08-16-2018, 01:23 PM
Havard Wrote:Hello Gazelle! Welcome to the Comeback Inn!
Great to hear about your history with our hobby!
What are you doing in gaming these days? What parts of Blackmoor interest you the most?
-Havard
In recent years I have become aware of the various groups showing their games on Youtube. I started with Force Grey and then Matthew Mercer's Critical Role campaign. I watched some of Vox Machina and then jumped into the new Mighty
Nein as soon as that started. I watched all of the Stream of Annihilation and most recently Stream of Many Eyes. This is mostly to get familiar with 5th Edition.
It's been a while since the group I was formerly played with all went their separate ways and that was 3rd Edition. I was running a game for my children then too. Since then my son has been playing with his friends and one of my nieces was working in a gaming store during 4th Edition.
When I ran campaigns I always used Greyhawk except for a run in Dragonlance. As a player I have played in Forgotten Realms, Kalamar, Ravenlodt and a bit of Dark Sun. For a while in between I did some play by mail too. I also played in some Gurps games, Judge Dredd, DC Super Heroes, Shadowrun, Vampire The Masquerade and some other super hero game (either Villains and Vigilantes, Champions or Heroes Unlimited I don't recall). I am sure there are some other things I don't recall. I worked for a time at Chips and Bits Inc selling a lot of these dames as well. Of course there are lots of video and computer games as well starting with Ultima III, Asventure and Zork.
I have a great love of all the early stuff. I started playing in the Holmes Basic D&D partial example dungeon The Tower of Zenopus and went on to In Search of the Unknown, Keep on the Borderlans and The Village of Hommlet. Iy was a mix of Holmes D&D and 1st Edition AD&D. I got a hold of the White Box and it's supplements as well as Chain Mail and anything else from The Judges Guild and Dragon Magazine I could find. I became aware of not just Greyhawk, but Blackmoor as well. Blackmoor for me was in the Greyhawk world and through research I have become aware of Blackmoor's connections with Greyhawk, Mystara and Wilderlands of High Fantasy from The Judges Guild.
I have become very interested of late in all the works of E Gary Gygax, Robert Kuntz and Dave Arneson and their original campaigns, so I have come upon this site and others. I have gotten a hold of Rob Kuntz' El Raja Key and I find a lot of his works are hard to find. I lament on the passing of Gary and Dave. Gary was putting out products on his original Castle Greyhawk although it was being called Castle Zagyg and unfortunately that was never finished and what products there were are now difficult to find at a reasonable price. Hopefully Gary's widow might decide to work something out for this project to start up again. I'm sure she means to monetize this at some point if she can work out some deal where she gets what she believes it's worth. I know that Dave was putting out some products and I wonder what might have been left undone there too. I became aware of Rob's Kalibruhn setting that TSR and Gary never wanted to put out although various products have appeared. I feel there has always been a connection between these three settings as these three men ran adventures for each other at times and worked together with others to form TSR and bring this to us. In 1979 I could not begin to put a lot of this together, but today there are resources available here and elsewhere online that make things possible that were unimaginable back in that day.
Today I am working on some ideas for a setting for my wife to play in. She is multi-racial and has a bit of most everything in her family history, but she has particular interests in the black experience, American Indian and perhaps the Islands of the Caribbean and diversity in particular, so I've been looking at the Mythology and legends of these peoples. I have noted in recent years more diversity in the D&D community and more women too. I am amazed at how D&D has been coming more and more from out of the shadows. Hearing people talking about playing D&D with their parents around the table after dinner like I used to play cards and board games as a child tells me this has become a normal part of the experience growing up in many homes. No longer are we off in the basement on the fringes.