"A coward dies many times, the brave only once."

To what do I refer? I'm talking about the excellent movie Guns of the Magnificent Seven. Now, obviously the original is the best of the four movies, but after being let down by the "sequel", Return of the Seven", Guns more then makes up for it in my opinion. Return is basically the first movie
with different actors, done... badly. Guns tells a slightly different story and is much better for it.

Before I go to far here is the order of the movies from best to worst:
1. The Magnificent Seven
2. Guns of the Magnificent Seven
3. The Magnificent Seven Ride
4. Return of the Seven
 
Now of course people will say the Seven Samurai is THE best, well or course it is, it's the source material, but that's not what the topic of this post is about. So with that side track out of the way...

I'm going to assume if you are reading this you have seen the original Magnificent Seven... and if you haven't go watch it come back here and then read the rest of this post! Better yet watch Guns of the Magnificent Seven too then come back. 

Ok, you're back?

One downside that starts us off, Yul Bryner is not playing Chris Adams. This time around George Kennedy takes the helm as Chris Adams. While not as slick as Yul Bryner he did make for a great leader of the Seven. At first I thought I wouldn't like his portrayal, but I was pleasantly surprised. While I watching it I didn't see him as Chris Adams as so much as George playing another guy named Chris Adams... If that makes sense. In other words it's a good western and a good actor that stands on their own merits. If it hadn't been part of the Magnificent Seven series it would stand on its own merits as a fine movie.

One area I think that helped rive the story is that in this version the viewer actually cares about the assembled Seven, unlike Return where the viewer is left scratching their heads. I especially like a Joe Don Baker's character Slater as a ex-confederate soldier trying to make a

living in the west while maimed from his wartime service which has caused his life to spiral downwards. He doesn't have too many scenes in the movie, but I found myself wanting more of him on screen.

Monte Markham stars as Vin Tanner, err make that Keno, Chris' right-hand-man in this version of the series. I found myself liking him in this role and I think he did well rather then the ill fit of Robert Fuller as Vinn in Return. Much like the casting of Kennedy it works.

Another point on actors is James Whitmore as Levi Morgan an aging knife thrower/former outlaw who looked old even back in 1969. Most younger people will know him from his role as Brooks in the Shawshank Redemption. 

Rounding out the thoughts on the cast. In a 2 hour-ish movie it's difficult to get to the other characters but they somehow manage to do it with Cassie a black laborer-physical dynamo, Max the young Mexican (taking over the role/spot of Chico) and PJ the enigmatic clad in black gunfighter who has the least amount of screen time of all of them.

Without spoiling it too much let's say the story is a departure from the normal fair in regards the theme of the Magnificent Seven of helping innocent villagers. The assembly of the seven goes quickly as we hop from member to member without any lag in the story. The use of the Mexican federal military rather then raiding outlaws is a welcome change.Its also cool anytime a western has a Gaitling gun which the bad guys do.

In closing, as the title of the post suggests, the best line is delivered at the very end by George Kennedy in Spanish to a a very young Reni Santoni. What makes this great is that his character Max repeats in back in English (which is a twist on the way his character communicates through the movie; struggling to find the right words in English and reverting to Spanish):

  "A coward dies many times, the brave only once."

I give Guns 4 out of 5 stars and if I could, I'd give Return of the Seven zero... 

Lastly on a side note it looks like Denzel Washington is talking about joining a remake of the Magnificent Seven. Woot!

Visionaries: Knights of the Magical Light

The Visionaries: Knights of the Magical Light was a cartoon show that ran in the Fall of 1987. It occupies an odd time in my childhood, that is to say not at all. I was 14 almost 15 when it came out. I remember watching it because it was somewhat DD related/inspired, but at the same time it felt awkward watching it. Hey, who wasn't awkward at that age? Despite I will freely admit I saw almost all the episodes. 

