Poor Randy

The following note was found inside a recently acquired copy of Ready Ref Sheets, an old Judges Guild book that's probably one of the most useful things ever published for OD&D. I've used it for several other editions of D&D as well. Anyway, here's the note:

I love finding stuff like this in old game books. It just warms my heart to see evidence of unknown people having some fun God knows how long ago.

The Gospel of Saint Zalazar

I happened to have the good luck to marry into a family of gamers. My wife isn't a gamer, though she's played a couple of games of Illuminati over the years and she's currently obsessing over the GameBoy version of Lego Star Wars. My brother-in-law Jim and his sons play boardgames and wargames. Sister-in-law Anne will plays some games from time to time.

But this post comes courtesy of Anne's husband Rod. He's a D&D man going back to the Basic days. He played in my 3E campaign and the 1st edition campaign I ran immediately afterwards. Back in the Navy he played D&D, Traveller, Champions, and Gamma World. His game group got a lot of playing done because there wasn't much else to do on a ship all day.

Now here's the cool part: In most of those games Rod played the same character. When his group switched games they all converted/translated characters. Rod's played other characters over the years, but Zalazar, his primary PC, has adventured under Basic D&D, 1st edition AD&D, 2nd edition AD&D, and all those other games I named above. Behold, the Purple Grimoire of Zalazar!




A metal bound tome, with each page encased in plastic and back by black construction paper, this dread volume tells the tale of a world-hopping 32nd level magic-user and the artifact sword known as Niffelheim. Click on a page and bask in the unbridled awesomeness.

A Calvalcade of Characters Sheets, part 3

Bart Bolt is the only old PC I have multiple versions for in my records. In all my years of gaming he's the single most successful D&D character I've run starting from zero experience points and working my way up. Bart was created for Dave Dalley's 2nd edition AD&D campaign, originally set in his own setting but later we rode Ziggy's Magic Cabinet to Krynn. To this day I'm not sure if that guy was Ziggy from the comic strip or Ziggy Stardust or both or neither. Dave's campaign almost felt like a buddy action movie at times, with Gopher's highborn swashbuckler Sir Ian Wulfric Belvidere III and my ranger/peasant hero playing off each other's foibles. Too bad that dragon killed Sir Ian near the end of the campaign. He was on a quest to win his true love, too.


I'm pretty sure Bart was one of the first characters I typed up on a Word Processor. I have earlier versions that are hand written. Each of these character write-ups goes to about 5 pages, as I took a LOT of notes. One page lists pretty much every NPC Bart had ever met, another is a diary of monsters killed. The latter was standard on my charsheets at the time, because both my regular DMs were concerned about my PCs acting on monster knowledge that they didn't have but that I knew.

Anyway, rather than bore you with 15 pages of a single character, I thought I'd share some doodles I found on various pages.


"Quelch" was a little no-account town that my crew and I fought tooth and nail to save from all sorts of wandering menaces. I didn't realize it at the time, but it was basically our home town in fantasy drag. Notice "no windows" on the floorplan. Classic player paranoia. The stuffed dragonclaw on the mantle came from the black dragon that killed everyone else in the party. In the last round of combat it was me solo against the dragon, both covered with grievous wounds. We tied initiative. I killed it, but it simultaneously knocked me to exactly zero hit points. Only timely intervention by an NPC allowed me to live to claim that draconic trophy.


An attempt to draw a coat of arms for my dude. He wasn't a knight, but I had hopes. Again with the dragon claw. The hand in the bottom right is actually a white glove with a blue gem on the index finger. That's a token from one of Bart's greatest adventures, when we played through Graeme Morris's epic two-parter UK2 The Sentinel and UK3 The Gauntlet. The item in the bottom left is a warhammer with a Kirby Thor-style lanyard.



The Halo Trees of K'Pushia get their name from their strange circular branches covered in white fluff. I think we went on some sort of adventure to get a Halo Stick and two other items for some sort of magic spell. I have the words "Kirchin Vaolup Leaves" and "Stinking Nelfose Roots" written on that same page. I vaguely remember they were all supposed to end up in a fey cauldron or something.

A Calvalcade of Character Sheets, part 1; part 2

A Calvalcade of Characters Sheets, part 2

In my youth Jim was the older, wiser AD&D guru all us dumb kids looked up to. We were still in high school and he had a house and a wife, so even though he wasn't really that much older than us, we pretty much hailed him as our hero. That's why we put up with so much crap from him. He killed A LOT of our characters. We carpooled to his house and on the drive over we would talk about the cool replacement characters we had made. I usually brought two or three new PCs every session, under the assumption that my current dude and at least one replacement would die during the next few hours. Below are all my characters that lasted more than one session. Behold, the victims of Jim.

