I'll sort of echo Slam's above post. Back when I regularly played D&D, most of my playing -- and indeed my preference -- was homebrew. I did play some purchased Greyhawk adventures, but I was lucky in that I had a couple of friends who could write a good adventure or campaign themselves, and if I was DM'ing, I loved concocting homebrew settings too.

To go into a little more detail of what I played...

A lot of early games played in junior high (7th grade) started with Keep on the Borderlands and took place in a generic fantasy land where not much happened outside the actual dungeons.

The first homebrew world I built in the summer between 7th and 8th grade (the summer we moved back from Maine to CT and we stayed with my grandfather for most of the summer before we found on own place in late August, so no one my age was around and I was alone except for my grandfather and his dog all day so I had plenty of time to work on it) was based on some of the loose world ideas in the Moldvay Expert Set and the maps in there. It included the Keep on the Borderlands/Caves of Chaos, the Isle of Dread, and White Plume Mountain in it, as those were the only three modules I had. In 8th grade I never found anyone to play D&D with in the school I went to, so that world just got more work done on it and began to incorporate a few more things into it (I found a copy of the OD&D supplement Gods, Demi-Gods and Heroes at a Toys R Us and began to incorporate some of the pantheons from that.

In 9th grade I met a group of kids who played, we all switched off running things and it was in a generic fantasy land, but then someone got the Greyhawk boxed set and fantasyland became Greyhawk. One of the kids in the group got the original Ravenloft module and we ran through that, long before it was a separate setting, but we explored other parts of Strahd's realm besides just the Castle for a while based on that kid's homebrew.

That 9th grade group fractured, and some of us started playing with another kid who wanted to be the forever DM. The Dragonlance stuff had started to come out and he ran us through that, which lasted most of the second half of 10th grade.

Summer between 10th and 11th we all got jobs for the first time, most of us no longer could spend all weekend at each other's houses and we stopped playing.

At university, I met the guys in the Role Playing club and started playing a little again. The Forgotten Realms Box Set had been released that year and I played a little in someone's FR game but I had no idea what that was at that time. I mostly I ran the Marvel Super-Heroes game that year with guys from the club.

Sophomore year I didn't hang with the RPG club guys much and taught some of my other friends to play D&D using just the Mentzer Red Box. I didn't have my stuff from the world I had built in 8th grade anymore, but I set those games there or in some vague echo of it that existed in my memory.

Junior year I lived off campus and commuted with one of the guys from the RPG club to campus twice a week as we had an 8AM class together 2nd semester. He invited me to play with them a couple of times, and I did a little of this and that with them, mostly Realms and Spelljammer but I just wasn't in to Spelljammer and some of the guys in the group annoyed me so I only played a few sessions. Most of my D&D fix came reading the novels set inthe Forgotten Realms that had begun to be released, including the earliest Drizzt books and the Moonshae trilogy.

Senior year, a different guy from the RPG club became one of my roommates, and we ended up co-DMing a homebrew world for a number of people. Some of the guys from my extended group of friends (they went to different universities but had all been friends and neighbors of one of my closest friends and roommates at university and came to hang out with us a lot) began playing in those games and would be the core of my post-university D&D group.

From the time I graduated university in '91 until I was in deep in grad school in '94-'95 I ran a homebrew game with a world I spent even more time on than I did om my jr. high world. I got a little lost in the sauce so to speak building that world. I was reading the History of Middle-Earth at that time and really diving into Lovecraft for the first time and both had huge influences on that world. I had deep histories of the world, the elves and the dwarves inspired by Tolkien's Lays of Beleriand and the two volumes of Book of Lost Tales, and the main plot of that game revolved around a demonic plague that was inspired by the entity in The Colour Out of Space. I was living in a different state than my players (I in CT, they still in Ma.) but once a month or every other month, we'd get together for a weekend of drinking beer and playing D&D as they would come to CT and crash at my place, or I'd go up to MA and crash at theirs for the weekend. However, real life growing up with work, grad school, and for some of them marriage eroded our ability to do that and we took a hiatus that was supposed to only last until I finished grad school. We never played as a group again. That campaign though, lived on in other forms, and a new version of the story, revised and updated saw life in published form from one of the third party publishers as one of the things I had published while I was freelancing in the rpg industry during the 3.5 era of D&D.

