Pardon the Interruption

I've got a few more post regarding my return to 2nd Edition AD&D and the Forgotten Realms planned, but preparations for Gen Con 2013 have thrown a serious spanner in the works. I'll pick up the series once I get back from Indy and have a day or three to recover. My apologies to everyone looking forward to me.

Current Clacking

In every player pack I created for one of my Realms campaigns, I included “current clack”—news and rumors characters would hear locally (including from caravans passing through their locale) as play began. This is…how it all begins, every time—because if you, the players, are going to choose where your characters go and what they explore, I must dangle an array of possibilities before you. You have to feel the world is no lifeless backdrop, but a gigantic flood of many lives constantly unfolding. 

Ed Greenwood Presents Elminster’s Forgotten Realms, p. 45

That’s Ed demonstrating his old school roots (as if there was ever any question). From that one quote, you see that Ed’s Realms campaigns were “sandbox” affairs, even if he didn’t use—or even know—the now-common term. And although 2^nd edition AD&D somehow got the reputation for being the version that eschewed the sandbox for the railroad, there’s nothing in the actual rules that says it has to be played that way. Deneir knows I wasn’t going to run my campaign that way.

Taking a page from Ed’s book, I created a list of rumors the PCs would know at the start of the campaign and then did some minor preparations to cover my ass should they choose to pursue them. I specifically didn’t flesh out every possible avenue of adventure, cribbing from the old Dungeoncraft articles the adage “Never create more than you have to,” but sketched out an encounter or two related to each rumor. I figured once the players chose a direction to pursue I could add more details to the scenario they wanted to explore. That method has worked well for me in the past and it continues to do so now.

After character creation in the first session, the players got a single page of rumors. Here’s what it contained:

Current Clack for the 9^th of Mirtul—Year of the Shadows (1358 DR)

• Rumors are flying that a trade coster (caravan) traveling from Loudwater up along the Dawn Pass Trail was attacked and looted by brigands of uncertain origin. The ambush occurred a half-day’s travel west of the Nighthunt Inn. Common opinion holds Zhentarim raiders are responsible for the attack, but no definitive evidence links the Black Network to the brigands.
• In light of the recent ambush, a small caravan bound for Lonely Oak is seeking to strengthen its defenses. Polgan Dranthmir of the Thunderpine Trading Coster is looking to hire stout swordsmen and spell-hurlers for the roundtrip journey from Elf Water to Lonely Oak. The trip is expected to take two tendays. Dranthmir is offering 3 silvers per day for freeswords and 5 silvers a day for spell-masters.
• “Elf fire” was spotted late last tenday by travelers approaching the village. The mysterious green fire was sighted south of the western trail near the vicinity of Grumber’s Meadow. Elf fire is believed to appear in places were lost treasure is concealed or where ancient spell-casting once occurred.
• Heavy spring storms have uncovered a sealed portal set in the rocky walls of the Orc Trough, a deep gully located west of town. In addition to this recently unearthed door, the Trough contains a number of old catacombs believed to be of elven origin.
• Erig Wholodown of Wholodown Brewery has a standing offer to buy leathertop mushrooms. He is offering 2 silver per dozen toadstools. Leathertops are found throughout the Southwood, typically in moist earth between the northern roots of crumblebark trees.
• Fresh land urchin tracks have been spotted along the western river bank, indicating a “quill” of land urchins is hunting the area. These curious creatures often form pearls within their bodies, and some older urchins have been known to create up to two dozen pearls with each valued between a hundred and six hundred gold coins. Unfortunately, the bizarre creatures’ myriad spines are poisonous, so urchin hunters should take care.

In the end, the players seemed most interested in the hired caravan guards, the unearthed portal, and the land urchin hunt rumors. They would do a little rumor-mongering of their own in the first session before deciding on which one to pursue. Their choice and the subsequent events will be covered in the next series of posts.

As an aside, I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback about these Realms posts. I hope you’re enjoying my return to Faerûn and maybe are inspired to make your own visit, either for the first time or to reacquaint yourself with old ground.

Adventure in Your Own Backyard

I took an atypical approach when designing the outskirts of Elf Water. In the past, especially when I anticipated a megadungeon-centric campaign, I’d locate potential adventuring sites a bit of a distance away from the PCs’ home base. This was a nod to realism, seeing as how an ancient ruin rife with fell monsters situated too close to a settlement would mean constant raids and the eventual deaths or departure of any sentient residents living nearby. That’s not the course I undertook with the Realms campaign, and there were several reasons for this design choice.

