"Second To The Right, And Straight On Till Morning"

I have long dreamed of a fantastical, island-hopping roleplaying game "project", akin to the beloved Ray Harryhausen sword-and-sorcery movies of my youth filtered through something akin to old school Dungeons & Dragons.

The exact flavour remains undecided, but I already have a campaign format in mind.

I want to emulate the very first campaign that Gublin and I played back in the late '70s: a picaresque nautical yarn in the style of Sinbad The Sailor, The Odyssey, Jason & The Argonauts or even Clark Ashton Smith's The Voyage of King Euvoran, with the player-characters as the crew of an exploratory ship sailing from mysterious island to mysterious island.

I've long said my campaigning Holy Grail is to run an open-ended 'forever campaign' that captures the spirit of the first generation of roleplaying campaigns (e.g. Gary Gygax's Greyhawk, Dave Arneson's Blackmoor, and my personal favourite: Dave Hargrave's Arduin).

Maybe this is the adventure that will steer me in that direction.

THE FASCINATION OF ARDUIN, BLOODY ARDUIN

Anyone who has read my drivel for long enough - and is into old school gaming - will be aware that Dave Hargrave's Arduin is one of my favourite settings and one that, to this day, shapes my ideals of what a "perfect" RPG campaign world should be like.

Over the years I have joined a number of Arduin groups on platforms that no longer exist, but I thought, today, I'd share a couple of pieces from those old groups that will - hopefully - go some way towards explaining my eternal love for Hargrave's legendary campaign.

In one group, a gentleman who went by the handle of Mourn Storm recounted a legendary tale from Dave's game and shared the picture below (by insanely talented Russian artist Leo Hao) to illustrate the story of the Battle of Fort Blood.

Storm's story read as follows:

"I patched together the tale of Fort Blood based solely upon what tidbits David passed along to me and interviews over the years with one or two players who were there. You also may remember the dedication to "Koryu, leader of the 47 Ronin" in [Arduin Grimoire, Volume 1].

"This crew was part of a world spanning quest he ran WWWAAAYYY back in the day, The players changed, characters died or were taken out of play, but there were always 47 'ronin' on this quest of Koryu's to retrieve/rescue his lover's soul.

"They found themselves at a place called Fort Blood and were about to camp for the night when one of the mages declared it was the Eve of the Black Solstice and that THIS place was a focus point. Long story short, they fought against the very Hordes of Hell from the moment the sun dipped beneath the rim of the world until dawn the next day."

Click here to see a massive version of this ultra-detailed painting

At some point I joined an Arduin discussion group on Yahoo and nothing sums up the spirit of Arduin better than the group's poetic, introductory text:

What dreams and glories we have all beheld!

I have travelled through the Ebon Gates on the Plateau of Forever, seen the highest peaks of the Misty Mountains and looked down into the dark swirling mists of The Devils Footprint.

I have delved deep within foul Skull Tower, wintered on the northern border of far Ghorfar where the Blue Barbarian Amazons wield their deadly skills and felt the oppressive heat rising from the jungles of Green Hell far to the south.

I have ridden the trails with brave men and craven, mad men and priests; I have known warriors, thieves, mages, treasure seekers, glory hounds, fools and wisemen. I call Deodanths my blood enemies, Dwarves stout hearted, Elves fools and Centaurs gallant foes. I have seen true honour and nobility in the bug folk called Phraints and courage unheard of from Halfling bakers.

I know the terrors of the Night of the Black Solstice, the fear that grips men when Amazons close to battle screaming like Furies from legend and the sweet thrill of victory when the last foe dies or flees the field. I've seen the deadly ballet of combat between TIE fighter and Dragon played out with lethal finality over the Mountains of Madness. I've fought in the blood games of Melnibone, traded skins with a Marmachandian merchant and walked the streets of Talismonde' side by side with Vampyr and Paladin companions.

I've searched for the Yabander stone, found the Blood of Sorkar, and once I saw Stormbringer unsheathed and lived to tell the tale!

More often than not, when I'm kicking around an idea for a fantasy campaign in my noggin, my first port of call for inspiration will always be Hargrave's legendary Arduin Grimoire (particularly the first three books, which I purchased as an eager Dungeons & Dragons-obsessed 12-year-old so many years ago).

