30 Day D&D Challenge: Day 8-Favorite Character You Have Played

Oh this is an easy one.  Its Quinn!  My 8th-level Half-Elf Fighter/Undead Slayer from our High School AD&D Neverwinter/Luskan campaign(s).  He was like Indiana Jones meets Kurt Sloane from Kickboxer.  He cut the heads off vampires and slapped Wyverns out of the air with his magical throwing axe: RuneCutter.  Son of an evil Necromancer elf and Human Priestess, Quinn hunted down ghoul infestations and was on a never-ending quest to enchant his mastercrafted longsword, Ghoulslayer, into the greatest Undead-slaying weapon in the Realms!

Urg.  Just typing the history of my character I can tell people are already getting bored.  But for real, he was the shiznit.  Dex 18, +4 studded leather, he was untouchable.  I even got my brother to draw a picture of him back in like '94 and I still have it.  In fact, its framed and hanging above my computer.  Don't believe me?  Here:

Looking at it, I realize it was back when my bro was playing around with drawing Anime-style hair, well, really it was more like Voltron-style hair.  We both dislike Anime, but I say that Voltron isn't really "Anime."  Its...uh...whatever you called Japanese art style before the term Anime was coined and used to describe anything pertaining to Final Fantasy.  Look, the point is that its an old drawing from high school.  And I still have it because its my favorite D&D character ever.

So...Favorite D&D character verified!  Quinn!

I never did get that sword enchanted.  This was 2nd edition AD&D, so the rules for crafting magic weapons were ridiculous and basically up to the DM's whim. And since the whimsical Brando was my DM, the recipe for crafting the sword called for like eighteen nearly-impossible components.  One of which was it had to be doused in Blue Dragon blood, which is not easy to find...

There I go again.  Anyways, you know you've found your favorite D&D character when you won't shut up about it.

 

30-Day D&D Challenge - Day 7: Favorite Edition

Favorite edition of D&D?!  Now this is kind of a tough one.

On one hand I have to hand it to the original 3e that came out in the year 2000 for resurrecting my interest in running weekly games.  Until then we played sporadically at best, like twice a year.  But when those three rulebooks came out we all bought them and devoured the new edition, even with all its cross-feat ridiculousness and unbalanced class issues.  It was a new beginning for D&D and a good way to bring new players into the fold.  If you asked me to help you get started playing AD&D (2e) in 1999 I would've overwhelmed you with three core rulebooks, six race guides, seven class guides, made you read through the Skills and Powers rules, and then would suggest you make a Fremlin Fighter/Thief from the Monstrous races compendium for the non-magic weapon immunity and flight capability.  

Yeah, you wouldn't have wanted to play with our group.  Too hardcore.

With the new 3e all that supplementary rulebook baggage was thrown away, and regular people again wanted to play D&D.  It ushered in a new golden age, and for that should be commended.

On the other hand I still love the old-school flavor of searching for secret doors on a 1d6, and where Elf is a Class rather than a Race.  Where every type of poison requires a Save vs. Death, and where monsters didn't need a reason to be hanging around a gigantic sealed-off dungeon with no water or food. Where every level you gained you also got a cool level name for your class, like being a 3rd level Swordsman or Conjurer, and even piddly 1st level Fighters were called Veteran.  Every Monk player wondered what it would be like to actually obtain the coveted title of Grandmaster of Flowers.

Where you rolled 3d6.  IN ORDER!  None of this wimpy 4d6-drop-the-lowest ridiculousness.  And before ThaC0 was a thing you had a huge chart of "Hit Die versus AC" that the DM had to (pretend to) reference when you rolled to hit.  Those were the days!

Finally, the crappy scrawled artwork in the OD&D rulebooks was no better than something I could draw in the margins of a college-ruled notebook, which made the whole game all the more accessible.

More current editions of D&D were capable of hiring actual artists, so the artwork is better than one could doodle during a boring class lecture, which to me makes it somehow less fun to look at.  Go figure.

In any case, my final choice for favorite edition of D&D, for all its flaws, is:
Original 1st Edition Dungeons and Dragons!

30-Day D&D Challenge - Day 6: Favorite Diety

For this one I'll have to go with Lathander Morninglord of the Forgotten Realms. His Domains are: Good, Protection, Sun, Strength, Nobility, and Renewal. He's the current incarnation of the Netherese-ian (Ancient Magic Super-People of Forgotten Realms) sun god Amaunator.  He likes fertility rituals, sunlight, and hates undead. All the good stuff you want out of a diety.  Also his clerics specialize in hunting undead and are called Dawnbringers, which is a pretty sweet title if you ask me.  His symbol is a sun over a lush field.  Universal good-guy kind of symbology. (which is probably why politicians like to steal the design). 

Another reason Lathander is my preferred D&Diety is because he was one of the few good dieties worshiped by the oppressed peasants of Ravenloft. The aforementioned elf vampire Jander Sunstar resurrected the Morninglord religion in Bavaria after saving a kid who had mistaken Jander for the sun god (and who later became the first priest of the Morninglord in Ravenloft).

