The Abandoned Tavern

From the day my brother-in-law Thom showed me his ancient D&D books, I’ve wanted to run a roleplaying campaign. That was about 15 years ago. I falteringly tried to start campaigns throughout grade school and high school. I joined a short-lived Robotech campaign in junior high, and played in a semi-successful freeform campaign while in Japan. Then, last year, three of us in the support room were tired of WoW and looking for something more fulfilling. We started in on Neverwinter Nights. It was a fun enough representation of D&D, but eventually we wanted to take it farther and play our own real D&D campaign. I bought the books while home for Thanksgiving, and went to work putting together a campaign setting. I didn’t even know that Omni had loads of miniatures and terrain just lying around from when such things were still considered appropriate uses of the company’s funds. I obsessed for a while about how the official D&D minis are packaged like Magic cards: you don’t know what you’re going to get until you open the pack. That meant I’d have to base encounters on what I ended up with, rather than basing purchases on the encounters I had planned. Now we play nearly every Sunday, and I think things are going quite well. We’re even using the benefits of modern technology, by keeping our character sheets in multi-layer OmniGraffle files and uploading them to an official campaign wiki.