My Experience

The first roleplaying game I ever got was the Tom Moldvay edition of the Basic Dungeons & Dragons game. I don't recall the exact date, but it was around 1981, when I was ten or eleven years old. At the time, I had no idea that there was an 'Advanced' game out there—afterall, where I lived in South Dakota there weren't a lot of gaming stores, or book stores for that matter. In any case, I was hooked right off the bat and very quickly picked up the Expert rulebook as well. 

To me, these two books formed the core of what I thought D&D was and what a campaign would look like: from the early dungeon crawls, to exploration of the wilderness, to settling and defending your own stronghold. That progression made sense to me, even if I wasn't quite sure what I was doing in those wonderful first years of gaming discovery.

Unfortunately for me, it wasn't until high-school that I ever really had the chance to run a game, and even then, it was just my buddy Mark and I. Earlier, I had played with my sister(s), but nothing ever really came of it. This first campaign (begun in the fall of 1987) followed a group of adventurers (all run by Mark) through the Temple of Elemental Evil, the Scourge of the Slave Lords and Queen of the Spiders—and even a bit beyond. We used 1st Edition AD&D through it all—introducing Unearthed Arcana a few months in.

It was fun and memorable, but far from what I'd consider an 'old school' campaign. Afterall, it was just one player, not a real 'party'—and even then, I had then penchant for not killing off PCs. That campaign broke up when I went off to college and throughout most of my years there, I only dabbled a bit in D&D—concentrating most of my efforts on Star Wars. 

When (in 1996) I finally moved to Florida, I sat in on several games with a friend of a friend, and even ran one short-lived campaign myself, but still, D&D or AD&D were not my 'go to' systems or settings. And yet strangely, a lot of my spare time was—and is—spent either tinkering with the system or creating fantasy gaming worlds. The latter has turned into somewhat of an obsession, in fact—a quest to combine the elements I most enjoy from a lot of different settings into a 'near earth' type milieu (this is likely to become a big part of this blog, in fact). 

Lately, in reading all the other old-school D&D blogs, I have been yearning to stretch my legs in a 'real' D&D game. To that end, I have been streamlining my own rules system. Only when this is done do I intend to approach my friends and their friends with the possibility of running a campaign. My only real concern about doing this is managing the expectations of my players—who are probably used to my 'story based' and less deadly campaigns. What I want to try in this one is classic sand-box style play. Have some adventure locations and strings worked out, but let the players choose which to follow. I also want to 'let the dice fall where they may' as far as the combat system goes—meaning that character death (especially early on) will be a more credible threat.

Will this campaign ever get off the ground? I don't know. But like a lot of projects of mine, it is a fun mental exercise.