1999: Kobold Soup

“You're sitting at a dark, dank tavern in a small town, when an old dwarf approaches, saying he knows of a ruined monastery where, supposedly, a great treasure lies hidden...”

In -99 I was introduced to roleplaying games, and spent most of that year on the player side of the table. Me and Lex (notice the cunning nickname) started out in an adventure as classically D&D as they come. Whereas we started out with a bang and a critical hit, the adventure didn't actually go so well and gave both of us nightmares because of the creepy thing sneaking around in the dungeon – we didn't actually find out what it was in-game, ever – but even in the first adventure we had some of those classical things that make roleplaying games so great, like the GM-Player miscommunication (“The door doesn't open when I push it? I bash it open!” - “It- it opens outwards, but okay?”), insane streaks of hateful, evil dice (“I missed the goblin six times and I needed to roll an 8?”) and even the tiniest bit of character backstory (“My parents were killed by dragons! Then I got adopted by my grandparents, but they were killed by dragons too!” - Hey, I was 11!).

After that initial adventure, we played occasionally under the guidance of my father, notably in the Tower of Power adventure, written and designed by one of my fathers' friends way back before I was born, but we also spent a lot of time just randomly fighting stuff from the monster manual, sans GM; it gave us the opportunity to try out how the game worked, and ignited those first few sparks of true creativity in us both – when we would actually stop and discuss for a moment where and why we were fighting the three gnolls. Somewhat surprisingly, Lex stood for the gamemastering before I did, in the adventure that gives this blog post its name: Kobold Soup. The plot: A man really, really likes kobold soup, but he has no kobolds to put in it. The mission: Kill lots of kobolds and feed the man. The twist: One of the kobolds owns a bank, and has at least one item from every treasure table in the game. The happy ending: We run out of shit to spend the money on, and build a giant church for the rest of it.

The Tower of Power was the most interesting adventure story-wise, one which I'd be glad to run again even though I've both played and ran it many, many times. Unfortunately we never finished it back then, because we either died or my father was too busy to run it for so long that we forgot what we were doing. The adventure revolves around a mysteriously scented tea, which players from my AE games probably recognize.

Notable Characters:
None really, but I'd like to give myself a pat on the back for at least giving my cleric a backstory of some kind.

Crowning Moments of Awesome:
It didn't get a whole lot better than instantly killing the first monster – a giant spider – I think. We did kind of accidentally kill a dragon because we misinterpreted the rules, but it wasn't very exciting because it died instantly (again because we misinterpreted the rules) and it was just one of those “let's fight random stuff!” bouts.

Next Up: The Crossdressing Crusades, in which we introduce two new players and four new characters, and I make my debut as a gamemaster.