Chester of the Pointy Hat, page 2
Chester, page 3
Chester, page 4
Chester, page 5

Jim may have been a killer DM but Chester's death was all my fault. The party was trying to locate and slay a black dragon. We figured out where the dragon lived on the dungeon level, but the party couldn't agree as to the right course of action. After much heated debate, I declared in a loud voice "FINE! I DON'T CARE WHAT YOU GUYS DO! I'M GONNA GO THROW MY FIREBALL AND YOU GUYS CAN CLEAN UP AFTERWARDS!" We were only 50 feet or so from the dragon's lair, so of course it heard the whole damn conversation. When I kicked open the door I was promptly melted with acid breath.

Razzak Gristlyguts, page 2
Razzak, page 3

Razzak was once in a really tight spot so he started chanting "Demogorgon, Orcus, Demogorgon, Orcus." This was back when saying a demons name gave a flat 5% chance they would take notice. The dice eventually came up for Demogorgon and he sent a retriever to investigate. The retriever tore through whatever menace we were fighting at the time and then turned its attention to the party. I had to throw myself into a rapid river to escape, nearly drowning. The rest of the party were slaughtered to a man. That was effin' awesome.


Arius Claudius, page 2
Arius, page 3
Arius, page 4

Arius was my PC who entered play as the bondage slave of a troll. Despite this rather inauspicious beginning, I got a lot of good play out of him.

Botonimous Bradelbreek, page 2

I retold this dude's most memorable adventure here. At one point in the campaign he was significantly higher in level, but then he got drained several levels in a wight attack.

Mochimoto Tojo, page 2

Wow, this dude's stats were egregious even beyond the usual level of cheating in that campaign. Not that high stats ever helped us that much.

A Calvalcade of Characters Sheets, part 1

Among my game crap I have a folder labeled "Favorite PCs". I thought it might be fun to scan in and share some old PCs of mine.


Nannok up there (not spelled Nanoc as a bit of a figleaf) is my oldest PC on file. He dates somewhere between '85 and '89, as he was an Unearthed Arcana-powered barbarian and my group stopped using the UA after 2nd edition came out. Nannok was the only 1st edition barbarian I've seen played from 0xp to 2nd level. That 6,001xp requirement for second level was too daunting a hill for most players to even try.

My schoolchum Dave Dalley was the DM for the adventures of Nannok, which were done as a one-on-one thing. I started out in some random hex up in the realm of the Frost Barbarians, the Viking equivalent region in the World of Greyhawk. I hexcrawled my way down to Ratik or the Bone March. Nannok biggest accomplishment was clearing out a small kobold lair single-handedly. I took the time to try to hatch the kobold eggs and raise the young. Only two of the poor things survived having a barbarian dude for a mom. I then resumed my adventuring career with 2 loyal kobold henchmen. Dave ruled the kobold would be true neutral alignment. Thus my barbarian unwittingly proved that nurture trumps nature in his World of Greyhawk.

Sadly, I couldn't find the charsheets for Nannok's hench-kobolds.


Alexander got all his loot and xp in two runs in the mid-90's. The DM was Ray St. John, the dude who tricked a silver dragon in my Bandit Kingdoms campaign and wrecked my Atlantis campaign when his PC refused to wear pants. (Someday I really need to type up the latter story.) My buddy Pat was the only other guy for this particular outing. He played Stumpy, a standard-issue dwarf fighter/thief/arsehole. In our first outing the major villain was a vampire. I thought Ray was setting him up as the Big Bad of a major plot arc. No, we ended up fighting that mofo at the end of session two. Here we were, two first level nobodies, trying to stake a vampire in melee combat. It was pure luck that neither of us got drained.

Next up is one of my all time favorite PCs. For a brief period my Bandit Kingdoms campaign was run on a rotating DM basis, allowing me to play for a bit. Here's my dude, in all his 3-page glory.


Lord Munge, as he styled himself, was a reject from the Horned Society, a Demogorgon-worshipping heretic. The diabolists of the Society were regular whipping boys in the campaign.


This is the most pimped-out character I ever played in D&D, apart from the odd high-level pregen or one-shot PC.

The Baron and Sir Cleave were the other regular PCs in the campaign. Lord Zarebean bought the farm in Doctor Wu's War of Vengeance and I promptly moved into his castle and assumed his title. Shriek actually started out play as a mongrelwoman henchwoman, but she died. My dude had too much pride to pay the cleric of another church for a resurrection, so I hired a magic-user to cast reincarnation instead. So my evil half-orc ended up with an elf sidekick. Lord Skullos was rescued from Vecna's Dimension of Undeath. In exchange for figuring out how to reattach his skull to a body, I put him to work leading my animated troops. The Gang previously worked for the Evil Paladin (like an Anti-Paladin, but more self-righteous and less explicable) until we killed that dude. Since I generally pay my troops rather than command through fear and mind control, they took my offer to change sides. Dia entered Lord Munge's employ when a tavern owner needed an assassination done but lacked hard coin. I agreed to take one of his bar wenches in lieu of the requisite gold.