#RPGaDAY Day 2 – First RPG Gamemastered The first dungeon I ever designed was a random mess filled with monsters I thought were neat in every room and corridor, regardless of level. There were Gelatinous cubes and oozes in the hallways, and a chimera (one of my absolute favorites) lived next door to a tribe of goblins who lived down the hall from a red dragon.The other defining feature of the dungeon was the ton of water features I used in it (most of which were lethal to the foolish adventurer who drank from them MUHAHAHAHAHA!), inspiring me to name it the Dungeon of Water. It was totally artarded and lethal. Dont judge. I was a stupid kid totally new to level design and running on pure enthusiasm for a brand new hobby. I never ran that one though. After I got my hands on a Basic Set to compliment my Expert Set (I bought them backwards, as you might recall from my last post) I was thrilled to find that it included the adventure that I played in for my very first game, B2: Keep on the Borderlands. I ran that instead, mimicking a lot of what I had seen Warren (the college guy who ran that first game) do as a Dungeonmaster. I was terrible, but it was a lot of fun for everyone involved, so nobody noticed. A point of fact for those of you who never had a chance to play in those early days. Most of what we initially learned about the rules and the art of DMing was handed down by someone through example, not learned from the books. Warren was what I would call a 2nd Generation role-player, someone who learned the game by learning from someone who ran the White Box before AD&D and the basic sets came out (the 1st generation being the folks who discovered D&D immediately after its first publication and had to learn the hard way). As such, the manner in which I DM is based on an oral tradition passed down to me from Warren, who learned it from someone else. There are many different schools of DM thought because of this, so that no two DMs trained in the old school manner need necessarily be alike. In fact, I would love to travel and play in a game run by someone from an entirely different old school tradition of play because, unlike the new method of reading and getting on with it, there is a deep history in these traditions and a lot of interesting folklore that comes from the experiences behind them, This rich tapestry of history and tradition is why old school D&D is still so cool to me after all these years...
Posted on: Sat, 02 Aug 2014 16:39:55 +0000
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