As far as mechanical benefits go, when you make a cleric of the Morninglord in AD&D you gain all your spells each day automatically at dawn, rather than only after praying for an hour.  That just seems like a major time-saver to me.  I prefer my religious spell-blessings to be consistent and convenient for my busy schedule, rather than dependent on whether I've breathed in enough holy smoke that morning.

30-Day D&D Challenge catch-up - Days 1-3

I realized since I started at Day 4 I should really try and fill the backlog of missed days.  So here you go:

 Day 1-How you got started
Age 8.  Cub scouts.  Some kid brought his dad's copy of the Holmes basic rulebook and let me read it. 'nuff said.

 Day 2-Favorite Playable Race
Gotta be Dwarves!  They're just too stoic and angry enough all the time to not be fun to play.  Plus they hate elves, which I can sympathize with (I like half-elves, but only if they're the self-loathing kind).

 


Day 3-Favorite Playable Class
 Wait, didn't I just tell you that it was Dwarves?  Oh, wait, we're talking fancy-schmancy Advanced D&D.  Okay then, my favorite playable class has to be Ranger.  The perfect solo adventurer or party leader.  Can sneak, can track, can fight (often with two swords at no penalty), and has perpetual 5-o'clock shadow.  The coolest of D&D heroes. 

30 Day D&D Challenge - Day 5:Your favorite set of dice/individual die

Favorite die (Day 5)

That's easy, this one:

  This sparkly little wonder is the d20 out of the first set of dice I ever bought, at age 9 or so.  Part of a set of 'sparkly' dice that at the time I thought looked like cool gems, but in retrospect are some the ugliest pieces of plastic I've ever seen.  This die has been rolled so much over the years it has basically rounded into a marble.  Still, she's cut the head off a ghoul or two when I've needed her to.  I've lost track of all of the dice from that original set except for this fabulous character, who I keep in my day-travel dice bag.  That's right, a bag of dice I carry with me everywhere I go.  You never know, right?

30-Day D&D Challenge - Favorite Gameworld: Ravenloft

So I've just learned about the 30 Day D&D Challenge, but that won't stop me from jumping in and giving my two cents on the most important topic of Dungeons and Dragons-ing!

Favorite Gameworld (Day 4)

Ravenloft!

Easily my favorite D&D gameworld has to be Ravenloft.  Specifically, AD&D Ravenloft from the mid-nineties, not the 3e+ "conversions" they tried to make in the early 2000's.  Something was lost in translation when the campaign book contains actual player Feats to gain a mechanical bonus to avoid being affected by Horror and the all-mysterious Ravenloft Powers Checks.  Instead of rolling strange percentiles to avoid fainting at the sight of the ghoul ballroom dinner, players get a +3 skill bonus versus horror (will) checks or are frightened (-4 to attacks and AC).  Meh.

I love Ravenloft not because its the most exciting for the players (few campaign settings will elicit such eyerolls from players as the Gothic Mists), and not because it has the smoothest mechanics (95% of the iconic Ravenloft-specific dark powers/mists mechanics are "because the DM says so"), but because of the loads of fantastic gothic fluff they crammed into every Domain splatbook and Van Richten's Guide that was printed in the 90's.  This is a campaign setting for those DMs who never actually get to play, but just love to read about settings.

And the Van Richten guides!  There were like 15 of those things!  Guide to Ghosts, Vampires, Constructs, Mummies, Demons, Lycanthropes...you name a gothic monster, they had a whole splatbook dedicated to it.  A splatbook that read like a series of journal entries (introducing the suggested plot hooks and ideas) from Van Richten's point of view!  They were superior to the Volo's Guides (of Forgotten Realms) because they had the overarching ominous tone of Ravenloft, where you read on to see what horrible thing will happen to Van Richten or his friends.  This is versus Volo just talking about drinking in Taverns and stuff, and just read like a rather ho-hum travel guide.

And then there's the novels.  Like many D&D novel, some were so badly written to be all but incomprehensible as to what was going on, but others introduced iconic characters and plotlines.  Vampire of the Mists, Knight of the Black Rose, and I, Strahd are three of the better novels set in the Ravenloft universe.  Vampire of the Mists introduced Jander Sunstar, the good-hearted elf vampire trapped in the mists who you wanted to root for even though he was a vampire.  Knight of the Black Rose gave us Lord Soth, a major Dragonlance character being transported to Ravenloft, showing us they were serious about the 'no one is safe from the mists' angle (they were willing to move a major character from another whole campaign setting!).  And I, Strahd gave us Azalin, the Lich arch-enemy of Ravenloft's Dracula, Strahd.

Ravenloft is the B-horror gothic movie setting of 2nd ed. AD&D.

ScanCon2013 Leaderboard

It has begun!  The ScanCon Tournament of Champions is officially in progress! The mailer with the hidden clues arrived at each person's home last week, and not 24 hours later did we already have four players in the running for this year's ScanCon challenge gauntlet.