Dungeons and Dragons: The Chronicles of Atlantis

The second major Dungeons and Dragons game that I played in was led by Mike Daniels. He, like Brad, based the adventures in a post-Apocalyptic world, set several years after Brad’s world (or at least that’s how it was in my mind…I could have made that up myself.)

This is one of my lowest points as player, in my opinion. I have always said how honest I am, and I am really embarrassed to admit this now, after so many years, but I was not completely honest with how I created my dwarven fighter Zinc. Oh, I rolled his stats, all right, but I kept rolling them until I got the stats I wanted. Of course, I think everyone knew and just ignored it, or kept on trying to kill Zinc. We got attacked more by bandits than any group I’ve ever seen, and Zinc was a hand to hand fighter. The archers would stand back and shoot at the bandits, and any time they missed the bandit, they would eagerly ask ‘Did I hit Zinc?’ and they did, on many occasions. Now, 30+ years later, I apologize to my gaming friends. I still feel bad about cheating my scores.

There were two groups that Mike ran in his world. The first group was made up of a fighter created by Rob Covert called Snake Plisken (gee, wonder where he got that name), who at different times was possessed by a magic intelligent sword; Warren Brewer playing Gertrude the female dwarven cleric, and a non-player character mage known as ‘Who Knows.’ Zinc joined them later in the adventures, as did several others.

The other group was made up of Dan Wang, Dave Wang, Lance Carothers, and myself, among others. I ran a human druid called MacDuff.

The most interesting character development, however, I thought, were John Wunderlin’s character Prince Thunderbolt, and a non-player character called ‘Galadriel.’ At some point, we had to get some information from Galadriel, and Thunderbolt started to flirt with her. We kept coming back to her, and Thunderbolt became her consort. Eventually, it was revealed to us that Galadriel was actually a silver dragon.

In some adventure or another, the two groups joined up and fought a ‘big evil,’ which had to do with extradimensional creatures known as the Slaad. We fought them, and MacDuff was killed in the battle, which I admit upset me; I get very attached to my characters, but part of it was Mike was trying to simplify and make it so everyone had only ONE character. Anyway, our remaining characters ended up a hundred years in the future, and Galadriel was still around, except she had a son…who had Prince Thunderbolt’s coloring. It was a fun twist. Mike did keep us guessing.

I’m hoping to get permission from Mike as well to ‘mine’ this world to create more background for my Castle Zierath world as well.