My First Real RPG Experience

I love Role Playing Games (RPGs). I have been playing RPGs since I was in sixth grade. I did run a few Dungeons and Dragon games while in junior high school, but they were very un-memorable.

The first game that really had a real creative edge for me was run by Brad Gottschalk. It took place on a post-apocalyptic world where magic, demons, and gods had returned to earth.

It is funny, but as the many, many years have gone by, I have in my mind re-written vast parts of what happened. As I game, I do take notes. It’s not something that I did from the very start of that game, but I started fairly early on. My memories of what happened in that game do not match up with my notes. I also found an early piece of writing from that game – the start of a book. Oh, my gawd. What was I thinking. It was pretty bad.

At any rate, Brad created a series of adventures that included the H.P. Lovecraft Cthulhu mythos. The Cthulhu characters and races the first edition of the Deities and Demigods handbook, but not in the later editions because of licensing issues. We had a lot of fun with them. The adventures took place starting in Bagdad and spread from there. I joined the adventures a little later, so many of my friends had established their characters and relationships already.

My character was Bruin Zeemam, a human ranger. He was half-white, half-Asian, with his father a lord from Peking (Beijing). He was a big man – 6’4”. I always drew him with a thick beard and mustache, and, of course, a ranger hat. I’ve post a couple of pictures of him as well. One was drawn when I was in high school; the other while I was in college. Eventually, I’ll get around to drawing him again, too. I still have a very warm spot in my heart for Bruin.

The first two characters Bruin met were Warren Brewer’s Sygamore, a Halfling theif, and Tom Hood’s half-orc assassin whose name I couldn’t remember even in high school, so I called him Tom Thatcher. He joined them in Istanbul on the way to Bagdad. We fought green dragons, hill giants, and even met a devil Beelzabub. We fought a tyrannosaurus and a blue dragon, as well as others.

Bruin met many others, the most important of whom I’ll list here

• Melonius Gallinette: Ingrid Lind’s human magic-user
• John Sunlight: Eric Bierstedt’s human (most of the time) ranger/assassin/paladin/monk
  Stilich VI: Tom Hood’s cleric
• Galloz: Michelle Buchert’s druid
• Galluck: Michelle Buchert’s fighter
• Gallum: Michelle Buchert’s paladin
• Atticus: Mike Daniel’s druid
• Warren Worthington (possibly a name I made up to): Warren Brewer’s a half-orc Cleric of Zeus

There were several really big storylines. One was the exploration and destruction of a Cthulhu temple underneath Bagdad, which our characters did work their way through, although Bagdad was destroyed in the process.

We also made a trip through hell where several of the characters were killed and brought back.

While everyone had some storylines, the storyline of John Sunlight seemed about the strongest. His was a tale of loss and redemption. He was a good character – a paladin, who lost his way. He was killed, reincarnated as a dwarf, went completely evil, eventually returned to his original form, and spent a lot of time trying to get redemption.

Others who played in the world included Dan Wang, Dave Wang, Warren Carothers, Lance Carothers, Andrea Hood, Pat Daniels, Burton Davis, John Wunderlin, and Philip Sens. There were several different groups of characters going on at once.

I am hoping to get permission from Brad and the others to ‘mine’ this world and put it into my Castle Zierath world so I can create these stories in that world (with some changes - since the CZ world is definitely not Earth, and Hell does not exist...).

At any rate, I had an immense amount of fun playing in this world, and look forward to having these friends write down any of their remembrances and/or corrections for this world.Top of Form

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