Visionaries were somewhat Thundarr like in the world where it takes place was a world were technology had fallen/failed. While not as over the top as Thundarr it was post-technological. It was also a mash up of Camelot and the Knights of the Round Table with the main mover and shaker a wizard named Merklynn who was nominally neutral in the dealings between the two factions: the Darkling Lords (obviously evil) led by the knights Darkstorm and Leoric the leader of Spectral Knights (the good guys).

What I think saved me from feeling too weird was the tie into magic, particularly the magical words of power that were invoked via their magic staffs. In the first episode "The Age of Magic Begins" the various knights climb to the top of Iron Mountain in a form of challenge. It is at the end of this episode that each knight gains a magical animal totem that mirrors themselves, Leoric a Lion, Feryl a wolf, Darkstorm a Mollusk, Reekon a lizard, etc. Those knights that do not possess staves gain the ability to power magical power vehicles, obviously a ploy to sell more toys? One upside is the cast of characters is pretty good and each bad guy has a good guy to mirror him/her. In some cases the knights knew each other prior to the age of magic.

Cryotek using his staff

To activate each staff the wielder had to recite a magical verse. Amongst my favorites were:

Cryotek's Staff of Strength - "Three suns aligned pour forth their light and fill the archer's bow with might!"

Witterquick's Staff of Speed - "Sheathe these feet in the driving gale, Make swift these legs o'er land I sail!"

Darkstorm's Staff of Decay "By what creeps, what crawls, by what does not; let all that grows recede and rot!" (Great for a staff of withering)

Lexor's Staff of Invulnerability
"The arrows turn, the swords rebel; let nothing pierce this mortal shell!

Come to think of it these would make great command words, phrases for more then just magical staffs, wands etc if one were so inclined. How about Lexor's for a potion of invulnerability? 

Another use in a a D&D campaign is the idea of the one shot nature of the staves; they required recharging at Iron Mountain. Now this could be a hindrance to a campaign as a whole as players might stay near the place of recharging rather then venture afar. However, if sufficiently powerful the players might husband their resource until the need is great, then head back (thats what I would do). Perhaps they are akin to power in relics/artifacts in AD&D. Its not inconceivable to have say Lexor's staff of invulnerability keep everything out much like a cube of force, can only be used once until its recharged and usable by any class. Possession of such items might bring prestige in said campaign world if the items are well known or perhaps foes seeking to claim or steal it.

In terms of visual style the Visionaries had a very similar look to the other cartoons of the 80s, were the rise of manga was beginning in the USA. Interestingly the series was created by Flint Dille, who met none other then Gary Gygax when Gary was working on the D&D cartoon. This is fateful as Flint is none other then the brother or Lorraine Williams... Any TSR nerd from back in the day can tell you how much she is hated for ousting Gary from TSR. Flint would work for TSR for a time and the rest of his details can be found here. Anyways I digress. 

In a way, Visionaries felt very much like the other cartoons of the 80s, MASK, G.I. Joe, He Man,Thundercats,Transformers etc, a bid to sell toys in the wake of the mega success of Star Wars. Looking back on it the series was a odd bird, it only lasted one season and felt even back then it was a attempt to cash in. It was also a short lived comic book series but I never saw one and was a fairly avid comic reader back then. Maybe that's me looking back on it through hindsight. 

Not that I condone such things but there are places on the web to watch all of the episodes,

Next Revision of Hurled into Eternity is up and Beta version printed

This post explains why I haven't updated the blog in a few weeks: the first true print out of the rules for Hurled into Eternity, at least in this format. Years ago (as in 15+) when the progenitor to these rules were in its d12 configuration and a traditional fantasy RPG called Quest, I printed sections of it, but never the entire rules themselves.

This is a prototype of the rules. I say prototype loosely here because I'm not sure I'm going to use this styling when it gets ready for a potential kick starter. None-the-less, I printed out two copies at the local Office Max as you can see in color for the covers and the interiors are double sided black and white. Total cost for printing out two copies was under $20 including the color covers.

It weighs in at 78 pages, doubled sided when printed with two more for the covers. All told the entire rule set in terms of page count is 154. Maybe these will be collectors items someday (hah!)

