this isn’t a book; it’s a time machine

This is how I go to my happy place.

This is where it all began for me: the D&D Basic Rules Set. When I opened this book in 1983, I had no idea that it would change my life. Back then, if you told 11 year-old me that I’d be 36 and wiping tears from my face because reading it brought back so many joyful memories, he would have called you one of the names the cool kids called him for playing it. (Don’t judge him too harshly; he’s only 11.)

My original D&D Basic set was a garage sale casualty, but the book in this picture is a first printing that I bought at a game store about ten years ago. It’s perfect in every way, except for a missing character sheet in the middle, which I printed from the PDF copy I bought from Paizo last year.

The Keep on the Borderlands module beneath it belonged to someone named Randy Richards, who wrote his name and phone number (as we so often did in those days) on the cover. I don’t know who Randy Richards is, if he cares, or if he’ll even read this, but if he does, I want him to know: your book is in very good hands, Randy, and its current owner loves it as much as anyone could.

I’ve been on a real D&D kick lately (blame the Penny Arcade podcast, and how much I love 4e) but I hadn’t actually gone back to the beginning and read the Basic Rules for a very, very long time. So late last night, after my family went to sleep, instead of watching TV or reading blogs, I went to my bookshelf and grabbed the Player’s Manual you see in this picture. I read it cover-to-cover for the first time in over 20 years, and played the solo adventure, which was the very first dungeon I ever visited. I named my fighter Thorin, just like I did when I was a kid. I made a map on graph paper, rolled dice on the floor, and felt pure joy wash over me. I scared off a Giant Rat and killed the remaining two before I failed – like I did when I was 11 – to solve the riddle of O-T-T-F-F-S-S, losing all my treasure. I tried to talk to the Goblins … before I killed them and took their treasure: 100 sp and 50 gp. I battled the Rust Monster, who was just as tough and unreasonable an opponent for a first level fighter as I remember. Thorin eventually managed to defeat it with some … creative … trips back to town to replace his armor and weapons, just like he did a quarter century ago. Luckily for him, the Rust Monster didn’t heal between battles … just like the last time he faced it. I decided to leave the skeletons for another time, and walked back to town with my 650 gp and 100 sp. When I calculated my XP, I had earned 1084 … not too shabby. I closed up my book, and went to sleep happy.

When I was a kid, the D&D Basic Rules Set was never just a game to me; it was my portal into a magical, wonderful world that I still love. Now that I’m an adult, it isn’t just a couple of books to me; it’s a time machine.

The world I live in is filled with uncertainty and occasionally-overwhelming responsibility, but for an hour or so last night, I was 11 years-old again, and I went back to a world where the biggest problem I faced was trying to save up for a Millennium Falcon. When I read “You decide to attack the goblins before they can get help…” I could hear my Aunt Val tell me “That’s a game that I hear lots of kids like to play, Willow. It’s dragons and wizards and those things you liked from The Hobbit. The back says you use your imagination, and I know what a great imagination you have.” I could feel the weight of my Red Box, which I carried with me pretty much everywhere I went, and how huge the thing felt in my tiny arms. I could feel it get heavier as I added modules and characters, and my own dungeons, drawn on graph paper. I could hear the snap of the thick green rubber band I eventually had to wrap around it, and I could see the yellowing scotch tape I added to the corners.

I enjoyed it so much, I’m going to reread the Dungeon Master’s Rulebook next, and run the Group Game adventure it contains, “for use by a beginning Dungeon Master.” Then, it’s time to go back to the Keep on the Borderlands, using just the Basic Rules, where Magic-users can’t wear armor, Fighters have 8 HP, Dwarf and Elf are classes, and everyone dies at least once before finally taking a character to second level, because that’s where it all started for me, and sometimes you just have to go back to your roots.

Geek in Review: The Birth of an Avenger

This month's Geek in Review is about creating Aeofel Elhromanë, the Eladrin Avenger I played for the most recent Penny Arcade D&D podcast.

While all D&D characters begin as a collection of numbers (on paper, my Eladrin Avenger is 14,12,14,14,16,12) those numbers don’t mean anything without a story to bring them to life. Maybe it’s because I’m a writer, maybe it’s because I have an imagination that I’ve always had to actively keep under control, but as long as I’ve been gaming, creating backstories for my characters has been as much fun – in some cases, more fun – than actually plunging them into a dungeon.

Though Wizards provides a spiffy character creation tool for 4E players, the Avenger class comes from the unreleased Player's Handbook 2, so those tools weren't available to me when I was bringing him to life. Undeterred, I designed and created Aeofel the way I've been doing it since I opened up my red box basic D&D set in 1983: I sat on the floor with some dice, some notebook paper, a bunch of open books, and – most important of all – my imagination.

I could have simply minmaxed my character, but that's just not how I roll. I wanted Aeofel to be more than a collection of numbers on a sheet of paper. Even though I knew we were playing a dungeon crawl with minimal roleplaying, I wanted him to be an actual person, because, as the first line of the basic set (my introduction to D&D) says, "This is a game that is fun. It helps you imagine."

I let my imagination run wild, and as I got to know Aeofel, he told me a story that was much longer than the one of two paragraphs I'd intended to write…

Two days’ journey from Mithrendain, beneath a thick canopy of leaves in the Forest of Astranz, there is a school, where, for countless human centuries, Eladrin have lived and trained, under Melora’s watchful eye.