As I begun one such expedition into the depths of the Grimoire, I came across the following quote on page two of the first book, on a page about experience point rewards.

Bear in mind that the Grimoire used an experience/level system very similar to that of old school Dungeons and Dragons.

In this particular entry, Mr Hargrave was counting down various events and giving guidelines to what experience points they would earn in his campaign.

For 375 experience points a player character would have to have been:

"sole survivor of an expedition acquiring the mightiest of artifacts (Satan's own pitchfork, nuclear weapons, phasers etc.)."

What kind of wonderfully, whacked-out and over-the-top campaign must Dave Hargrave have been running that such treasures were available to lucky (foolhardy?) player-characters?

And how gutting to only earn a mere 375 experience points from probably the most dangerous adventure of your life?

It's no wonder that The Arduin Grimoire blew my pre-teen mind and continues to hold an amazing fascination for me even after all these decades.

CAMPAIGN AUTOPSIES: Will I Ever Learn?

Photo by Giancarlo Revolledo on Unsplash

When the Tuesday Knights came into being I was the de facto gamesmaster, running a deliciously vanilla fantasy campaign in my homebrew setting of Tekralh.

However, I don't feel my gamesmastering chops really began to take form until May 2014 when Pete handed me the reins of his nascent Chronicles of Cidri campaign.

Pete had been running this, for a few months, using the old The Fantasy Trip rules, but I updated that to a retroclone of the system, Heroes & Other Worlds.

I have to confess that the mechanics were rather too "dice pooly" for my liking, but they really worked well in the context of our campaign.

I ran Cidri for the better part of three years, building up to a delightfully OTT apocalyptic climax.

This campaign remains my personal gold standard, a target I now wish to aim for again - and hopefully excel - when I'm finally allowed to return to the head of the table.

The Tuesday Knights' membership has changed a lot since those days, we've lost some people and gained more members, which means tastes have changed as well, but I still feel these "revelations" hold water and I really should adhere to them.

I wish I'd had the foresight to conduct an autopsy on our Cidri campaign when it wrapped, dissecting my thoughts on why it worked, but I think I was just basking in the adulation of my players... and so it never crossed my mind to attempt the kind of surprisingly perceptive analysis that I had with these earlier efforts that hadn't worked out.

As will be clear by now I've started work on my latest attempt to run an "open-ended" campaign for the Tuesday Knights, but this time with a new rules set (Twilight Sword) and a superficially-familiar fantasy setting.

This will actually be my fifth or sixth attempted campaign since the Tuesday Knights first started gaming back in August 2008.

So, what went wrong with my previous games?

TEKRALH I: The first game I ran for the Tuesday Knights started as heavily houseruled version of Castles & Crusades (with a large dose of Hackmaster and Arduin) and it worked really well to start with...

Until, for no readily apparent reason, I decided to switch horses mid-stream and changed the rules system to a by-the-book version of Labyrinth Lord. The characters were severely de-powered and the game turned into a meatgrinder of TPK after TPK.

Within a few sessions all the fun that we'd had at the start of the campaign was sucked from the campaign. Eventually, I had to pull the plug on the game as it wasn't getting anywhere.

When we started the players were giving me nice backstories for their characters, with plot hooks etc, but by the end I was lucky if they'd give their characters names as they knew their life expectancy had become so limited.

MORAL: If it ain't broke don't fix it.

KNIGHT CITY I: Next up was my Villains & Vigilantes campaign, set in Knight City. This was driven almost entirely by the naïve dream of trying to recapture the magic that Steve, Pete, Nick and I enjoyed with our original V&V games back in the '80s.

Almost from the start things went wrong with this campaign due to the simple fact that we weren't all singing from the same hymn sheet. It wasn't anyone's fault in particular, but when we were teenagers we were all (except for Nick) avid comic book readers and had reasonably similar tastes in comics and superheroes.

Thirty years later, tastes had changed and the sort of scenarios I wanted to run (e.g. dimension hopping, cosmic stuff) didn't sit comfortably with some of the players, who were expecting more straight-forward supervillain bashing.

There were also problems with the rules (from the clunky combat table at the game's heart to the peculiar diversity of character's random power sets), but ultimately these were just the straws that broke a very unhealthy camel's back. I think we could have overcome these if everyone had had contiguous ideas of where the game should be going.