The first was that the Realms have such a rich and long history. I didn’t quite grasp this in my younger days, but now I have a better idea of what Ed was going for when he built the world. With a history stretching back millennia, the Realms have seen innumerable civilizations and cultures rise and fall, with each potentially leaving their mark behind. There are a lot of similarities between the Realms and Middle Earth, and Peter Jackson’s movies have influenced my mental picture of what the Realms “looks like.” Just as in Jackson’s films, a moss-covered ruin or broken statue of an ancient potentate isn’t out of place in the wilds of the Realms, lingering evidence of those who tread Faerûn long ago. I could conceivably place such enticing lures close to the village and thereby hint at the Realms’ history and to serve as adventure hooks.

Secondly, since I was running a by the book AD&D game with a small number of players, I wanted them to have ready access to help for the first level or two. They could flee to the safety of civilization if they ran out of important materials or got in over their heads. Borrowing from the MMORPG school of design, the outskirts of Elf Water is the “yard trash” newbie zone where one can familiarize themselves with the world before pursuing grander and more dangerous goals. In the future, I could see myself using Elf Water and the environs as an introductory campaign for players experiencing RPGs for the first time, but I hope it’s also challenging and interesting enough that veteran players will enjoy their own explorations.

Thirdly, I wanted to ground the PCs in their home town, making it seem like a real place, one they have familiarity with by virtue of living there their entire young lives. I have many pleasant memories of rambling through the wooded glens of my own neighborhood in my youth, dreaming dreams of what adventures might be found there and making my own discoveries of places and things forgotten in the scrap woods of suburbia. It stands to reason the PCs would have similar experiences, albeit of a slightly more dangerous variety.

Lastly, and I make no bones about this, I was influenced by Ed’s map of Shadowdale that appeared in the Gray Box. In addition to detailing the village of Shadowdale, there are a number of geographical features depicted on the map, many of which have legends and adventure potential assigned to them. If it’s good enough for the Realms’ creator, it’s good enough for me.

With these design decisions in mind, I set out filling in the rest of blank space on my big piece of poster paper that already held my Elf Water map. This is the result:

Blank poster paper and colored pencils: Life's less celebrated wonders.

There are few special landmarks and places the PCs know about—and more they don’t. I have a master map with each interesting place or thing detailed, but these are unmarked on the big map. During the game sessions, I lay the large map down on the table and let the players consult it, replicating their familiarity with the area. Of course, growing up here doesn’t mean they know everything about their own backyard. They know the major landmarks and legends, so I’m not spoiling the fun by pointing out a couple of them. Maybe it’ll get your own creative juices flowing.

In the lower left-hand corner is a gorge running through the woods. This is the somewhat infamous “Orc Trough.” The elven/human alliance broke the Black Slashers’ drive toward Loudwater in this gulley back in 1235 DR with a cunning ambush. The rocky walls of the Trough contain a number of elven catacombs known as Sinomrin. An Espruar word that’s closest Common translation is both “tomb” and “remembrance place,” the Sinomrin were formed from the surrounding rock to memorialize some of the great lights of Eaerlann who fled south when Hellgate Keep rose in power. When the Black Slashers marched through the Southwood, guerilla engagements drew the horde to this location. Human and elven troops concealed themselves in the Sinomrin, springing out to ambush the horde and cutting the orcish flanks to bloody ribbons before routing the Slashers and sending them back to the Graypeaks. When the elves conceded the verge of the Southwood to human settlement, they emptied the Sinomrin, leaving the catacombs bare. Since that time, the Sinomrin have served to host teenage parties away from parental eyes and more than a few adulterous rendezvous. But they are not all completely abandoned as the party has recently learned.

Just north of the Orc Trough on the far side of the brook is the farm of Amrig and Sobashy, a woodsman and healer, respectively. The couple prefers the solitude of the woods over the hustle and bustle of the village proper, and they are largely believed to be “elf friends,” individuals who deal with the isolationist Lanymthilhar elves.

At the eastern edge of the banana-shaped clearing bisected by the western road stands a single tree. This is the Hangman’s Tree, a relic of the rough frontier justice enacted regularly in the early days of Elf Water’s settling. Although no longer used, rumors say a ghostly figure is sometimes sighted beneath the tree and is undoubtedly the spectre of an unknown criminal who met his (or her) death on the tree decades ago.