The main purpose of the print out is to help facilitate testing and get a physical copy to make it seem more real. After years of only looking at it in its electronic form its good to finally see a physical manifestation of it. So far it has been very useful as I can reference as I work in the Willmark man cave testing the rules. So far its helped me tweak the rules for the Wild Card System, a bit for the better I hope.


Of course since printing stuff out I've noticed issues with it and changed the Wild Card System to flow better. I think I fixed the obvious problems regarding it. So far gun-fighting is looking very deadly with shotguns being perhaps to much. I'd really like to hear about feedback on the combat sections with the revisions.

Regardless, here is the latest version of the revised rules here.

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay- Death on the Reik

The long and winding River Reik has many places to adventure, but none so fearsome as Castle Wittgenstein. Just look at the Ian Miller cover, it is all kinds of awesome. Death on the Reik is a great module and I was fortunate enough to play it just as it was reaching America. We started playing the seminal, masterful series the Enemy Within right after (or there abouts) after THE CAMPAIGN. I do recall us playing a proto-warhammer campaign where I was playing a bounty hunter with a Strength (S) score of 2! Not much came of that.

As I noted here (Small, but vicious dog) my second character in WFRP was a rat catcher who got killed by a bird winged mutant, Alas poor Wilhelm! I can still remember his corpse being draped across some branches, ahhh good RPG times! Thinking back on it I'm pretty sure when started the Enemy Within campaign, the ratcatcher was not my original character. I started with the elf from Shadows over Bogehaufen, the minstrel Malmir Giluviel. Whether he died or not I can't recall, but by the time we reach Bogenhaufen I was playing
my rat catcher. He is the character I think of when I look back at this module, but he was one of many I played. Funny aside, when we reached the  castle many of the original
characters had perished, not just mine.

Since we did participate Shadows over Bofenhaufen and Dave's character was a Boatman we quickly saw the value of the boat early in the module. Aside from the fatality of my rat catcher we secured the boat and made our way. We didn't really need much prodding as we were quickly discovering that traveling by water was much safer then by road, recent fatalities not withstanding. Since we very, very poor we quickly grasped the principals of trading and did a bit to get us better weapons and armor. I think at this point I was playing (temporarily) Johann "Rowlocks" Dassbit a boatman from Shadows over Bogenhaufen (he may have been Pete's character who was showing up less and less) whom we had along as an NPC. Unlike the previous AD&D games my luck was none-to-good in WFRP. On the death of my rat catcher I played a bunch of the NPCs until I got assigned an outlaw (see below). Not sure why I wasn't allowed to roll a new character so I bounced from NPC to NPC.

We made it through all of the early encounters without too much trouble: the Cult of the Purple Hand (I don't recall who looked like Kastor Lieberung), Wisebruck, the signal tower, Kemperbad and the Barren Hills). The signal tower was great fun and it felt very spooky and old as we poked around it. The fight with the skeletons and the skaven in the Barren Hills went too well for us: it made us overconfident going into Castle Wittgenstein proper.

The GM did a great job utilizing the numerous NPCs in the series especially when character deaths happened which was often. As noted above my character was dead for several weeks of real time and I wanted a more combat oriented character. We werediscovering that some character classes were better then others in WFRP. So the GM gave me Hild Eysenck, an Outlaw (renamed and gender flipped to male) version of Hilda Eysenck to run from the module. It was a smart move as we needed more warrior types. He was a bit of wildcard, but helped us get through the brutal exploration of Castle Wittgenstein. Even the lower dungeons were a grind from my recollection and looking over the module. Again, we were not that high in terms of powered up characters and very of us were actual warrior classes which are a must in WFRP.

The town of Wittgendorf was fun, well at least looking back on it. Fortunately I wasn't the one that looked at the foul spider baby to gain Insanity Points. I think we did start a fight at the pale lady encounter and slew some of the guards as Lady Margritte rode off. Additionally, we did find the warp blade in the ruined Temple of Sigmar. I don't recall who carried it, but it did help immensely in the fight(s) in the castle later on. We rummaged around the town only briefly after fighting the guards and did not encounter Jean Rouaeaux or his brew house and horror filled basement.