MORAL: Make sure everyone is on the same page.

TEKRALH II: I thought I'd found a winner when I came across D101's Crypts & Things (a sword & sorcery variant of Swords & Wizardry) as I thought this kind of human-centric adventure game was the way to go.

The simple problem with this very short-lived campaign - and it had nothing to do with the rules - was I had just discovered A Song Of Ice & Fire!

I was in the grip of Westeros-fever and spent all my time thinking about developing the wider world, quickly losing sight of the intimate adventure I should have been running for the players. 

This would have been fine if the player-characters were all high-up members of House Stark or House Lannister, but they were actually 1st Level D&D proto-adventurers and tunnel grubbers.

Instead of developing scenarios or stocking dungeons I was researching medieval legal systems, clothing, cuisine, bartering etc My eyes were fixed on the horizon rather than the gamestable in front of me.

MORAL: Intimate, not epic.

SHADOWDARK: I only ran this for one session. The players told me afterwards that they loved it, but something about it just didn't click with me.

At the time I was working on my overcomplicated Frankengame monstrosity of assorted houserules all stapled together with my own ideas from decades of gaming.

As it happened, "my" system and Shadowdark shared some similar ideas. It's just Shadowdark did them more elegantly, more streamlined. So I should have been happy!

To this day, I have no idea why I bounced off of Shadowdark so hard, when - upon initially reading the rules - it felt like such a perfect fit for my style of gamesmastering. 

However, I'm glad I didn't drag this game out and euthanised it before people got too invested in the campaign.

MORAL: If you're going to kill off a game, kill it quickly.

KNIGHT CITY II: Last year - before the osteoarthritis in my back knocked me off my feet for more than six months - I started a new V&V campaign (this time with some houserules to avoid some of the issues we'd encountered mechanically last time).

I provided the players with pamphlets before hand introducing the setting and - hopefully - suggesting the style of game I was hoping for.

But, once again, it didn't take long to realise that we had four players all pulling in different directions. This meant, for instance, that the opening scenario - which should have taken one or two sessions to wrap up - was heading into its fourth month when I had to retire from the field.

At its core, the problems with this iteration of Knight City were exactly the same as before, even though the make-up of the group at the table was different.

Superheroes are such a broad genre that they can mean diametrically different things to different players, no matter how well you think you've spelled out your personal vision.

And a central element of that clash of ideologies lies at my own feet. Over the decades (I've been reading comics since I was a wee nipper, and a collector since I was a teenager), my personal beliefs about what makes a good costumed crimefighter have become so embedded in my psyche that I'm not only unable to clearly explain my "vision" (surely everyone else sees superheroes the same way, right?) but I get frustrated when my players don't automatically share the same "vision"!

Just because it's a beloved reading and viewing genre for me doesn't mean I can run it as an open-ended, forever campaign. In fact, I'm probably too emotionally invested in the genre for me to brook any deviation from my perceived "one true way".

To top that off - again ignoring my mistakes from previous failed campaigns - I'd gone full "Game of Thrones" on Knight City and obsessively detailed every borough, with hundreds and hundreds of locations. Most of which, the players bypassed when creating their character backstories. 

It's almost as if I'd totally ignored every single misstep I'd made previously as a gamesmaster and was trying to crash on regardless.

MORAL: Learn from your past mistakes. Pick a game genre that everyone understands.

Early Thoughts on Personalising The Twilight Sword Setting

As a youngling I had this Pauline Baynes map of Narnia on my bedroom wall

With the impending release of the beta PDF of Twilight Sword, I have begun to noodle around ideas for "personalising" the lands of Radia - the game's default setting. 

World building from scratch is one of my weaknesses as a gamesmaster: all my worlds created whole cloth tend to end up as simply reskinned versions of real lands from Medieval(ish) Earth... and not in a clever, Robert E Howard Age of Hyboria way.

I also have a tendency to "Game of Thrones" things up before the first die is slung, by which I mean I overcomplicate and hyperdetail the setting way beyond anything the players will probably ever have any interaction with.

This is because I tend to fall in love with my settings and then mistakenly believe I'm the next JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis or George RR Martin! When all I'm really doing is creating a backdrop for some wonderfully silly elfgames.

Aware of this fault in my planning process, I'm approaching Radia - which we know is inspired by video games and anime - with broader strokes.

