&D stuff in it.  There are also some old dungeons that I wrote back then in there that I'll probably post at some point and may even publish for real if it's a worthy project.  Anyway, this is my 19th level Wizard Elroy that I played in the Monty Hall game I was in back then when I was a teenager sometime around 1980 or before:

I elaborated on this a little in this post:

Re-discovering Old School D&D

A few things I have observed and recall about how we played back then from looking at the character sheet:

1.  I can't believe all of the magic items and treasure he's carrying around with him - its obvious that we didn't care about encumbrance back then.  I remember bags of holding getting a lot of use but Elroy didn't have one.  He also has what amounts to a dragon's hoard worth of gold and platinum pieces which one can only assume he has stashed away in his stronghold or something because he certainly isn't carrying it all.

2.  The amount of incredibly powerful magic items he has in his possession is staggering.  Several artifacts and several really powerful items can only be explained by the fact that it was a Monty Hall game and we went down into a 20 level deep dungeon and killed Demogorgon at the bottom where we found some of the artifacts and the 1,000,000 gold piece gems and crown.

3.  Yes, you heard that right, not one but two 1,000,000 g.p. gems each with a demon trapped inside and a crown worth 85,000 gold pieces!  This can only be explained by the Monty Hall nature of the dungeon and the fact that once you are that high of a level this is probably the only way you are going to level up - its certainly not going to happen by killing kobolds!  Keep in mind that these items were in Demogorgon's treasure horde so its not like we just found them laying around - we had to kill the Prince of Demons to get this stuff!  And behind door #1 Monty is this beautiful 85,000 g.p. crown!

4.  His AC is -5 mostly due to magic items but having a 17 Dex doesn't hurt.

5.  He has 73 hits!  I'm not sure how he got this many unless either we were using Basic D&D for the +1 CON bonus per level with a 14 CON and we didn't stick with hit point limitations for higher level characters (thru 9th Level per Rules Cyclopedia).  If he rolled 2.5 hits average each die +1 hit point per level for CON that comes out to 66.5 hits (average).  So if this is what we did then 73 hits is plausible and only a little above average.

If we were using 1st Edition AD&D he would have had to have rolled fours on just about every roll without hit dice limitations for higher level characters since there is no CON bonus to hit points in the AD&D PHB for a 14 CON.  So either I fudged the numbers or we were playing Basic D&D and weren't playing with reduced hit dice at higher levels. 

6.  No pre-generated character sheets here - we just used a piece of paper and rolled with it.  Remember this was somewhere around 1980 (maybe earlier) and there was no internet and you had to buy the character sheets just to Xerox them.  If you are a kid with a limited budget why bother...

7.  His stats are pretty darned good.  I'm not sure if they got bumped through play (wishes, tomes of whatever or other magical effects) or he got rolled up this way but I actually didn't roll this guy up, he was inherited at first level on the first level of the dungeon so I can't say for sure.

8.  Rather than selling all of the non coin treasure that we found and dividing up the total which is what we do now, we just handed out the spoils as fairly as we thought possible and didn't worry about it if one guy got more g.p. worth of stuff than the other.  This explains why he has all of the elaborate gems and jewelry written out on his sheet rather than just a pile of cash.  Again, one can assume that most of this stuff is piled up in his keep somewhere.  That's a dungeon that's just screaming to be written up at some point (Elroy's Tower) and I even started it back then but never finished it.

9.  I guess the two magical shields were just excess loot to give to my hirelings or something.

Not every game we played in back then was this Monty Hall but I do remember that there were magic items a plenty in most games and that plenty of characters died.  Elroy even died once on one of the upper to middle levels of the twenty level dungeon he was adventuring in when he foolishly put on a Necklace of Strangulation without casting Identify on it first.  The other party members boiled the flesh off of his bones in a massive cauldron located somewhere in the dungeon to remove the necklace and then had him resurrected and he returned to the land of the living to complete the massive dungeon crawl!

Re-discovering Old School D&D

Back in the late seventies when I was in the seventh grade, a bunch of my brother’s 6^th grade friends started playing a new game which they brought into the middle school to play during lunch and study hall time.  This was the first time I was introduced to Dungeons and Dragons – it was the second printing of the basic boxed set with the blue cover showing a red dragon.  I still have a couple of copies of these books, one of which was played so much, the cover fell off and is still missing.  I thought it was the coolest game I had ever seen.  I had played board games and video games down at the arcade before but something about D&D was just too cool for a kid in the seventh grade.