During that time, I met a guy who was a forever DM in CT who worked at the local Barnes & Noble and ran games there, and was invited to join a new game he was trying to start up at his house. It was set in the Forgotten Realms and we played for close to three years, the longest I ever played one single character in a campaign (I've DMed longer campaigns, never played as a player that long before or after). That was another that took a hiatus and never started up again, and ended sometime in '97 or '98, my memory is fuzzy. He and his wife started doing Amway and "the business" took up all their time so he wanted to take a break until they had established their business and were making enough he was going to have all the free time he wanted...yeah right. We never played again. We remained friends, and he was my concert buddy, as we would do all kinds of shows-Yes, Tull and King Crimson in particular-for a few years after the D&D game ended, but we had mostly drifted apart by the time I moved in '03.

I didn't play much between '98 and '01. No group, tried playing at a couple of shops but found no joy. In '01 I met the future Mrs. MRP and she was a gamer and had a long running game in her own homebrew world. Started playing with her group when we were dating and I would make the trip out to Ohio, and when I moved out here took over as DM just as the 3.5 rule set was released. I started freelancing within a few years of that and freelanced for 2 years. During that period ('03-'07) I was attending Gen Con, Origins and several smaller cons and networking with other freelancers, publishers and gamers, playing just about every published setting out there at some point in convention halls, hotel rooms after hours at cons, etc. Did deep dives in a few I was pitching projects for, or playtested for other freelancers, etc. etc. After I stopped freelancing, as the switchover to 4E was happening and Pathfinder was emerging and the market for freelancers was terrible and paid crap, I found a couple of local groups. We played a Lord of the Rings game, a homebrew D&D 4E game, a Pathfinder game set in Golarian, my homebrewed version of Blackmoor and Wilderlands of High Fantasy, etc. etc.

Sometime in the 4E era, life got in the way again, some of our players got too busy, some of our players moved away, and we found no new players to replace them, and we stopped playing for a long while. Then the Critical Role phenomenon took root and D&D surged in popularity in the mass culture and it became easier to find players and last year we finally found a group of new players. I run two games set in the same homebrew world now, and Mrs. MRP runs a third game, set in Exandria, the setting from Critical Role.

However, with the surge in multiverses in the zeitgeist of pop culture, D&D has begun to follow suit and I am considering adding elements form some of my favorite worlds into the sauce of my homebrew world the next time we start a new campaign, so I have been thinking a lot about some of these settings.

-M

Last three episodes of The Legend of Vox Machina dropped and I have to ay after finishing season 1, this may be my favorite pop culture release of the last few years. I need to give it some time and a rewatch or three, but even the fact I want to rewatch it is huge for me, as I rarely if ever rewatch new releases these days.

It's fun, interesting, and strikes the right tone that reflects most fo the best gaming tables I have ever been a part of without requiring an ounce of knowledge about D&D to enjoy it. And the animation, character designs and action choreography are top notch.

-M

So I just discovered that in the Pathfinder RPG system from Paizo Publishing (an alternate version of D&D that was developed when D&D changed editions from 3.5 to 4 for those who did not want to switch), in the lore of the campaign setting they developed for the game (a world called Golorian), there is a Demon Lord named Lord Shax, whose symbol is a pool of blood with a white feather in it and looks like this...



I ran across the name while reading one of the Pathfinder comic tpb from Dynamite.

Some info on Lord Shax from the Pathfinder wiki

Who knew our illustrious leader shaxper was holding out on us, or are we secretly the Cult of Shax and no one told me?

I found this bit particularly enlightening .

Hmm, maybe this site does make sense now...

-M

Not quite a ttrpg, but a board game based on one. I just received this today, my end of a trade where I sent someone a bunch of Illuminati NWO card games (A Delxue Editons box, a Y2K deck and a Bob Church of the Sub-Genius expansion) in exchange for this vintage Dragonlance Board Game. I am a huge Dragonlance fan, and super excited to get this. Our next game night where we aren't playing D&D, we will have to bust it out and give it a spin.




-M

Saw this in the preorders for the next wave of D&D minis...if Mimics were real this would be the one place I would never want to encounter one...



-M