Rythlondar

Risus Monkey has reposted an awesome bit of gaming history: the Ryth Chronicle. If anyone has come to this site from somewhere other than the Monkey's page, I encourage you to run and check it out. The story goes like this:

A few years back, I was working a cool job where I got to watch a lot of TV. My boss, a fellow named Len, mentioned off-handedly that he once a chance to make a career in gaming, having known a guy back in the day who had made millions of dollars from role playing games. I thought of all the people in the world who had made shit tons of money from role playing games. Only one came to mind.

"Len," I asked, "Did you know Gary Gygax?"

That is how I learned that my boss had been an avid gamer back in the early 1970s. He told me a tale:

Once upon a time, a poor and unknown guy named Gary invented a game called "Dungeons and Dragons." He traveled the world (well, the upper Midwest) selling this new and innovative game at "conventions." You see, many centuries ago in the early 1970s, there were so few gamers in the world, they had to travel to meet up with one another.

Len met this brilliant young geek and purchased his wares. With a friend, they made up a place called Rythlondar, and proceeded to have adventures. Along the way, they had to invent some things like combat tables and 20-sided dice to facilitate their gaming. Sometimes they had to call Gary long distance and ask him what was up with the rules. Their characters grew in power and majesty until one day everyone was slain by something big and nasty. LOL!

Since this first generation of gamers had no internets to connect them, they had to record everything on paper. These papers were then sent by "post" to places all across Michigan! Some time later, Jimmy Carter was elected President of the United States.

At least, that's how I remember it.

In any case, Len passed me Xeroxed copies of his old gaming notes, which are an amazing history of an early, first-generation D&D campaign. One night, I brought them to a gaming session and showed them to Risus Monkey, who (appropriately) went bananas. He scanned them, posted them to his blog, and got in touch with Len and his co-creator John to do interviews and everything. The result is now fully available for the world to explore and study. 

If you haven't already seen them, I highly encourage you to head over and take a look. It's freakin amazing.

What do you mean, the gnolls ate your brother???

Since I’m late to blogging, I’m late to chiming on my place among the D&D Generations. According to Cyclopeatron, I am solidly a "4^th Generation" D&D player, although I did start with the 3^rd generation box sets, especially the famous Red Box.

My mom bought me the Red Box, I’m guessing for my 12^th birthday, which would have made it 1990 - a bit later than most, but I suppose some surplus materials were still kicking around South Jersey's gaming stores. I had only been a solo “player” before that, building armies conscripted from a friend’s Monstrous Manual (1988). So getting the Red Box was my first chance to actually play for real… but who would I play with?

Fortunately, our family had an awesome tradition: every Sunday night was Family Night. The kids would take turns choosing a game for the whole family to play, and then we would watch the Sunday night Disney movie. So one evening in early 1990, I became Dungeon Master for the first time and made my whole family play Dungeons & Dragons. It was great.

I don’t remember many details, but I do remember the coolness of my parents breaking out of jail and slaying orcs. Also, at some point my brother decided he was bored and didn’t want to play any more. He announced that his character was charging ahead while everyone else snuck about, and then he went off to do something else. A couple minutes later he came back wanting to play again. I said he couldn’t because he had run off into the gnolls’ lair and gotten eaten. This upset him, which upset my mom. Fortunately it was about time for Michael Eisner to come on and we had to wrap up. But my first session of D&D ended with my mother yelling at me for allowing my little brother to be eaten by gnolls.

Whatever. It was his own fault.

Over the next few years my brothers and I took turns creating terrible dungeon crawls and amassing untold fortune. Eventually, we conquered the world using said fortune and the aforementioned Monstrous Manual Army. I remember reading through the various boxed sets, but never had the chance to actually play them. When I got to high school, I found that my friends were into D&D, and we played AD&D 2e pretty regularly, which is what makes me solidly 4^th generation. I never got my parents to play again, but my mom would ask after our adventures, and laugh as the same guy had to roll up a new character every session (“How’d you kill Taylor this time?”).

But anyway, I guess I fall into that “small number” that was introduced by the boxed sets, but invested heavily in the 2e merchandise – just as TSR had hoped!