The first explanation of what the game was about was given to me by the DM as I was run through the sample module in the basic rule book.  I was told it was mostly a game of exploration – you explore old ruins and the dungeons beneath in search of treasure.  In fact, back then, there wasn’t a monster in every room which gave it more of an “Indiana Jones” archaeological exploration kind of feel.  Sometimes rooms contained mundane items with evocative descriptions telling the tale of past deeds or ancient history, some contained small amounts of treasure (like the few coins that could be found exploring the rat warrens or the potion found in the pocket of the goblin cloak hanging on pegs on the wall) or were in fact empty but some contained goblins, giant rats or other creatures which had to be overcome in combat.  The whole idea of rolling up your own character to search through these old musty chambers in search of treasure and adventure was very appealing to me.

I also remember vividly the first character I rolled up to play in the sample dungeon.  It was the elf character class from basic that also had magic user spells.  I don’t remember what spell he took at first level but I do remember that I wanted the biggest sword that I could get in order to do the most damage possible so I equipped him with a two handed sword in addition to whatever other equipment he could afford.  I remember later on while playing AD&D coming to a similar realization about equipping my fighters with pole arms because they did more damage.  Thus began my first efforts at power gaming which still continue to this day but are more prevalent in later iterations of the game.

I went on to play with several other groups, the most memorable of which played through the village of Hommlet and the Temple of Elemental Evil campaign modules when they were released.  I didn’t even realize those were the modules I played in back then until recently when I played through both adventures in a C&C game I was in here in Richmond a few years ago, and had several déjà vu moments.  The first one was in the Moat House after we defeated the brigands who had taken up camp there in the corner tower.  The DM drew the map of the tower with one corner of the wall caved in and all of a sudden, I was like – “holy crap, I’ve played this module before” though I remembered only a few of the details like the collapsed corner walls of the tower.  Later when we eventually overcame Lareth and his henchmen, I remembered how tough a fight that room was when I was a kid.  Something about going up against a bunch of NPCs with spells and strong fighters like we had made it a very challenging encounter, more so than your run of the mill low level monsters.

Later, when we were playing through the Temple of Elemental Evil module, we fought several of the temples including the Fire Temple.  We cast a heat resistance spell on one of the characters who began searching through the lava pit in the temple to find the loot that we knew was probably stashed there.  When we retrieved the contents of the treasure, one of the items was a +3 Frost Brand magical long sword.  Once again, I had another déjà vu moment – I had a recollection of doing something similar when I was a kid (also using a heat resistance spell of some sort) to pull the treasure out of the lava pit and being in awe of the +3 Frost Brand sword that we found there amongst the other loot.  Our C&C game disintegrated shortly thereafter but not before having three very memorable déjà vu moments from two very memorable and well written 1^st Edition D&D modules I played in long ago.

The original group that I played those modules with as a kid was the most memorable of many I played in back then.  We explored all kinds of dungeons and battled demons, devils, dragons and all manner of foes and had a very notable arsenal of magic items.  I’m pretty sure one of us had the rod of Lordly Might and another guy had the Girdle of Giant Strength and we had a collection of all different types of swords and other items in our bag of holding to pull out as the situation dictated.  I also remember vividly that we would lose characters on a regular basis, usually to the more powerful demons or devils or to the various types of dragons we battled more than likely as victims of their breath weapons.  We always used to joke that we would pour what was left of so and so into a flask to bring back to town to have resurrected later.  So losing characters was no big deal – either you got them resurrected if you had the cash or were high enough level to cast the spell or you just rolled up a new one.  We also started toying with psionics at this point as well.

After that group eventually stopped playing I got together with some other friends who were writing their own dungeons rather than buying the modules down at the local game store.  Probably the most notable of these was the twenty level or so Monty Hall dungeon we played in at a friend’s house around the corner from where I lived.  Essentially, we played once a week and just about every week, the DM would write up another dungeon level for us to explore and we kept it up until we reached level 20 where I’m pretty sure we defeated Azmodeaous or Demogorgon (or both) and took their stuff.  My character started out as a 1^st level wizard on the first level of the dungeon and by the time he came out, he was a 19^th level wizard who owned (2) one million gold piece gems which both had a demon trapped inside, a +6 dagger, a +6 demon slaying dagger, the Hand of Veccna and the Rod of Seven Parts.  Of course those were just the best stuff he cherry picked as we went along – you’ve gotta love Monty Hall dungeons!  You can see Elroy’s character sheet here:  Elroy the Archmage.  I found it several months back and was all goggle eyed over all of the artifacts he had in his possession.

It was around this time that I started buying dungeons and running them for my friends from time to time.  I bought the hall of the Fire Giant King and ran them through it with a high level party that pretty much breezed through the module.  Then I started writing my own dungeons.  I still have a few of these tucked away which I’ll post at some point.

