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Player Comments |
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Andrew C: This time of year reminds me of when I was working on my second adventure "The Valley of Mist". I was a junior in high school and was obsessed with D&D. At that time I was both teaching the game and learning to DM. All of my spare time was spent on creating the adventure. My weekend nights working on the story lasted until 5 am at which point I was too tired to think and begrudgingly went to bed. Afternoons I would hook up my headphones with a 25' extension to the stereo in the living room and listen to my records ("dog & butterfly" by Heart, T'Pau, "Unforgettable Fire" by U2, and anything by ELO were the ones that I listened to most). I had all the time in the world to work on my stuff. I wasn't skilled enough to wing it so I planned everything. What I appreciate best is that my playing crew still talks about that adventure. It's not that that adventure was my best but it was so new and exciting. Many weekends were spent pleading to my friends' mom at 2 in the morning to allow us to keep playing... "We promise we'll be quiet". 10 minutes later we're shouting with excitement. Although those days are gone new ones have given me that same anticipation that I had so many years ago.... dru 20 Jan 05
Matt C: My earliest D&D memories were of my brother steve dming a game with my cousin and I. The way the dice fell, my character had never seen a map, whereas my cousin's had... And I asked why I couldn't look at the map, and steve kept saying "because you've never seen one, you wouldn't know what it was anyway!"... I didn't understand that when he said "you" he was talking about my character... So I spent that particular session pissed off. It being my FIRST session, it's very memorable! By the end, I reaalized that it was my character who hadn't seen a map. After that, it was great! My character had been wanting a grappling hook, and an npc suggested a thieves guild. So the first town we got to, I asked the guard if they had one... We were turned away. The next town we came to was unexpected. We were told "there's a wall in front of you that goes both directions." My cleric cousin gets his spider-climb on, and is greeted at the top by a loaded xbow! We were welcomed into that town at spear point!!
There's nothing like when it's all brand new! There were mirrors to travel through, time we were standingin a cloud giant's huge glass jar, I think I had to eat raw horse meat once, cause I didn't think of buying food... That and my horse died... mc 20 Jan 05
Jim M: My D&D related memory isn't actually about D&D -- it was about getting to house to play D&D.
It was sometime in 1981 or 1982. The Police had just released "Ghost in the Machine", and "Every little thing she does is magic" was constantly on the radio. It was winter time--around this time of year--that a group of us, including Fraz and Steve C., were walking up around the Cleveland Circle area of Brookline on our way to our friend's house. There had been a snow storm a few days earlier (perhaps school was closed that day?) and the sidewalks were buried under large snowbanks. Our group had to walk along in the street, and we chattered excitedly about strategies for the upcoming session. The sky was blue, the air was crisp, the streets were wet with melting snow, and we wanted nothing more than to stay indoors and roll dice all day long.
Every time I hear that Police song, I still think of that moment. ..jm 20 Jan 05
Steve C: Muj introduced me to D&D on December 29th or 30th, 1979. He had been playing with another group (Brady C. is the only name that I think I ever got - I'm willing to bet that Posen was involved, and probably Linberg as well) for a while and had gotten the boxed set for Christmas, as I recall.
Back in that day, there wasn't even an AD&D yet - it was a blue book of rules; you could be a fighter, a thief, a wizard, or a cleric. The spell list had less than a dozen options. There was mutli-classing too. Mudge, Conlon, Clifford, Fredricks, Almeda, and Hart. All piled into a semi-finished basement (Hart's family's) to start our journey down to the dark side.
Kan (pronounced as in the Wrath of) was an elvin fighter-MU. The scenario was the Keep on the Borderlands - the very module upon which the FK game has thus far been based. Two nifty house rules: encumbrance not enforced (I think either Hart or Almeda was carrying a row boat for a while, until Almeda got a folding boat), and we were all allowed a "recovery swing" (meaning that we got two attacks per round).
The recovery swing is based upon our understanding that an attack was a swing, and since you need to "reset" anyway, you would be bringing your weapon (invariably a long sword) back to fully-cocked position. Kind of like baseball.
