One man and his d20 (Part 1)

Someone once said to me that when it came to roleplaying, my house was a shrine to D&D.

I think he meant it a little disparagingly, but all it did was fill me with pride.

Damn straight it is.

Like many others, my first taste of fantasy role-playing was the Steve Jackson/Ian Livingstone Fighting Fantasy game-books. The first one I played, ironically, was Starship Traveller, bought as part of a school scheme to encourage us to read outside of the class-room (can you imagine a game-book being part of such a scheme now?!).

Traveller was one of the hardest and least rewarding of the series, but it certainly got me interested. (By the way I absolutely refused to cheat my way through, and still, to this day, have never completed it!)

I would have been 8 or 9 at the time. Afterwards, pocket money, birthdays, and Christmas were all earmarked as occasions to fill out my Fighting Fantasy collection. There was no internet to learn about release schedules. My search engine was a weekly trip to the John Menzies' book department.

Heading back to Krynn, part 2: DL13 Session 1

Lorendle - Wild Elf Fighter 7/Cleric9 
Ringmar - Kender Thief 11
Crystal - Human Mage9
Tyranus - Minotaur Fighter 11
NPCs - Berem (Human)

Note: session notes can be found in the comments, so as to keep them away from anyone who doesn't want to peek behind the curtain.

I won't lie to you, it was pretty exciting to stoke the fire under this campaign.

The game starts in the ruins of Karthay, just after the party had prevailed against none other than Kitiara the Blue Highlord, whose last ditch leap from the cliff edge onto her dragon hadn't ended so well. Skie, however, had escaped. Healing the bronze dragon Clarion, insane and poisoned due to Kitiara's actions, was the first order of business, as well as the introduction of a new minotaur PC.

Once healed, Clarion informs the PC's that he had been compelled to help Berem via dreams of his king, Paladine the lord of all dragons, and that the party should in turn seek out the Glitterpalace, there to prove themselves worthy of Paladine's greatest gifts. The dragon is also able to transport them directly to Port Kalaman, center of the Whitestone forces in Ansalon, by expending the latent magic of his lair. "I go to join the war, and don't expect to return," he says.

Heading back to Krynn, part 1: DL13, prep

I had an interesting experience this weekend, running an AD&D Dragonlance session for the first time in over a decade.

Years ago, when 3rd Edition smashed into the the D&D landscape like the proverbial mountain on Istar, we left an instance of the Dragonlance DL-series unfinished following a short-lived attempt to convert it to the new rules which ended in under-powered characters and an exponential increase in work for the campaign's already-stressed DM.

Hard work though that campaign was, we've since always had a fondness for it. It was an incredibly long-running enterprise and featured several memorable PC's getting themselves into a lot of ridiculous situations, all against the backdrop of one of the most epic D&D adventure series ever committed to paper.

So, a couple of months back, we decided to resurrect the campaign using the original PC's and a by-the-book version of the AD&D rules.