So that’s my reminiscence of some of the most memorable role playing experiences I had as a kid playing D&D.  In high school, I started hanging out with some guys from the VCU Game Masters club who had regular meetings to play RPGs down at the nearby campus of the Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond.  These guys opened up my eyes to other role playing games which I had never considered playing before such as Pendragon, Call of Cthulu and Rune Quest in addition to D&D of various flavors (home brew mostly but one was set in Thieve’s World using Chaosium’s boxed set).  Some of these guys went on to work as game designers for Chaosium or as free lancers like Les Brooks, Sam Shirley and Daniel Greenberg.

This opened up a whole new world of role playing games and eventually I discovered Arms Law, Claw Law and Spell Law by Iron Crown Enterprises and started using it in games that I ran.  I basically just played D&D and swapped out the D&D weapon, monster, and spell stats and charts with the ones found in ICE Law.  Those combat tables had very vivid descriptions of all of the horrible results that could happen to you or your foe which were not only quite graphic but were also histerical in a morbid sort of way.  I also bought a few MERP modules like Moria and Mirkwood although I never actually played or ran anything for Middle Earth, they were just cool modules to read because I had read the Tolkien books.

Eventually, when I was in college at UVA I met my room mate's cousin who lived in town and had worked for ICE at one point who told me they needed people like me (architects and designers) to do layouts for them.  A few years after I graduated I eventually moved back to Charlottesville to start my own Architectural CAD business and started doing free lance illustrations for ICE.  This is when I really got into Rolemaster (I was doing trade dress art for it and even art for MERP modules) and pretty much stopped playing D&D altogether at that point.  I remember at the time thinking that D&D was for kids and since I was a grown up that I should play a more sophisticated system like Rolemaster despite its extreme complexity.

I had fun working for ICE and playing in RPGs with some of those guys (including Rolemaster, Pendragon and Call of Cthulu) but eventually, they lost their MERP license and the company filed for bankruptcy.  Some time before they filed for bankruptcy when I was still living in C’ville, I heard that some of those guys were playing D&D 3.0 and having fun with it so I decided to give it a shot.  It was sort of like the old D&D but seemed to be more about tweaking your character with all of the feat builds and prestige classes and stuff plus, the power scale seemed to have gotten higher (more hit points, more damage, higher AC etc.) and it became evident eventually that it was really a power gamers game (which I liked for a while).

So eventually, I moved back to Richmond and around 2004 got into another 3.0 game in town at a new friend’s house.  We eventually upgraded to 3.5 and then started playing a hybrid of 3.5 and Castles and Crusades (basically C&C with feats and some 3.5 signature spells).  Once we realized how bad the power gamer creep had gotten with 3.5, we dropped it altogether and just ran C&C.  This is about the time of the Temple of Elemental Evil campaign I mentioned above but we also played in the Lost City of Barakus and the Tomb of Abysthor before that by Necromancer Games.  Eventually, this group fell apart and I quit playing for a year or two but eventually I got the itch to play again.

I started poking around online and found a BBS post written by some guy who said he was getting back into AD&D and this eventually led me to read all about the original Castle Greyhawk game run by Gary Gygax and Rob Kuntz back in the day in Wisconsin.  This led me to discover Grodog’s Castle Greyhawk site and several OSR blogs including the Greyhawk Grognard’s among others.  I forwarded a link to Joe Bloch’s Castle of the Mad Archmage to our old DM and suggested that this was the kind of thing that made me want to play 1^st Editition D&D again – it has a very old school module feel with the light blue maps and 1^st Ed stats and stuff.  This was when he came up with the idea of running a Basic D&D game using the old Rules Cyclopedia.  I had recently downloaded several “free” retro clone PDFs including Swords and Wizardry, OSRIC and Labyrinth Lord and suggested that maybe we should try one of those.  Since he liked the B/X variety of basic with a little AD&D thrown in for good measure, he suggested that we try Labyrinth Lord.  The rest is history – we have been playing Labyrinth Lord with some 1^st ED rules mixed in along with some house rules and have been having a blast since about July of 2010.

Its kind of funny how after having so much fun with D&D as a kid, I eventually moved on to other games, did the power gaming thing with 3.0/3.5 and eventually came to the realization that we should just play AD&D or basic again since C&C wasn’t quite the same as the old school stuff.  Anyway, that’s my entire role playing game history in a rather large nutshell.  I kind of discovered the OSR by accident after having a certain nostalgic yearning to play the game I played when I was a kid again.  It was a long journey but I’m glad I’m back to playing the game I love and I salute the Old School Renaissance for making so much cool stuff available to us old timers who want to “just say no” to Pathfinder and 4.0 D&D neither of which really capture the feel of the original game for me.