Playing the part of my new character I led the party to Sigrid the outlaw chief. In short order we agreed to explore the secret way in (Under the castle/ areas #1-11). We did assault the guards at area 8 and secure our boat again. Why we didn't pilot it out and leave I'll never know ;) as it were we took the stairs that ended up in the ruins of the Outer Baily among the mutated beggars. Since we were fairly stealthy and had not fought any guards other then the ones by the river gate the alarm had not been raised. Carefully picking our way we made it all the way to inner areas where we encountered  the chaos warrior Ulfhednar the Destroyer (Jeff also used the mini for his BBEG in THE CAMPAIGN) who put a hurting on us. (he was not in his guest room so we encountered him much closer to the entrance). My memory is hazy, but after fighting him we hightailed it back to outlaw camp. Somehow we encouraged them enough to assault the castle with us heading back through the secret entrance and creating diversions.

I don't recall us adventuring much after this. I'm not entirely sure we made it to the end to confront Lady Margritte and her monster. Reading through the module many years later as a GM I  felt let down by the Frankenstein rip-off of the ending. If I ran it again I'd change the ending to something less cliched. As it was the only time I GMed it the party never got close to area 61-62.

We did not play much more of  the Enemy Within proper as around this time we started to play more Warhammer Fantasy Battle as it took less time, plus we we're all were starting to drive and serious girlfriends beckoned. I don't recall us playing much of Power Behind the Throne. I know for a fact we did not play Something Rotten in Kislev or the lukewarm at best Empire in Flames ( I have it but don't think I'd ever use it as is*)  In the end it was fun and I have fond memories of Death on the Riek. Years later I ran my current gaming group through it and had fun but they were much, much more wary then my original group.

Some random thoughts:

• * Much like Q1- Queen of the Demonweb Pits at the end of the GDQ series
  it feels stilted, as in not part of the overall flow of the modules. Q1
  needed a much better ending and in my opinion was done better and more
  in character here. So fans banded together and produced Empire at War (I've not read through the whole thing yet so I can't vouch for its quality). 


• Death on the Reik is regarded as one of the best RPG modules of any system and I'm not going to disagree. It was fantastic to adventure in and I loved every minute of it, PC death and all, well aside from the in my opinion tepid ending


• Another thing that I always remember is the spooky weirdness of Castle Von Wittgenstein. The maps were uber-cool and the atmosphere dark and grim with mutants living in the courtyard! The graphic/design cartography was always top notch in WFRP products but Death on the Reik was perhaps at the pinnacle.


• When I've GMed Warhammer the players were curiously reluctant to explore more of the castle or were much more cautious... I wonder why that is????


• The River Life of the Empire section is fantastic. It really is full of very useful information for a campaign set in the Empire. Couple this with pages 4-38 of Shadows over Bogenhaufen and you have more then enough material for a Empire based campaign. 

In closing I give Death on the Reik a 9 out of 10, it's just that good. Its also certainly the best out of the Power Behind the Throne modules with the last two, Something Rotten in Kislev and the lukewarm Empire in Flames were mediocre at best... If you are lucky enough to play it you wont be disappointed.

Of hanging paper gravestones on the DM screen...

Gravestones on the DM Screen: A High School Foray into Ravenloft

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, high school was a golden era of gaming for our group—and few sessions were as brutal or memorable as our run through I6: Ravenloft. This isn’t a formal review of the module. Instead, it’s a blood-soaked recollection of how one sadistic DM tossed us headlong into the Barovian meat grinder—and gleefully hung gravestones for every fallen PC.

The players were mostly the same usual suspects: Dave, Jim, Daryl, Tom, Mike, and myself. Jeff, of course, was behind the screen. We'd just wrapped THECAMPAIGN and dabbled in some Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay and Twilight 2000 before returning to AD&D for this deadly one-shot.

