So, in the second installment, I left off talking about my autobiography in Gaming up to the end of the 1990s. In the third installment, I'll go into the year 2000 and beyond . . .
In the year 2000, I moved away from the great state of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations to live in exile in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, specifically in the town of Plymouth, which has designated itself as "America's Hometown" . . . Around the same time, a great revolution in Gaming took place: the Third Edition of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons (although now they dropped the "Advanced" and went back to simply calling it "Dungeons & Dragons"). The release of 3rd Edition coincided very closely with my move - I bought it right away, of course, and so I owned the latest version of D&D, but had nobody to play it with.
The 3rd Edition took a systematic approach to rebuilding D&D from the ground up. Instead of having new ideas, each using entirely different mechanics, simply tacked onto the rules (as was prevalent in AD&D 1st edition from the start, and slowly crept into AD&D 2nd edition over the years), the new system provided a "Core Mechanic" - the d20 roll, with higher always being better - and built everything else from there. This led to the new version of the game being called the "D20 System."
The 3rd Edition of D&D was a pretty big deal in and of itself, but there was something else that came with it - the revolutionary "Open Gaming List" (OGL). This allowed other game companies to create and release materials relating to the D&D game rules, as long as they followed certain guidelines and didn't infringe certain copyrighted materials. What followed was a major boom in the game industry - it seemed like nearly every established game company started putting out D&D materials, and everyone with a personal computer who didn't have a game company seemed to start one. It was a time of unparalleled growth in the game industry, the "D20 System" was everywhere, and spin-offs like "D20 Call of Cthulhu" proliferated. And I was away from my gaming group.
I was faced with two major problems - where to find a gaming group, and whether or not to convert my homegrown campaign world to the new edition. The first problem was solved when in December 2000 I moved into the basement suite of a co-worker who became a close friend, Mike B. In his basement, I had enough room to host game sessions . . . and I was able to convince members of my old gaming crew to make the 2-hour trek to Plymouth to play. So my crew consisted of Harry E. and Ray F. ( both founding members of the group, though Ray F. had to stop playing fairly soon, unfortunately), Bob B., and David C. Occasionally we also gamed with Ken S. Increasingly over the years we also gamed with Liz, who married Bob B. So I had a gaming group, though its composition varied a bit. The other challenge - what setting to use? - was a bit more difficult.
I wasn't sure I had it in me to completely re-write my entire campaign world from the ground up to the 3rd Edition. Plus, my group felt that in the last 8 years or so, we had exhausted most of the possibilities of my core setting. So a compromise was settled upon - I would create a new setting based on the southern subcontinent of my campaign world, in the region of a city called "Delensar" (so we sometimes called it the "Delensar campaign"). Since I had never really detailed this region of my world, I wouldn't be rebuilding old material with new rules - I would be free to create setting and rules as I went. The other plan we came up with was a unifying plan for the types of characters - everyone wanted to try a "swashbuckling" campaign, and the names of the characters came first - "Robertt The Righteous" (Ray F.), "Garrett The Daring" (Harry E.), and "Everett The Downtrodden" (David C.). To these were added "Crevius the Wayward" (Bob B.), "Kurt The Cunning" (Ken S.), and occasionally "Rianne The Cautious" (Liz B.).
I found that the new "D20 System" allowed for a more freeflowing style of play that coincided nicely with the "swashbuckling" style of the campaign. We ran rollicking adventures that were fun and funny, played both seriously and for laughs. It really injected new life into playing D&D. Maybe it was just the theme of the campaign, but most of us felt that the new D&D is what D&D should have been all along. And in 2003 came an upgrade - a revision of 3rd Edition, called "D&D 3.5" Although there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth over the supposed "nerfing" of certain classes, powers, and spells, for the most part this was accepted as a perfecting of the D&D RPG.
Up until the advent of 3rd edition I kept notebooks (generally spiral bound at first, then 3-ring binders) full of all the lore of my campaign setting. Starting with 3rd edition, I tried moving to various other formats, including standard and large index cards, Microsoft Word document files, and file folders of handwritten notes.
During these years, we did try branching out to other games and systems. We brought to a finale my long-running "Chicago By Night" game of Vampire: The Masquerade. I ran some Mage: The Ascension games. We had a short-lived "Las Vegas By Night" chronicle of Vampire. I even tried - briefly - to start a completely new campaign setting based on the Viking Age using D&D . . . this never really took off, but I have since based my new Pathfinder Campaign on the bones of a setting I wrote then.
