Introduction

I first gained an interest in Dungeons & Dragons at the ripe age of 8 or so. My oldest brother had obtained a copy of the Monstrous Manual for AD&D 2.0. I'd been playing games like Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior since I was 4-5; I loved the concept of fantastic worlds of monsters and magic. Needless to say, I was absolutely enamored by the book. I would borrow it and look at the pictures and read about the monsters whenever his back was turned.

Three years later I finally realized that there was significantly more to D&D than monsters and I bought the Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide and High-Level Campaigns book (don't ask me why I got the last one). I also appropriated my brother's book (he'd lost interest in it). About a year after that, I approached one of my best friends with the idea of starting a campaign.

For the original campaign there were five of us (four regulars and one who made it when he could, about every other session). I was the DM. However, the rules of AD&D 2.0 are fairly complicated (at least for a group of middle-schoolers) and we didn't bother to learn them through and through. Battles would consist of d20 rolls that either 'sounded like they were probably high enough to hit' or were 'probably not high enough to hit'. Speed factors were thrown out the window, as were miniatures/battle-maps.

Still, the story my friends and I invented kicked ass (I wish I remembered most of it). We all had an absolute blast.

Now, several years later, I play in two campaigns (v3.5) with a different group of people (my old friends and I have all gone our seperate ways since high school). I spend a sizeable portion of my free time playing around with new ideas for characters, magic items, classes, etc. My mother once asked me why I don't teach a class on it (I told her they don't have those, she followed up with a 'why not?'). I decided to start a blog on it instead.