The Geeks and I played D&D.
2nd Edition erupted onto the scene during this period. We gobbled it up. We each made one character and started a campaign where all of us took turns DMing. We started in an amorphous realm of our own cobbling, but soon we settled into the Forgotten Realms. We toyed with Battle System a couple times, but straight RPG was more to our liking. My Necromancer (pattern emerging...), Jack of Shadows (still one of my favorite books) grew to be quite powerful, as did the other members of our group.
A couple years into the campaign, one of the player's character died. I think it might have been in Undermountain.
Jack of Shadows was the one that killed him.
I turned him to stone when he stole something important from the rest of us. We demanded he be cooperative and he ran. I blasted him in the back.
He had it coming.
We had put up with a lot of his self-serving, half-drow, ranger-thief character's nonsense for a long time (he was, of course, a bit of a dick in real life). It made for a pretty incredible gaming session, and it was the beginning of the end of all of our friendship with the guy.
The campaign continued into high school.
I picked up Ravenloft on an affectionate lark of all things vampiric and spooky. I was immediately hooked.
Off we went into the Mists.
I relished the rollercoaster of dread and fear that I was able to create. It was a whole new way to enjoy the game. The other guys loved it too. The power and wealth and renown we had built up was largely useless and irrelevant. We weren't there to conquer, we were there to survive. We had our wits and each other against ever-mounting odds. It challenged us at every turn and we had a fucking blast. Feast of Goblyns and both Ravenloft modules proved excellent playgrounds of doom. There were a lot of close calls, some tough choices, and some steep prices to pay.
I haven't retread those paths in many years, but the more I think about playing again, the more the Mists tug at my quivering ganglia.
Dark Sun arose.
Psionics, oppression, and a harsh, raw world terribly out of balance? So rough you start at 3rd level and and can have stats up to 20? Okay!!!
Dark Sun was strange because we read the novels, or at least the first novel, before we started playing there. It set the pace, which was fine, but the story was closely intertwined with the first official adventure module; Freedom.
We gave it a shot.
One of my all-time favorite adventures as a player. We were taking part in something bigger than ourselves. Bigger than a dungeon crawl, or a quest for a reward, or a flight for survival; the face of the world was changing in a big way, and we were there, we helped make it happen. We went from rag-tag downtrodden slaves to tyrant-toppling freedom fighters in one adventure.
It may have been a railroad, but it didn't feel like it, and we sure didn't mind either way.
We reveled in it, we struggled to make it happen.
One of the guys did the majority of the Dark Sun DMing. Our realms play was one thing, but it was more fun as a player in the newer campaign settings to be in the dark about most everything. One DM for Dark Sun. One DM for Ravenloft. One DM for Undermountain/Underdark Realms play. If someone had a particular adventure idea they wanted to run in one of the other settings, it wasn't hard to keep it self-contained.
The Dark Sun campaign ran for a year or two. My psionicist Maralor ended up being a Senator through some curveballs the DM didn't plan for, but handled excellently. We all had a blast on Athas.
In the midst of all that, we started a new Ravenloft campaign with new characters. We tried making an all-caster group, and had a lot of fun with it, but it didn't last long.
The problem was that with every new product TSR put out, for every interesting new story hook or idea they proffered, the grand scope and mystery of the setting diminished and lost its luster.
I didn't want to find out from them how uninteresting or perfectly boring some of the mighty Sorcerer-Kings of Athas were, and I especially didn't want to have the Dragon of Tyr end up so blasé. "His name is Borys? Gee-willickers!" My visions of the enigmatic Nibenay and the fiery Hamanu were vastly more intriguing.
In Ravenloft, the culmination of Hyskosa's Hexad was so disjointed and underwhelming that I don't even remember what it was. My cadre of colorfully spooky NPCs and their schemes resonated much more powerfully, but when I had entwined them in all of this material, my excitement as a DM unraveled with it.
Perhaps therein lies my gradual disenfranchisement with Dungeons & Dragons and why the OSR seems so thrilling.
It didn't help that school and girls and visions of college and adulthood were intervening.
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