At the moment, clearly, I know almost nothing about the actual, 'official' setting, so am just scraping together notes and bullet points of ideas, locations, names (for places and people) etc that - hopefully - veer away from the usual Western/Tolkien norm of fantasy settings.

For the anime influences for Radia, I shall be looking to pick up cues from my beloved Frieren: Beyond Journey's End, Record of Lodoss War, and Delicious in Dungeon.

My knowledge of anime is limited (although greater than my knowledge of video games), but I remain firm in my belief that these three serials have the best resources in the pure fantasy (Dungeons & Dragons-inspired) genre.

Beyond anime, I'm looking at established settings such as Narnia, Wonderland, Oz, Neverland, Eternia, and Arduin, and films like Labyrinth, The NeverEnding Story, The Dark Crystal, and so on, rather than my usual inspirations, for example Hawk The Slayer and Lord of The Rings. 

Don't get me wrong Hawk The Slayer remains the definitive old school Dungeons & Dragons movie in my book and Peter Jackson's Lord of The Rings trilogy is simply the greatest movie of all time, which I ensure I watch at least once a year from start to finish.

But, in my experience, the thing I find about such intricate settings as Middle-Earth and Westeros is that they are 'fragile'. If you mess around with them too much they break and are no longer the setting you fell in love with in the first place.

Now, I know you can say: but it's your game, you can do what you like with the setting, who's going to know?

But, besides the fact that I would know, it's my belief that these settings are so intricately interwoven that if you mess with, or change, one bit it will have a cascade effect further down the line so that something else isn't going to make sense (just look at George RR Martin's anger with The House of The Dragon tv show because characters were cut out who actually have an important role to play in the story at a later date).

Hence, why I'm shifting my focus to loosey-goosey, weird and surreal settings that are governed by more fairy tale aesthetics. I believe these will gel more with my vision - and understanding - of how Radia (and Twilight Sword) is supposed to operate.

Of course, I could be completely wrong. But I hope not.

I'd really like to run a setting that was, at once, familiar to the Tuesday Knights but also fresh and original, and not just another Middle-Earth/Forgotten Realms/Medieval Europe retread. 

And has talking animals.

Tell Me About Your Character

One of the most powerful influences in my formative gaming years - and one that still inspires me to this day - is the "dedication" sections found in old role-playing games, where the author records (usually in just a simple phrase) the fates or notable deeds of play-tester's characters.

Not only did this prove to me that the system had been thoroughly play-tested (something a lot of games, I fear, these days - especially from some of the 'bigger' companies - don't get) but also that the players were clearly putting some thought into their characters and helping craft a grand story, the bigger picture.

The list of characters above is from the 1979 Heroes game, a Dark Ages RPG that has long since left my collection - the only memento I retained from it being a photocopy of the dedications page.

But as great as the Heroes dedication was, the ones that have driven my role-playing ambitions the most were the dedications by Dave Hargrave in the first two volumes of his seminal Arduin Grimoire:

I know I've talked about the "Elric in Hell" scenario several times in recent days, but this is the kind of myth-making that is a cornerstone of my love of role-playing games, especially those with an 'old school' flavour, over any other form of gaming.

I don't want to know about your "feat-combos" or "power-ups" - I want to hear the stories you've had a hand in creating, the actual adventures your characters have undertaken... and I want to help my players create those moments and memories as well.

This, for me, is the essence of role-playing games and why they are the greatest hobby in the world.

Elric In Hell!

My beloved original Arduin Grimoire trilogy

I mentioned the foundational roleplaying text (for me) the Arduin Grimoire the other day, but I'm pretty certain it's not as famous (infamous?) these days as it was when I was growing up as a young gamer.

When I first encountered Dungeons & Dragons, back in the late 70s, I had little to no idea about the concept of worldbuilding.

It wasn't until I acquired the three little tan books that make up David Hargrave's original Arduin Grimoire trilogy (there are now nine volumes in total, but none as inspirational as the first three) that it even dawned on me that 'other people' were making up their own worlds to campaign in.

The first thing that struck me, and that I still love today, was the sense that the history of Arduin had been a co-operative development between the gamesmaster and his players.

This was crystallised in the dedication pages of the first two volumes where Dave lists the names of the some of the player characters and their fates.

