c1981 - Get Moldvay Basic set, later Cook/Marsh Expert set, mess around for this for a while, primarily focusing on the Keep on the Borderlands and some half-ass homebrews.
c1983 - Get Advanced Books, for the next couple of years try very hard to make AD&D work for my group.
c1986 - Become interested in the Mentzer boxed sets, and more importantly, the Gazetteers. Go back to basic/expert style D&D for several years, starting again with the Keep on the Borderlands.Continue to play AD&D in Jim's killer campaign. In retrospect, I can't help but wonder if it was the original Unearthed Arcana that drove me back to the simpler rules of Basic/Expert.
c1989 - 2nd edition AD&D comes out. My group drops most of our BECMI gaming in favor of playing the crap out of 2nd edition. David Dalley runs his Krynn campaign, one of the best campaigns I've ever had the priviledge to play in.
c1993 - Running the Rules Cyclopedia, once again relying on the Keep on the Borderlands and the Gazetteers.
c1994 - Don McKinney runs a super campaign using the RC, with the highlight being a partial run of Night's Dark Terror.
c1996 - Run a superfun hybrid 1e/2e AD&D game set in the Bandit Kingdoms.
c2001 - After a lull 3e draws me back into DMing. Run a short campaign based on Quasqueton and the Caves of Chaos, set in "Greymoor", the World of Greyhawk version of Blackmoor. Somwhere around this time I started getting really into OD&D.
c2002 - Back to AD&D 1st edition for a short but entertaining high level campaign that ends with a party armed with Hammers of Thunderbolts pretty much destroying the Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl.
c2006 - I hop on board the 3.5 bandwagon with the Wild Times campaign, the best campaign I've run since the Bandit Kingdoms and the '80s Gazetteer game. Heck, maybe better than those. Have some good times in the World of Alidor. Run OD&D as a con game, which was a hoot.
c2007 - Run Moldvay Basic as a con game for ten players, the most I've ever managed at a single session. Good times.
Putting together this timeline was a fun exercise of the ol' noodle. I've omitted a lot of brief experiments and flubbed games and I've probably flubbed at least a few dates. Hopefully I haven't forgotten to mention any totally rad campaigns.
If anybody else tries putting together a similar timeline please let me know.
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Posts
Mine (short version)
ReplyDeleteSometime Early Mid-80s: Played.
Sometime After that: DM'ed a lot. A lot of a lot. Life for some weeks largely defined by how much I was DMing.
Sometime After that: Wider hobby pulled me away, played only intermittently while busy with other games.
Sometime After that: Got re-interested in earlier versions of the game, started DMing a bit now and then. Life at this point becoming increasingly defined by writing RPG material, but maps now sometimes include alien planets or postholocaust fox-hunts played with people.
Sometime After that: D&D is quietly cancelled on one of its major anniversary years by TSR, leaving only AD&D. TSR fades away not long after, taking all flavors of D&D with it. WotC resurrects the D&D trademark and applies it to their own version of AD&D. Dragon magazine editor drops me a line asking me to write for said magazine, provides rulebooks for same, but then jumps ship to Star Wars Gamer, so I end up running the new D&D-trademarked Star Wars-trademarked game based on the new Star Wars-trademarked films. I write a solitaire for that. Best. Per-Word RPG Pay. Ever. Fun project apart from all the distracting abused trademarks.
Sometime After that: Return to occasionally DMing earlier versions of D&D. At this point resigned to never really having interest in any flavor of AD&D again, regardless of trademark status. Still pretty impressed by Star Wars Gamer, mainly because in its short run it had lots of decent one-night modules and a buttload of ship deckplans in it, and I like those. Still equally impressed (take that as you like) by both D&D-trademarked WotC game and Star Wars-trademarked Lucas prequels.
Today: Still consider myself a D&D fan, through thick and thin.
Night's Dark Terror is one of the best modules of all time. Love reading your Gameblof, Jeff, keep up the good work.
ReplyDeleteMy timeline:
1984. Start playing D&D with best friend in primary school. We used the Mentzer BECM rules.
1988. Join a high school group and play 1st Ed. Form lifelong friendships.
1989. We convert to 2nd Ed and play it exhuastively for 10 years.
1999. Become a little jaded with D&D and take a short break.
2000. Dive into 3E, DMing and bringing the old group back together. Also join another group playing 1st Ed where we tackle the Night Below epic campaign.
2005. Port over to 3.5E. Also run the occasional 1E one offs like Lost Caverns of Tsocanth and UK5 Eye of the Serpent.
Jeff, awesome post! It's cool to see other people's timelines, because I suspect I may be taking longer to learn some lessons about groups than other people. E.g. it took me 6 years of gaming to actually have a character die (our campaigns were always too short and abandoned) and have to learn to deal with character death. It took me ten years or so to realize that you're not always compatible with your friends, and that group dynamics can harm the game.
ReplyDeletec1996 - Introduced to Vampire in Junior high and start to love roleplaying. AD&D 2nd Ed. followed shortly thereafter.
c1997-2000 - My friend's dad DMs for a group of 6-10, as he had a lot of experience running games in his college days. My friends and I run our own small games on the side.
c 2000-2003 - I jump on the 3e bandwagon and DM my first longstanding campaign. Several of my players run their own games in rotation too.
c 2004 - 2007 - Invited to an awesome campaign with my friend Johnn and now play in only two groups. Finally made it level 11 in D&D, my highest yet.
Night's Dark Terror.
ReplyDeleteStill can't believe you guys got that throne back across the rope bridge.
And I started that game with my outdoor conversion of Keep on the Borderlands (instead of the Caves of Chaos being one big complex, each mini-complex was reworked as a old human village or town ruin.