North of the large clearing where the Hangman’s Tree grows is a rocky hill known as “The Prow.” The southern edge of the hill is steep and narrows to a point, giving it the appearance of a ship’s bow breaking through the surrounding trees. A stone bearing Thorass runes is located atop the Prow and some of the PCs have seen it in their youth, but the lack of fluency in the dwarven tongue means the stone’s writing remains a mystery.

Immediately east of The Prow and in the vaguely star-shaped clearing located east of the Orc Trough are two large clearings. The presence of a pond and creek in each meadow makes for damp earth, making both places possible sites to gather leathertop mushrooms, should one be in the mood for such fare.

All my initial prep work was now finished and I was ready to begin the campaign. There was just one small chore I needed to do: seed the campaign with rumors and see which ones would spark the players’ interest, thus deciding the course of the campaign for the first few sessions. I’ll share those rumors, or to put it in Realms terms, “the clack,” tomorrow.

Welcome to Elf Water

The next step in the campaign prep stage was establishing the PCs’ “home base.” This was a much easier phase than settling on a region in which to set the campaign—largely, because I cheated.

I’ve always enjoyed and appreciated maps, even before I discovered RPGs. One might even argue that my fascination for this hobby stems from that love. I still recall a map from the interior of some children’s book I owned that showed the protagonist’s journey through a forest, diagramed in dotted line fashion like a “Family Circus” cartoon. For me, the attraction wasn’t what adventures were documented, but what possible events might occur in the areas unvisited by the hero. Maps still have that effect on me.

The “cartographilia” has manifested in a peculiar habit of mine. I find it incredibly relaxing to sketch maps of small towns and sylvan areas, rending such landscapes in either regular or colored pencil. My mind wanders during the process, pondering who lives in these imaginary places and what life must be like for them. It’s a wonderful way to de-stress when something’s bothering me. As a result, I have a number of little maps tucked away in various stages of completion. When it’s time to introduce a new community into a game, I check this collection first to see if anything fits the bill. In this case, I had the perfect map.

Coming up with a name for the community was a quick chore. I imagined that the settlement was situated on a place where the elves and humans first came into contact, a place to trade and negotiate the accord that ultimately led to the human settlement of the outskirts of Southwood. Picturing a forest glen along a riverbank, a place where elves once danced graceful waltzes underneath a summer moon, the name “Elf Water” sprung to mind as an appropriate human-given name for that place and the community that arose on that site would share that moniker.

In the past, I’ve gone to great lengths to detail most of my home bases before play begins. The pages accompanying my old Ashabenford map is a good representation of how much effort I’d expend before the game started. But this time, going along with the “this is supposed to be fun” mantra, I whipped up just two pages of notes documenting a few important NPCs and buildings to guide me. I plan to flesh Elf Water out as future play dictates. I know who’s in charge, what temples are in town, who has their fingers in quasi-legal (or outright illegal) pies, the major wizards, and a few other colorful individuals. That’s all I needed to get things rolling.

The final step was to scan my village map and key the important buildings for the players to consult as needed. A quick trip through Photoshop and—viola!—Elf Water was ready for PC inhabitation. With plenty of space to add new material, I can get a lot of use out of this community, now and in the future.

Yes, I know what "festhall" really means.

That’s it for this week. There’ll be a post on Elf Water’s outskirts and some actual play reports next week as I continue to ramble on about the Realms. 

Choosing a Backdrop

To say the Realms is large place is an understatement, even if I’m confining myself to regions covered in the Gray Box and some of the supplements. Those poster-sized maps only hint at the scope of Faerûn and it’s not until you put down the transparent overlays and start counting hexes that you realize how much an area even a small section covers. Needless to say, I was going to have to zoom in on but a small part of its grandeur for the campaign.

My usual choices for campaigns are the Dalelands (Mistledale in particular; see my original campaign map of Ashabenford here), the Western Heartlands along the Trade Way, or somewhere in the Savage North. One of these years I’ll tackle Tethyr or the lands east of the Sea of Fallen Stars, but since this was an exercise in fun, I decided I’d keep to my old haunts. Having a backlog of previously-generated campaign materials for those regions doesn’t hurt, either.

Since I was coming off of Kingmaker, and as an old school DM I have a preference for such, I wanted to keep the campaign on the fringes of civilization, thus allowing me to play with some of the plot ideas I had in mind. This crossed the Dalelands off the list and I wasn’t feeling like managing the constant stream of traders and costers rolling along the Trade Way. Plus, I personally like mountains and forests. A return to the Savage North was in order.