In the first volume, Dave's own character is listed simply as "Elric The Hell-Lost", but this is expanded upon in volume two, Welcome To Skull Tower:

"The Baron In Exile, Lord of the House Of The Tower of the Dragon, wishes to thank formally the brave and steadfast people who gave their years and their lives to return him and his from the very clutches of the Lord Of The Undead.

"These true friends crossed three hells and seven and a half long, long years to fight their way to our succour. Our House is ever in the debt of the House Of The Rising Sun, the House of Ibathene, the House of Greylorn the Patriach, and to all those heroes who joined in that undertaking.

"You who slew the Great Lord of the Undead himself know who you are, and you know that our House will give its all in your need, if ever that time should come. We who were hell lost and soul caged SALUTE YOU, our comrades and friends.

"David A Hargrave

"a.k.a. Elric,

"Baron and Lord of

"The House of the Dragon Tower".

However, the most detailed explanation of these events came in issue two of the superb Different Worlds magazine,  in which Dave Hargarve recounted a potted history of his campaign:

"Elric, Duke and Lord of the Dragon Tower, spent seven years in hell, a captive of Cimmeries, Lord of the Undead. The efforts to free him cost the souls of over 40 other characters and was directly linked to the causes of the Great Insurrection. But freed he was, to take up a blood feud with those he felt had left him there!"

It's no wonder that that imagery has stuck in my head for the better part of 30 years, and has constantly played a leading role in my "wish list" of unfulfilled role-playing moments.

Although the hefty Legendary Lands Of Arduin makes reference to Cimmeries as Lord of the Undead and Elric's House of the Dragon Tower, there is no mention in that 800-page tome of his time in the underworld that I can see (but I haven't read the book cover-to-cover!)

I'd love to find out more details of this "campaign-within-a-campaign", if there is anyone out there in the Interwebs with more detailed knowledge please get in touch.

Lights! Camera! Die Roll! Set-Piece Ideas For Gaming

By Elizabeth Thompson - Royal Collection , Public Domain, Link

Great memories - that is "magic moments" in roleplaying games - often come from the unplanned and unexpected, but that's not to say some gentle nudging and downright scheming from the Gamesmaster is inappropriate.

Browsing the deep back catalogue of Craig Oxbrow's excellent inspirational resource The Watch House (if you're into sci-fi and/or Doctor Who gaming then you need to read his Door In Time blog as well) I came across an article he'd written on Six Staples Of SF/F Series, by way of Den Of Geek.

These standards are:

• The Bodyswap
• The Time Loop
• Ascension To A Higher Plane Of Existence
• Alternate Dimensions
• The Doppelganger/Double/Duplicate
• The Dream Episode

And all are immediately applicable to the anime-inspired fantasy campaign I'm kicking around at the moment while the Tuesday Knights get all pulpy in Pete's new Outgunned Adventures game (season two of his epic weird science campaign).

Tie these "standards" into my own "wish list" of cool moments and there's plenty of meat for potentially memorable adventures, if I'm GM enough to script plots that can do these tropes justice.

I guess, in part, all this comes from my passion for visual media (films, TV, and comics in particular) and thus my desire to emulate moments I see in these at our table.

The main bullet points from my "wish list" were:

• Have the players running the defence of a "hopeless situation", ridiculously outnumbered by an implacable foe, as seen at Rorke's Drift in Zulu, Dros Delnoch in David Gemmel's Legend, and Helm's Deep in The Lord of The Rings. To name but three.
  
  
• A "Horatio Holds The Bridge" moment - I'd just discovered D&D when this poem was read to us at school and the two just clicked.
  
  
• An interesting time travel story (cf. Doctor Who et al)
  
  
• The party encounters cosmic entities that threaten the world and only the heroes can stop them - every Marvel/DC comic book that features this sort of stuff inspires me to greater madness, combined with a lifelong love of the works of HP Lovecraft.
  
  
• Rescuing a trapped companion from incarceration in the pit of Hell - this came from reading the dedication pages in my original (and treasured) Arduin Grimoire Trilogy, by Dave Hargrave, where he mentions an epic campaign to free his own character.
  
  
• Having the players caught up in a war between angels and demons.