Jeff gave us some leeway with character creation, including a starting XP allotment and a short list of magic items (subject to DM approval). I rolled up a 6th-level human cavalier named Sir Alexander Silverglade—an absurdly noble name for a high schooler to dream up, though apparently I went all-in: Alexander William Christian Edward Kenneth Silverglade. Upper-Upper Class. Tenth in line to something or other. Clearly royalty, and clearly doomed. Naturally, Sir Alex for short.

I still have the character sheet. He wore full plate, carried a shield +2, and wielded a Rod of Lordly Might Jeff had forgotten the functions of—thankfully for me. My attempt to sneak in a +1 Flame Tongue sword was denied and replaced with a vanilla +2. But with high stats (18s in STR, DEX, and CON), full armor, and a preposterously low AC of -6, he was built like a tank. Cavalier perks from Unearthed Arcana gave him damage absorption, fear immunity, and mind control resistance.

Did it help? Only just, perhaps not even.

We were allowed three magic items. I picked strategically—borderline exploitative, really—but it didn’t save us. The adventure began in classic Ravenloft fashion: dropped into Barovia at dusk, wolves howling, villagers fearful, and death already sniffing around the edges.

We made a brief stop at the “Blood on the Vine” Tavern, then poked around Bildrath’s Mercantile and scraped together what we could. It wasn’t much. With night fast approaching, we barricaded ourselves inside an abandoned house to wait for dawn before approaching Castle Ravenloft.

Big mistake.

If you’ve read I6, you know the nighttime random encounters are no joke. Every three turns, 1–2 on a d6? With encounters like wolves, zombies, wraiths, ghosts—and oh yeah, Strahd himself, with his bat and wolf entourage? We got the full buffet:

• Strahd showed up with wolves and bats.
• Zombies broke through.
• Wraiths seeped in.
• A ghost floated through the walls.
• At least one PC was level-drained.
• My character was aged 40 years by the ghost.

I argued (rules lawyer alert) that my cavalier’s immunity to fear should also cover the ghost’s aging effect. Jeff didn’t buy it. Sir Alexander aged from 22 to 62 in an instant. The following week, Jeff reduced it to 10 years—maybe out of mercy, maybe not. Either way, I claimed a moral victory.

But the real gut punch came when Jeff unveiled a house rule (and a flair for the dramatic): whenever a character died, he’d hang a printed gray tombstone on his DM screen with the fallen’s name written in Sharpie. The first casualty? My squire, William, mauled by wolves in a side room. Jeff hung his gravestone like a trophy, grinning as the rest of us sat in stunned silence.

By the end, the screen was covered in tombstones.

We eventually made it into Castle Ravenloft—barely. Through random encounter rolls and pure chance, we ended up starting on the upper levels, near the “Rooms of Weeping.” I was the party mapper, so I still recall the progression ending abruptly near rooms K36–K46. We didn’t get much farther. Supposedly the hilt I carried was the Sun Sword, and the blade was in K41. Not that it mattered.

The final battle was a bloodbath. I remember Strahd attacking with a pack of specters and wraiths. Our cleric died almost instantly. I think I was the only fighter type left standing. Thanks to my AC and cavalier resistances, I tanked most of the assault while the rest of the group got drained or shredded. I was eventually dropped to 4th level by two wraith hits—but I lived. Barely.

Sir Alexander was the sole survivor.

The game ended there.

Jeff ruled that the mists of Ravenloft wouldn’t let him escape, so in my headcanon he found refuge at the chapel in Barovia, helping Donavich defend it nightly. Still aging, still armored, still bitter. I always thought that if I ever ran I6 myself, I’d reintroduce him as a weary old knight clinging to his code in a world long since lost to darkness.

We never played Ravenloft again. Our group wasn’t that into gothic horror, and while I later picked up the module (still in pristine condition), I’ve always felt the random encounters were more dangerous than the rest of the dungeon. Still, it was a hell of a session—especially the gravestones. That image of Jeff’s DM screen, covered in the names of fallen PCs, has stuck with me for decades.

And no, I’m not being paid for this—but if you want a legal, affordable copy of I6: Ravenloft, you can find it here.