Breaking out my copies of FR1 Waterdeep and the North and FR5 The Savage Frontier, I started re-reading them and looking over the landscape. Although a Waterdeep-based campaign would be fun, running an urban game requires a lot of work, and I discarded that idea. The same reasoning also removed Silverymoon, Neverwinter, Luskan, and other large urban sites from the list. Then my eyes fell on the Loudwater environs and the creative wheels started churning. A nearby fallen Elven empire, a large town, the biggest forest in all of the Realms, a Zhentarim-controlled village, an abandoned dwarven kingdom, and Hellgate Keep all in close proximity to one offered more potential adventure seeds than I could count. This had potential.

Following my decision to only incorporate Realms canon as interested me, I started looking for what was actually detailed about this area. None of it is covered in the Gray Box, so it was time to move on to secondary sources, namely the above-mentioned supplements. Loudwater and Llorkh garner a paragraph or two each in Waterdeep and the North, while Hellgate Keep and the High Forest each earn three. Hardly a treasure trove, but exactly the amount I felt like dealing with. The Greypeak Mountains have a paragraph in The Savage Frontier, and more detailed information for Loudwater, Llorkh, and Hellgate Keep is provided. The High Forest earns an entire chapter, but by this point, it’s become beyond the scope of my focus for the initial campaign adventures, so I can ignore that material for now.

What does catch my attention is a small entry covering “Other Woods” in FR5. It reads in its entirety, “This is not the name of a single forest, but includes the Lurkwood, Southkrypt garden, Southwood, Moonwood, and Westwood. These [sic] edges of these forests are logged by men, though their dark depths are largely a mystery.” Southwood (or South Wood depending on if you’re going by the text or the map) is located just beneath Loudwater and seems perfect what I’m thinking about: A frontier area close to a bastion of civilization but offering unplumbed mysteries.

I decided to consult a tertiary source—The North boxed set—to see if there was anything further I could use in there. As much of the material in that set is based (or copied outright) from both FR1 and FR5, it might or might not provide additional glimpses or inspiration. Luckily, there was a little more, but the entry was still sparse enough for me to monkey with. I’ll decline quoting it in case it spoils any surprises for my players.

Next, I started brainstorming and came up with the following background for the campaign:

After the transformation of Ascalhorn to Hellgate Keep, the elven kingdom of Eaerlann fell, and most of the moon elves fled down the Riving Shining to either travel to Evermeet or join the Fallen Kingdom near Ardeep Forest. A few, however, lingered in the Loudwater area, either joining the small mixed-race community or occupying the Southwood. These displaced refugees harbored dreams of resettling the ancient kingdom if the forces of Hellgate Keep were ever banished. For centuries, the elves claimed the Southwood as their own, a small domain of displaced elves dreaming of their former glory. This enclave dubbed themselves “Lanymthilhar.”

In 1235 DR, the Year of the Black Horde, a never-before seen force of orcs boiled out of the Northern mountains, rampaging as far south as Calimshan. One tribe, the Black Slashers, charged down from the Graypeak Mountains towards the River Shining. Forging a tentative alliance, the humans of Loudwater and the refugee elves of Lanymthihar battled the Black Slashers, breaking their invasion near the northern verge of the Southwood. After this defeat, an accord was reached between the Lanymithihar elves and the residents of Loudwater. The agreement opened the outer edges of the Southwood to human logging and settlement, but the forest interior would remain sacrosanct and protected by the elves. So long as this compact was obeyed and the loggers didn’t become greedy in their yearly felling of timber, the two cultures would pursue their own agendas separately and in peace.

The PCs would begin the campaign in one of the few forest edge communities, caught between civilization to the north and forbidden mystery to the south. A decision to play up the mystery of elven culture and the phenomenon known as “The Retreat,” led me to prohibit elves as a starting race for the PCs as mentioned previously. While not actual enemies, I wanted to explore the “alien” factor of elves, rather than making them pointy-eared humans. I hope to have fun with this aspect of the campaign.

After a quick trip of the maps through my scanner and importing the scans into Photoshop, I made minor changes and additions to the canonical landscape of the region. I also took a look through Volo’s Guide to the North to see if I could use anything in that book, and decided I’d incorporate one of roadside inns mentioned therein. Situated to the east of Loudwater, “The Nighthunt Inn” might come in handy should the PCs ever decide to travel toward Llorkh. I now had my regional campaign map.

Loudwater and Environs as Ed never imaged.

The next step would be zooming in even more to detail the PCs’ home base of Elf Water and the adventuring opportunities in their own backyard.