I began to discover the fringes of what would become the OSR (Old School Renaissance). Necromancer Games put out materials for D&D with the slogan, "Third Edition Rules, First Edition Feel" - and their stuff really did have it! It felt like those heady days in the mid 80s when 1st edition ruled! They managed to capture the feeling and ambiance of those old games perfectly! And then I found a company called Goodman Games which put out a line of modules called "Dungeon Crawl Classics" - tributes and homages to classic D&D modules (original D&D and 1st edition AD&D), with 3rd edition and later 3.5 rules. These even had the look of the old school modules. It felt like being young again. That's the only way to describe it!
I ran games in Plymouth from around the spring of 2001 up until the spring of 2006, by which time the games had tapered off quite a bit. I was working two jobs - teaching Latin and working for Borders Books and Music at the Kingston Mall just north of Plymouth. Bob B. and Liz had gotten married, had a child, and family life was increasingly making demands. Ken S. couldn't get out to play much, and ended up eventually moving to Canada and settling down, getting married. Ray F. couldn't get much time, and he also had a child and the demands of family life.
In the summer of 2006, I moved back to Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. I moved back in with my mother in West Kingston, briefly. Bob B. and Liz were living in Cranston and were able to host occasional games there. I wasn't really ready to run a campaign, so I started running modules of Dungeon Crawl Classics. I was stringing together individual modules to make a sort of campaign. It was fun. In July 2007 I moved into an apartment in Cranston with my then-girlfriend, now ex-wife Danyell M., who joined our gaming group (I married her in October 2008, and she became Danyell B.) Our Cranston apartment was just minutes from where Bob and Liz lived, and they hosted the games since they now had 2 children and parenting demands made it hard to get away.
From 2007 to 2011 I continued to run D&D 3.5. We had Dungeon Crawl Classics, and a "next generation" of the "Delensar Campaign" with new characters set a number of years after the "Swashbucklers" had left off. In 2008, a NEW edition of Dungeons and Dragons was launched - 4th edition. Despite the initial excitement, this fell flat for us. We tried one game, and barely got off the ground. We never even finished the first module we tried. D&D 4th edition was an abomination - a version of D&D that was no longer recognizable as D&D. It strongly resembled the video game "World of Warcraft," and even used a lot of the terminology of WoW (like "character builds"). Despite this brief flirtation with 4th edition, we never returned to it. Harry E. reported that his sister Heather's generation started gaming with 4th edition, and having never really known anything else, considered it normal. But we could just never bring ourselves to look at it again. It was that bad.
The change in the Open Game License (OGL) after the advent of 4th edition caused some big ripples in the Gaming world. One of these was the decision by Paizo to continue a version of the 3.5 game rules, modified and perfected into a sort of "3.75" as people called it - the Pathfinder RPG. I didn't really begin running this until November 2011, but I became aware of it in the Beta testing stage, and began to fall in love with the idea. A way to continue D&D! REAL D&D, not that 4th edition monstrosity!
Anyway, I ran 3rd edition or 3.5 D&D between spring 2001 and June 2011, so a whole decade. These were very good times for Gaming. 4th edition barely touched us. But for financial reasons, in the summer of 2011 Danyell and I were forced to look at moving to a part of the country where I could find and maintain a job. So in June 2011, we wrapped up out D&D 3.5 campaign set in Delensar and we moved across the country to Phoenix, Arizona. Of all the things I left behind in moving, I honestly think the hardest thing to leave was my gaming crew. We had been together in some form since 1992. 1992-2011 was a heck of a good run.
When Danyell and I arrived in Phoenix, we were determined to find a Gaming group as soon as possible. I was no longer going to try to maintain my old campaign world, which I had been building in some form from the 1980s up to 2011. I returned to a plan for a world based on the Viking Age. I also decided that since D&D 3.5 was officially supposed to be "dead" and thus unsupported, I would look to the "3.75" alternative - Pathfinder, then the fasted-growing fantasy RPG on the market. Using the Obsidian Portal website (since I had yet to find another format of storage flexible enough for my needs), I began planning out the broad outline of a new campaign setting and a new campaign . . . More to come on this in a 4th installment . . .