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past – Hands Down Awesome

I challenge anyone to say that The Legend of Zelda, A Link to the Past is not one of the best video games of all time.

For its time frame, The Legend of Zelda was heads and shoulders above most other games in the genre. Set the scene: the 16-bit Super NES was a huge hit and represented a big step forward from the previous 8-bit system, which was a monster hit itself. Zelda I and II were good and very involved for the time.

Some people pan Zelda because it’s a flagship game for the Wii and we all know that anything Wii-related is bad, right? (Insert sarcasm here.) Those people are fools. Zelda is a very successful franchise, and specifically A Link to the Past is rated as one of the greatest video games of all time. (This is but one platitude — there are many, many more out on the web.)

The thing that was most striking the first time we played it was on a fairly dark night. My buddies and I fired up the game and heard this muted sound of rain. Was it raining outside? Was the TV burning out? As an aside, I did burn out one TV playing my Atari 2600 back in the day. We checked the TV. Nothing. So we kept playing and low and behold… it’s raining! I can’t understate just how cool this was. There was thunder and lightning; when Link tramped through puddles it splashed. I think that was one of the big advances — the sound. You can tell the designers of the game put a lot of thought into this.

No, the TV is broken...

 Questing for hearts and pieces of hearts was also fun, trying to get all 20. This was before the advent of the internet, so you couldn’t just go online or grab a game book that detailed everything. And if I recall correctly, A Link to the Past was the first time it introduced pieces of hearts to collect. You had to explore on your own. Which leads to another awesome idea: finding the bottles. I remember distinctly after grabbing the Zora’s flippers, swimming through the rivers and heading up to the castle. A certain friend of mine was getting rather annoyed about me “wasting time.” Low and behold, I swim to the bridge and what do I find? The third bottle! Needless to say I had a smug, you know what eating grin on my face, much to his consternation.

A great thing that the game introduced was the upgrade path for the main weapon, the Master Sword, and if you had full hearts, the fact that you could zap enemies from afar. Likewise, the gloves, shields, boomerang, bows, and armor could be improved. This would set the standard for upgrades going forward. What else was there? A hammer, bug net, shovel, flippers, a flying duck to zip you around the board, the boomerang, etc! Bombing walls, hacking bushes, the heights of Death Mountain, the shadowy groves of the forests. Fighting Troopers and Poes, Tektites and Zoras, Moblins and Keese. Multiple palaces to explore, multiple towers?

In short, pure awesomeness!

For those not in the know (and I’m not worrying about spilling the beans on a game from the early 90s), the cool thing about the game is the interplay between the Light World and the Dark World. Link has a ton to explore before even getting to the Dark World. By carefully placing certain barriers that require certain items to unlock the area, Link is largely confined to certain areas at first. The cool part is the player has to use both the Light and Dark worlds to get to certain areas. Some might feel that in hindsight it’s “railroading” of the highest order, but in terms of game-play it’s actually fairly open, certainly for the time.

A Link to the Past had another great touch that made it memorable: the ending video scene after defeating Ganon. Everything is put back where it should be, from Link’s uncle recovering to the thief in the forest looking very put out by Link’s triumph.

Like an idiot, I sold my Super NES a long time ago and got a replacement combo 8-bit/16-bit system for it some years back. One of the first games I reacquired was this one. Playing through it again roughly twenty years after the fact, it was still a great game, it still played well, and it brought a smile to my face.

In my estimation, this game is a 10 out of 10. It’s pitch perfect. Now, I know many will say that Ocarina of Time is better in the Zelda franchise. I won’t argue, I think Ocarina is rightly on that list as well. In my mind, you could say Ocarina of Time and A Link to the Past are 1A and 1B, and a case can be made for switching that. 

On a random note for Super NES, the only other game that came close to me liking it as much as Zelda was Final Fantasy I (or III in Japan), with Illusion of Gaia a far distant third. Still good, but third.

How about you? Did playing The Legend of Zelda, A Link to the Past impact you as well? 