Establishing Boundaries in the Realms

Having decided to go ahead with a 2^nd edition AD&D game in the Forgotten Realms, my first task was deciding what to bring to the table and what to leave on the shelf. Between the various rules and campaign supplements available for 2^nd Edition and the Realms, there’s a small mountain of books waiting to be climbed. And I wanted this to be fun, not mountaineering.

Deciding my limits for the rules was easy. Although not my usual “go to” D&D rules, I’ve never had too much a problem with 2^nd Edition in its initial form. The core rules are close enough to 1^st edition in practice and don’t make for far-reaching changes to the original advanced game. I’ve found that it’s only once you start bolting on the supplemental material that the power levels start getting wonky and the wheels fall off.

So no problem here: I’d only allow the players the class and race options available in the Players Handbook. No “Complete Book of…” class kits allowed, no Tome of Magic spells, and especially nothing from the Player’s Option books! This kept it strictly in the classic AD&D family, and had the bonus benefit of freeing me from such troublesome classes as assassins, cavaliers, and barbarians. I had forgotten that 2^nd Edition removed half-orcs as a playable class, but that wouldn’t matter for what I had in mind for the campaign. And, of course, as the DM, I could make use of any of the verboten material freely. Sometimes it’s good to be boss.

Choosing the Realms material I intended to limit myself to required a bit more thinking. My introduction to the Realms—outside of Ed’s excellent Dragon articles—had been the “gray box.” Using that as the backbone was a no-brainer. But I’ve got a respectable collection of other Realms stuff I’ve accumulated over the years. Would say the material in The Dalelands supplement trump what was presented in the Gray Box, which was much less detailed or would I stick to the bare bones presentation found in the original set?  Would I make the Volo series my primary source for all things Realms? Was I going to concern myself with Realms canon?

I wrestled with these decisions a bit, and my original thought was to go all the way back and just utilize whatever information was given in the Gray Box, building my own campaign from that modicum of information. The designer in me loved the idea of such a challenge and I readily imagined myself pouring over the two slim books from that set, ferreting out small nuggets of information and implied hints at the larger world to build upon. But then I remembered the real purpose of the summer campaign: Let Mike have some fun for a change. This isn’t work, knucklehead!

Ultimately, I made what I feel is the wisest choice and decided that the only limitations I’d place on myself was “Is the ‘canonical’ material in X entertaining, inspiring, useful, or fun? If so, use it. If not, forget it.” This gave me a lot of leeway while still maintaining a game which would be easily identifiable as the Forgotten Realms to anyone playing or observing it. Sure, a die-hard Realms aficionado might take me to task for fudging a few dates or adding new places, but last time I checked, I didn’t need anyone to vouch for the orthodoxy of my home games.

And speaking of dates and orthodoxy, this led me to my biggest alteration of the established Realms’ timeline: The Time of Troubles.

It never happened, folks.

I started running my first Realms game back in 1987 when the Gray Box was released. Reading that set completely changed how I approached world design. In fact, the experience of turning the pages of that set remains such a developmental milestone for me that I can still remember what food I ate and what was playing on my tape deck as I paged through Cyclopedia of the Realms (if you’re interested, I’ll always associate the Gray Box with port wine cheese, Paul Simon’s Graceland, and Eddy Grant’s Killer on a Rampage.)

So when the Time of Troubles happened, it needless to say had a great impact on my vision of Faerûn. Although even then I realized it was a marketing ploy to steer gamers towards the 2^nd edition of the game, I made a half-hearted attempt to adjust my own version of the Realms to accommodate the changes inflicted by the Time of Troubles. But it always stuck in my craw a bit. Years later, it seems that most of the world-shaking changes that Time of Troubles wrought have vanished (Bane’s been back for a while now), so why bother? Let’s just pretend it never happened and excise any obvious Time of Troubles-related material from the campaign setting. It’s surprisingly easy.

Removing the Time of Troubles was also a breeze due to my choice of when to set the campaign. Rather than keep the game relatively current to the established timeline, I went back to the beginning. This campaign takes place in 1358 DR, the Year of the Shadows (and interestingly not “Year of Shadows” as later supplements would refer to it), the suggested starting year in the original Gray Box. So technically and temporally, somewhere out there in the Realms, the campaign I ran in 10^th grade is currently underway with a much younger Michael at the helm. Maybe I should finagle a crossover event between the two groups?