Aeofel Elhromanë lived in this school for his entire life, devoting each of his 142 years to the service of Melora. He trained beside monks and clerics, and though he never saw battle firsthand, many of his instructors were veterans of the war with the Drow. He never knew his parents, but his fellow students were his House.

Eight nights ago, during the Court of Stars, the school was attacked by Goblin and Kobold raiders, lead by a human warlord. The school’s alarm, which had been silent for a generation, shook Aeofel and his brothers from their daily trance, and they ran from their quarters, ready for battle.

Aeofel dashed across the training grounds, ready to push the invaders back, but all he found was a trail of bodies –– attacker and defender alike –– from the school’s entrance to its shrine. Near the gate, a few warlords skirmished with kobolds, and wild magic crackled in the field beyond, but the attackers had fled the grounds.

His master, the great Avenger Immafen, stood beside the shrine’s entrance. His sword was slick with Goblin’s blood, and he breathed heavily.

“Master,” Aeofel said, “what has happened? Why were we attacked?”

If you're interested, you can read the rest of the story, as well as some more insight into Aeofel's design, in The Birth of an Avenger at the SG Newswire.

Please note that, while the content of my column is SFW, the rest of the site is NSFW, so you should access it accordingly, and don't bitch me out if you get in trouble.

nostalgia overload

One of the super-useful bits of advice I picked up somewhere about writing and blogging goes like this: most people can’t write for a book and a blog at the same time, because our brains get different kinds of feedback and rewards from each. For most of us, if we had to pick, we’ll write in our blogs because the feedback and interaction is more immediate and rewarding, and it trains us to write short bursts instead of longer narrative pieces.

YMMV, of course, but I can’t do both, and I’m having such a good time writing this thing that I’m writing, I really don’t want to stop until it’s done, so here’s something that should be entertaining until I get back[1]:

Actual recordings of classic video games, digitized from the original cassette recordings.

We recorded our video game experiences from 1982 until 1988 in a variety of locations on the east coast. Most of the recordings come from Ithaca, NY, Albany, NY and Ocean City, MD. Other locations include Lancaster, PA, Falmouth, MA, Rehoboth Beach, DE and Key West, FL.

Luckily I stored all fourteen audio tapes in a safe place and rediscovered them when I moved the rest of my stuff out of my parents house in 1997. In the last several years I digitized these nostalgic recordings to preserve and share them.

This is the most wonderful thing, ever. You get the little kid commentary about games that suck, the occasional burst of excitement when a difficult level is cleared, and the pure unadulterated joy of hearing the other games around the one they were recording. For maximum fun, I suggest putting it in a tab you aren’t looking at, and see how long it takes you to identify the sound clips once they start playing.

Man, I wish I had room and the money for a few arcade cabinets, or at least a MAME cabinet. I’m going to keep on reaching for that goal.

Hey, this’ll be fun: you can have any four classic arcade games in the world. Maintenance and cost aren’t a factor, and there’s no ROM swapping. Which ones to you pick? It’s really tough, but more fun if you don’t spend a ton of time thinking about it, so it’s right off the top of your head. Here are mine:

  1. Robotron
  2. Spyhunter (sit down version)
  3. Galaga
  4. Tempest

You also get one pinball machine. I pick Creature from the Black Lagoon.

When you get tired of riding the nostalgia train, you may want to unwind with the Cerebral or Medieval music collections from Magnatune.

[1] I am well aware that you can all get along just fine without me, I just needed a segue and that was the best I could do on short notice.

“Can Jim Darkmagic hang upside down from a rope ladder and cast spells? Fuck yeah he can.”

Episode three of the Penny Arcade/PVP/Me D&D Podcast is online!

Part 3 continues with a visit down the hole in the broken tower….

Something is waiting for them (and their rope ladder), but who (or what)? First down, Binwin the dwarf… where he discovers a room that was never finished, though it is occupied.

It's time for doughnuts, rope ladders, hanging from the ceiling—and for Binwin to drop into the midst of more followers of Orcus. How do things go? Well, here's the last line of the episode: "That is as bad as it could possibly be."

Several astute listeners have pointed out that I made an epic – and I mean eh-puh-hic fuck up when we played – I failed to account for Aeofel Elhromanë's weapon proficiency bonus, and his magic longsword, which means that should have added +4 to … a lot of rolls. We realized this shortly after the final encounter, and I felt incredibly stupid. In fact, I still feel incredibly stupid; I should have known better. Believe it or not, I was so excited to play 4E, so excited to play my Avenger, and so excited to be playing with my friends, I just overlooked it.

Anyway, in this episode, I confessed to everyone playing that I loved listening to the first series of podcasts (not much of a confession, really, because I'd mentioned this at PAX, at Comic-Con, at Emerald City Comicon, and then at PAX again) and pointed out that, as a fan of the original, I knew what it was like to hear them talking about cool stuff, without actually describing to us what the cool stuff was. So for the rest of the day, I gave little descriptions of what we were all seeing, so listeners would have some extra information to use when they imagined what it would have been like if they were in the room with us.

Extra-astute listeners may notice that the donuts arrive, and I actually eat one. Yeah, I'm not a huge fan of donuts, but from time to time, even I fail my save versus devil's food with rainbow jimmies.