...Remember the days when you rolled to see if you started with a magical item? Remember "Magic stores" (I've got all this gold; I'm going to the magic store to buy something.")? Do you remember buying wishes? 10,000 GP as I recall.
How about Mike Hart throwing away a +7 mace because he didn't want to part with his flame brand? Back then the indication that a weapon was enchanted was that its weight - in GP - was reduced. "This mace feels like it's not even there, it's so light."
...Remember magical tape, which enabled us to "fix" broken magical items?"
Ahh, sweet youth...
I could go on like this all freakin' day. Pentagrams that healed you, or teleported you to other pentagrams, or destroyed you. Gnolls that we forgot to check to "loot", only to find later that they had gauntlets of ogre strength ("Sorry - it's too late to go back now."). Wishing for "Armor that provides an AC of 1". At that time, AC didn't go negative, as far as we knew, so this meant +1 Plate Mail. A tinder box that "could set anything on fire"... smc 20 Jan 05
Steve C: Tony played Oz Oakenshield. Dwarf, appropriately enough. Or should I say "doo-auf"?
It's odd: I've got an odd assortment of clear and hazy memories about this [first] game.
I remember, for instance, on our way to Hart's house we serendipitously ran into Casey and invited him to play. He came over and we guided him through the character generation process.
"Hey look: another 18; is that good?"
Bastard.
smc 24 Jan 05
Steve C: Once upon a time, Kan had an intelligent long sword. I don't recall its name. Among this long sword's abilities were: Detect Magic (which I originally thought was Detect Evil - kept freakin' me out), Heal (1/day) and Teleport (1/day).
The scene: Kan emerges from a bath, towel wrapped around his mid-section. The sword is jumping around inside the scabbard. Draw the sword.
Sword: "I want to go hunting trolls."
Kan: "Not now, I'm about to get laid."
Sword: "I want to go hunting trolls."
Kan: "In the morning, I'm busy now."
Scene changes to Kan, wrapped in a towel, sword in hand, in the middle of nowhere. The sword apparently decided to teleport him out of the city to go hunting trolls.
How about the +5 long sword that you could not let go of?
On a ship (boat, actually), going through a tunnel (under-the-mountains river) and ran aground due to shallow water. The fix: pray to the gods for more water. The result: flash flood! We were spewed from the tunnel like the millennium falcon out of the second death star. What a ride.smc 14 Feb 05
Andrew C: Driving to pick up Matt this morning I was listening to a CD "Chance" by Manfred Mann's Earth Band. Whenever I hear this and other CD's by them I am always brought back to my sophomore year in high school. My brother Frank had just come back from the Army (he was stationed in Germany) and he was hot on playing D&D. He had also opened the door to music that I hadn't heard (MMEB being some of it). I hadn't played for about a 1-1/2 years and I was practically bursting with anticipation of playing again. He had also introduced me to the Dragonlance Chonicles. I thought this was great! They gave me a chance to escape on my own and I was instantly sucked into it. It was a way to D&D without actually playing. When we did play, which was fairly often, it was still relatively new to me and still quite mysterious. I was so uncertain if what I was doing in the adventure was going to get me killed. Which, looking at it now, was where the thrill of it was. I was trying so hard to create "character" for my character even though I wasn't really so certain on how to do it. The enthusiasm for playing was positively intoxicating!! It consumed me. The passion for the thrill of it all was in my fabric.
Now, this was all 1st ed and books were only $12-$15 (remember those days?) so acquiring them was no problem at all especially since I had a job and no bills whatsoever. I read them all from cover to cover several times so I could grasp everything and start my own adventure. Well, my friends had done some playing before but really not to any great extent. So, while I was green at DMing I was also teaching them how to play. The characters that they played reached legendary stature which returns full circle (20 years later) in my Threshold campaign. So, while it's all new to you guys for me it's a return to younger days. dru 17 Feb 05
