Having added the visitor map and now seeing that I draw visitors from elsewhere than my local town, where my friends are based - I feel some background about the game, its players and the details on the pages of this Blog, is now needed to allow these visitors to more easily visualise why this Blog exists. Here then is some information about our happy band (which I'm sure mirrors many others worldwide) and the game we currently enjoy (I trust).
I have long played various RPGs with friends, regularly on Sunday evenings and on occasions with other groups on different nights. The players in my game are drawn from two groups though, the Sunday game and a Tuesday game which I joined in the last 10 years. Life takes its toll as we all know, changes can be unavoidable and both groups suffered depletion of numbers as various members moved away (both in the UK and abroad). In late '03 we suffered the sad loss of an integral close friend, to cancer - this understandably caused a major change to our lives and we re-visited our social evenings of gaming. His absence left us unwilling to continue the games we'd been playing, so we stopped them and started afresh with our reduced numbers.
The Tuesday group was now quite small and after some abortive attempts at various systems we returned to D&D. Current then were v.3 and v.3.5, however we found them too restrictive for our creativity, its confusing rulings and unclear direction, limited free flowing play and also catered for 'power' gaming when creating characters.
The issue of v.4 was met with the usual groans about a publisher just trying to 'cash in' by selling new books to replace the existing range and our disillusionment with the homogeneous D20 system also reigned back our interest in discovering its novelty. It took the enthusiasm of our Sunday GM to make us re-evaluate our thinking. An inveterate rule system buyer, he had purchased numerous over the years in a search for the 'ultimate' system. Many were discarded outright after reading, more were play-tested for balance and suitability to an experienced, discerning gaming group (us) - few reached the stage of being used for game play, but D&D v.4 is the most recent and after some months, we came to realise it was a whole different 'beast'.
The Tuesday game never picked up though, leaving 3 of us just playing more traditional card games or fun board games, rather than RPGs. Then in mid '08 we lost another Sunday player to work commitments (due to have been about 3-5 months, it ended up being over 2 years); this more permanent loss severely weakened the group and we hunted round for a new member. We decided, as the driving force behind the Tuesday game and known to some of the Sunday group, Phil would be a good addition to our dynamic and we invited him in.
He took to v.4 even faster than we had and joined WotC 'Insider' online scheme for the character generator and magazine resources; discovering the serial campaign 'Scales of War' in the online magazine "Dungeon", he kicked it off for a new Tuesday night game. Several of our members had families and sons were growing, gaining an interest in their fathers' hobbies, including gaming. Phil ran SoW for his own sons separately, however we added two other players' teen sons to the Tuesday game to boost numbers - adding my own game in (as a variant and to allow Phil some respite from being GM), we arrive close to the current date. The only alterations in the last half year have been the loss of older sons to University and sports, the younger sons becoming substitutes in the Tuesday evening game and also my own, detailed here.
I hope this has given some insight into our evening game and the people involved, check the Synopsis page for more details on my campaign itself and obviously the main Blog details the player group's progression, with other pages giving background on salient features in the Faerun setting as they relate to the story-line.
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In an update to this background, the last 17 months have seen much change again in our lives and the break in my running my own game ran longer than we realised. University still holds several sons from attending the games and another of Phil's has decided he's 'too cool' to play D&D. On the up side though, an old friend 'Ian' is returning to the UK, having lived in Canada for the last 17 years and for the moment he's adopting the cleric character Verix; Phil's youngest has also joined us with his sorceror character Neebin.
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A 2015 update sees an end to the break in my game, Phil's SoW campaign is also ending shortly and I will re-start my campaign under the new v.5 D&D rule-set. Richard is back from Uni and is now the only younger player still involved in either campaign.
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