2000: The Crossdressing Crusades

In the year 2000, the third edition of Dungeons & Dragons was released. I got it pretty much fresh off the printers, though I had no idea how new it was; all I knew was that I was switching from something old, to something new. Pretty much simultaneously, AD&D celebrated its nineteenth birthday (The early D&D, which I never played, turned 26 that year).

The same year, a few months before I got the new books, I had managed to recruit two new players who came to form the basis of the first group I ever seriously ran adventures for. It consisted of my friend from school, Andy, and his little brother Benny. While Benny would only be in the group for two years, Andy formed the core of my long-running chronicles to follow. He spent a lot more time on his character than me or Lex had done before, detailing such things as family, education, habits, personality and wardrobe. While he was a bit overzealous at times, and he absolutely detested any form of harm befalling his precious, well-crafted character, Andy taught the rest of us that the sky's the limit when it comes to character creation. While my father still ran adventures for this group as well (the Tower of Power adventure in the previous post actually included them), I took my first staggering steps as a GM designing simple "kill the monster" scenarios for these two players.

Andy was also the one who gave this blog post its title. He introduced a novel new concept that neither me nor Lex had previously considered: his character was a girl, a stunningly gorgeous elven paladin named Gondriel. With that, he sparked somewhat of a trend, and when we eventually got the third edition books, three out of four people made female characters. At this point I still had my own characters in all the adventures, and was more or less the inofficial GM only because I owned the books – and my first 3rd edition character was Wendy, a half-elf druid. Lex followed suit with the ranger Wanda, which left Benny as our only male – Bruno the Bard.

For practical reasons we later split the group, and along with Lex I created the first real “campaign” or “chronicle” I ever made, unimaginatively named “Wendy & Wanda” which really sounds a lot more like a daytime TV sitcom than an exciting fantasy adventure now that I look back at it. Nevertheless, it was the first thing I played with a coherent, sensible storyline – and more importantly, it was the first time I got to work crafting NPCs. I made a lot of them for this game: Recurring villains, sidekicks, the quirky store owner Thorin, even a romantic interest.

I know what you're thinking, and let me stop you right there – yes, we were two teenage boys playing female characters in a story with a romantic side plot. This couldn't possibly end well, could it?

Surprisingly, our minds weren't in the gutter nearly half as much as you'd expect. While there were a few “Tee hee, I have boobs” moments, and our characters probably took a few more baths than what was strictly necessary if you're out adventuring, the romantic storyline actually developed relatively sensibly, and ended in Wanda being married to a handsome samurai with graying temples. You might wonder what a female Aragorn was doing marrying a samurai who probably belongs in a different quarter of the world altogether, which brings me to another interesting viewpoint: While we had a story, we still didn't have a setting. I made up the scenery for the adventures more or less on the fly, and aside from one town called Freeport which served as our base of operations, nothing was really coherent between our adventures; the town was simultaneously by the sea, in the middle of the forest, or next to an evil empire, as appropriate for the adventure.

We would eventually come to deal with this issue, but for now we were happy just to go on adventures. The stories were simple, but the adventures usually were at least vaguely linked together, and because of the recurring NPCs it did have the feeling of being a single, distinct campaign to a much greater degree than anything we had done before. We looked back at our adventures, and I loved what I saw; the simple mud of dull die-rolling had been fertilized, and out of it was spiring something beautiful, something none of us had expected to be there. Out of random encounters, survival rolls, and spot checks, a story was growing, a story that somehow was more than just the sum of its parts. It was a simple story, a crude, primitive tale of man (or woman, rather) facing monsters in harsh wilderness, but it was alive, and more importantly, it was mine.

This is when I became truly passionate. I started writing down what had happened in the adventures, sometimes from the point of view of one of the characters. I started reading the books thoroughly, scanning for new interesting monsters, traps, or other obstacles. I plowed through novels solely to get inspiration. I counted the days until the next game session. I was hooked, and hooked bad.

In just one year, I had gone from stringing together random encounters for Bruno and Gondriel, to fashioning characters, plots, and all sorts of challenges falling outside the scope of the rules. Now, only one thing remained: A setting.

Notable Characters: Gondriel, who was the first character to really be a character in her own right. Paradoxally, she wasn't in the first chronicle, as it was a while before I made real “stories” for the group in my hometown, but it was Andy's design of Gondriel that really showed me and Lex how to make your character more than just numbers on a sheet of paper.

Crowning Moments of Awesome: Yeah, we had a few. One of the best one was sneaking off from a school dance to run a session in the coat room, using our first-edition sheets made on the backs of old homework (Gondriel and Bruno remained 1st ed characters for most of their existence, for some reason I remember mostly playing 3rd ed with Lex). We also finally beat the first dungeon that my father ran for us, which I ran straight out of the book with some added quirks of my own. While I was the GM and probably biased, Bill and Sain (with the addition of Gondriel) finally did manage to make it to the treasury of the ruins and got their reward (not that they needed it after killing the kobold banker, but still).

The true Crowning Moment of Awesome, however, was in that magical moment when the game became a Story. I've spent my entire life since then reliving that moment in many, many, many different games, and it keeps getting better.

Next Up: Gnomeworld, in which I create a full-scale world, learn how to plan ahead, and things begin to take a darker turn. Also, a character actually climbs from level 1 to level 20 – to date, a feat I've only seen done once.