The last limitations I needed to establish were campaign ones, boundaries stipulated by the focus of the campaign. I had a few possible themes and potential plots I wanted to introduce (which I’ll cover in a forthcoming post) that would be best done if I drew a few lines in the proverbial sand. In the end, it came down to demi-humans in character creation. With a small group, I wanted humans to equal the number of demi-humans (if not outnumber them) in the party. Originally, I was looking at three players, and decided only one person could play a demi-human, ability scores allowing. At the last moment, we picked up a fourth player, so I relaxed that limit to two non-human PCs in the party. But there was a catch to this: To quote a famous ad slogan for Talislanta, “No elves!”

What? No elves in a Forgotten Realms campaign? You’re mad!

There’s a method to my madness, gentle reader, one I’ll explain in a future post.

Back to Faerûn

Ah, summertime! The season where one can relax a bit, spend time with long-neglected friends, go to concerts, attend barbeques, and enjoy a momentary escape from the workaday chores of modern life—that is, unless you’re a handsome, gregarious, freelance designer and writer struggling to keep the bills paid and the wolves away from the door for another month. Then summer is pretty much like any other time of year, except more humid and mosquito-filled.

As many of you know, I came back into gaming after a prolonged absence, returning to the role-playing fold about the same time the OSR started gaining momentum in the back alleys of the internet. I was lucky enough to return with a minor splash, one that swiftly moved me from hobbyist to professional, and, before I knew it, I was working as a freelancer as a second job. While the upswing of that development is that people actually pay me to use my imagination and I get to share my creations with a wider audience than I ever imaged possible, the downside is that there’s no longer a dividing line between recreation and vocation for me when it comes to role-playing games. I know: cry me a river.

Still, it remains a fact that what I once did for fun and personal enjoyment is now labor and there are many times when I wish—if just for a little while—I could treat RPGs as a pleasant pastime. I’ve been running a lot of DCC RPG on the convention trail, which is just play-testing in the guise of fun, and even my semi-regular home Pathfinder campaign is more of an exercise to familiarize myself with the mechanics and design needs of the industry’s current 800 lbs. gorilla in hopes that it’ll pay off with more work down the line.

At the end of April, one of the players in the Pathfinder campaign informed us he received a summer scholarship to study out of state for the summer. The Pathfinder campaign I’m running is the Kingmaker adventure path, which if you know Paizo’s APs, is designed for four players. The campaign had also reached a pivotal point and I (and the rest of the group) thought it be best if we put the campaign on hiatus until the departing player returned, and then pick things up from there.

That left us with the summer to play something else. I originally proposed that we’d spend the summer months doing a playtest of my Shiverwhen game and anticipated giving it a thorough shakedown and chronicling it over on the Shiverwhen blog. We got as far as the players generating characters and me doing the initial prep work when cold reality hit: this was going to be more work than I felt like doing. The problem with running a game you’re currently developing means there’s always something that need attention, sometimes even built from scratch to fill gaps. It quickly dawned on me that the last thing I wanted to do was spend the summer with an even greater workload. I’ve already got a lot on my plate between crafting new DCC RPG material and sewing the final parts of Stonehell 2 together. I didn’t need more work masquerading as recreation.

I told my players of my revelation and my desire to scrap Shiverwhen before it began, but that meant we had to find a replacement game for the summer. I gave them four options of what we could do: 1) DCC RPG (a chance for me to playtest and develop material); 2) OD&D (beer & pretzels dungeon crawling that’d be easy for me to write and keep everyone entertained through the summer); 3) Pathfinder (a non-adventure path to keep us in fighting shape for fall and allow me to further try my hand at designing for the system); and 4) 2^nd Edition AD&D set in the Forgotten Realms (just because it had absolutely nothing to do with my paying design work).

To my surprise and delight, option #4 carried the day.

So for the last three weeks, I’ve found myself back in Ed Greenwood’s world running a game using a system I’ve not really touched since 1990 or thereabouts. And I must say I’m having a wonderful time. Long time readers know that I remain a fan of the Realms, despite everything that’s been done to the poor place over the last (can you believe it?) twenty-five years. Returning there has been a joy, like falling back in with old flame or seeing someone from your youth and reminiscing about days gone by.

In the weeks ahead I’ll be posting more about the Realms campaign, sharing the work I’ve done with it, displaying maps, and boring you with the occasional actual play reports. For the first time in a long while, I’m having fun as a DM and designer again, and not viewing my time in front of the computer as work, but an engaging and entertaining process. This blog’s been too much of a marketing venue and it is past time to utilize it as a means to disseminate “fun stuff” and frolic in the shared happiness of these strange games we play.

More to come.