1st Edition AD&D- the Finale- Part VI

 

My dark elf fighter/mage is about to be killed next...

 

The Final Battle – Closing the book on THE CAMPAIGN

(Parts I, II, III, IV and V) 

This post marks the last entry in my series on THE CAMPAIGN—the high school AD&D 1st edition game that, for me, was the campaign. The one that still lingers decades later.

As with the rest of this series, I’m working purely from memory. I didn’t keep notes back then, and whatever map I had (drawn as we explored) is long lost. We were closing in on higher levels—by 1st edition standards anyway—and after nearly two years of weekly play, the campaign was winding down. Other games were starting to pull us away. I think Twilight 2000 was next, followed by Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. We ran through The Enemy Within in that system—with all the grim, disfiguring horror that implies.

But before the curtain closed, we had unfinished business.

The Trail of Dragotha 

We had been on Dragotha’s trail for the better part of a year—always just missing him, arriving to find carnage in his wake. Jim’s dwarf, in particular, had a personal vendetta. His kin had been slaughtered, and he wasn’t letting that go. Other characters had their own reasons. Mine was tasked with recovering the Shield of Arion, a dark elf relic lost to Dragotha’s grasp.

Eventually, we tracked him to a dungeon lair. The crawl was brutal, filled with clerics who stood in our way. I don’t remember the dungeon being more than one level deep, but I do remember the intensity of those battles. The enemy clerics weren’t just spell-slinging NPCs—they were designed to jam us up. And they worked. That design stuck with me. Years later, I modeled the clerics of Orion in one of my own campaigns after them: high-level threats with spells and powers that players couldn’t easily exploit. The same design philosophy that Gary used for the Drow—challenging, alien, and off-limits to players.

Into the Lair

Eventually, we reached a long, narrow hallway. At the far end was a reinforced door—and through it, Dragotha finally emerged. That's it, a door. Huh?

The Choke Point 

It was a clever setup. Not a grand throne room or wide-open space, but a choke point. No flanking, no big AOEs, no fireballing from range. He met us head-on. The melee fighters couldn’t all get into position at once. Our two big spellcasters—Daryl’s pyromancer and my fighter/mage—had no safe shots. Jeff knew what he was doing. He wanted the fight up close and personal. We couldn’t “call in the artillery” without nuking our own front line. 

And so the melee began

Dragotha came out swinging. In short order, he killed both Tom’s half-ogre and Jim’s dwarf—using, fittingly, the very weapons they were questing after. He wielded the dwarven axe and bore the Shield of Arion, turning our character goals into lethal instruments. Both were gone in the opening exchange.

Dave’s halfling fighter/thief stepped up next, narrowly dodging death. Then my dark elf joined the melee. I don’t remember Chris’s illusionist being present, and Mike’s cleric/ranger actions are fuzzy. But I clearly recall the turning point: with our heavy hitters down, I dropped a lightning bolt—not the spetum I was specialized in, but magic. That bolt finished Dragotha off.

Aftermath

I’ll always remember the scene: the dead on the floor, the battle map filled with fallen PCs, and the BBEG finally going down. That was the end. The campaign wrapped, and we moved on to other worlds. But multiple deaths and me ending it with a spell I used on occasion but not as frequently as fly and fireball.

The Campaign

Looking back, one of the most effective elements of THE CAMPAIGN was how Jeff personalized the stakes. Three of us had “McGuffins” directly tied to Dragotha. And they weren’t custom-made evil weapons—they were our cultural artifacts: a dwarven axe, a halfling bear cloak, a dark elf shield. Turning those against us was brilliant. Like Thulsa Doom wielding Conan’s father’s sword—it hits harder when the blade belonged to you.

Since then, I’ve played in great games, mediocre ones, and forgettable sessions. But THE CAMPAIGN stands alone—not just for what happened at the table, but for the friendships it forged. We’ve been at each other’s weddings, watched our kids grow up, argued, drifted, reconnected, and stayed part of each other’s lives.

And I wouldn’t trade it—or them—for anything.