Here is a guest post by Josh Diaz, a good friend of mine who has been helping me out with this D&D campaign. We’ll start a separate blog of our D&D adventures, more on that soon. And with that I’ll turn it over to Josh!
On Monday evenings, a group of heroes gathered in a crowded town square, uniting to help protect their homelands. At the same time, a group of game developers gathered in a dingy dungeon, to help learn the origins of their craft.
That’s right, Fire Hose is running a D&D campaign! I was invited by our Dungeon Master, Eitan, along with a select group of the realm’s finest scholars and sharpest blades, to come around and play in a game of 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons. 4th Edition is an updated version of the long-running game, and some of the design changes look back to both the original ‘tactical wargaming’ history of its predecessors, while also drawing on the immediacy and class balancing of modern computer and video games.
The rules are long, bookish, and copyrighted — so I’ll direct your attention to Eitan’s simple, but beautiful world. As Dungeon Master, Eitan is artist, writer, programmer *and* executable: he sets up the world our characters will inhabit, and keeps everything moving while we react to new events. As such, he’s come up with a little slice of a world that was richly represented with just a little bit of advance work. Pulling from real-world sources, our characters meet in a small and frozen town stuck on a peninsula behind a mountain range. ‘What’s exciting about a small frozen chunk of isolated no-man’s land,’I pretend to hear you ask? Well, in this case, the town is host to a small magical gateway that leads to a much larger town, and acts as kind of a trading post for the peninsula and it’s inhabits. With a hook like that, characters drawn from all over the world — an elf scholar who came to visit the big city from his wooded homeland, a dragonborn mercenary from a rural mountain rookery — are given both a reason and the means to gather. But if we can get there, where else can we get? And *who* else has access to the portal?
Oh, I haven’t mentioned the invasion, the ambush, or the kobold slingers with their potions of explodey doom yet. But one of the neat things about D&D is that in the course of play, you always end up with more threads than you planned, and that just means there’s something to think about for next week. Adieu!