Originally my list was drawn up for a legacy D&D campaign, but the ideas are so broad, universal, and potentially over-the-top that they work just as well for anime fantasy game in the same vein as Delicious in Dungeon, Frieren, and Record of Lodoss War.

Introducing PROJECT 60

In the middle of 2024, I announced on Facebook - as much for myself as anyone else - that I was launching PROJECT 60.

The primary aim of this overarching idea was that by the time I hit 60 (in a few years' time) I will have assembled and researched an actual historical skirmish wargame... set in the age of the Border Reivers.

Superficially it's a Medieval (Tudor) "Wild West" on the border of Scotland & England (The Debatable Lands), with swords, horses, black powder weapons, lawlessness, family loyalty etc

Bizarrely, it was a random mention of this time on an episode of Antiques Roadshow that first piqued my interest.

I've since been circling this idea - as either a wargame or RPG setting - for several years now, but finally decided 2024 was the time to get stuck in.

For figures and rules I shall be concentrating on those produced by Flags of War, as those were the first I discovered for this little-known period.

While I have yet to fully grok the rules system (at first glance there's an air of Savage Worlds about it that I rather like), one of the joyous things about this game and its setting is that it's very much a skirmish game, for a handful of figures on each side.

So there's no need to invest in hundreds of minis, that would then bust the bank if I wanted them painted up nicely.

It actually turns out that several other manufacturers produce miniatures - and terrain - suitable for this period, but the Flags of War ones are my favourites by far, and so will be my primary focus.

My first batch of miniatures are currently with my figure painter, and I'll let you all know once they are done. 

I've organised the games room a bit, so the table is ready for the miniatures. At some point, I must try to drybrush the model church and graveyard, add some flocking and so on to make it look less plastic.

What's really surprised me, as I accumulated my library of historical tomes about the Border Reivers, is that while there are a handful of factual documentaries about them as far as I can tell there has never been a motion picture made about these characters.

I'm gobsmacked by this missed opportunity, as their stories are full of action and larger-than-life antiheroes, very much akin to the Western cinema that was the backbone of Hollywood in the "golden age" and still produces epic classics to this very day. 

Part of my research has also involved reading the late Robert Low's superlative trilogy of Border Reivers novels, which my old university chum, JJ, sent me when he heard I'd taken a fancy to this period of history.

On the roleplaying front, it has finally struck me (in the last couple of days actually) that the games I fiddle about about with, house rule, and generally rewrite aren't actually being designed for me to run!

What I'm actually doing (subconsciously until now) is creating rules systems and worlds (such as my defunct superhero setting Knight City) that I want to play in, that I want to create a player-character for and have the kind of adventures I've always fantasised as the ultimate manifestation of this marvellous hobby.

This is why I would often get frustrated when I ran a campaign (usually an aborted superhero one) because it wouldn't turn out how I imagined it should. It wasn't that I was railroading the Tuesday Knights towards specific outcomes or trying to dictate the emerging story, but that it wasn't emulating the genre as I perceived it.

Most recent batch of Tekralh booklets - a mix of new and updated material

If you know me on Facebook you will have (possibly) seen posts about my recent work on Tekralh (the name I'm sticking with for my Frankengame), as the RPG strand of my  PROJECT 60.

I've broken the mass of my writing down into smaller booklets, which - at a future date - makes them more cost-effective to edit and reprint.

The building blocks of my Tekralh house rules

And what got me excited about all this again?

Back in March, I ran a single session of Shadowdark for The Tuesday Knights. Everybody said they loved it, but there was something that didn't click for me.

It took me a moment to twig: it was a very good system... but it wasn't MY system. I'm certainly not knocking the multi-award-winning Shadowdark, but several of the things I liked about it were also things I liked about my own Frankengame.

Yes, my house rules are a lot crunchier than Shadowdark and maybe not as easy for people to instantly grok, but I kept coming back to the point that my Frankengame was my game... and, ultimately, if I only get one final shot at running an open-ended, mega-campaign, I'd really like it to be my own baby.

The original Arduin Trilogy - the biggest influence on my DIY RPG ideas

To try and explain what I'm going for with my bundle of house rules (that build off of Newt Newport's Crypts & Things and Matt Finch's Swords & Wizardry), I want to point you towards the main influences and inspirations for Tekralh:

• Dave Hargrave's Arduin - my very first 'postal purchase', from a small advert in the back of White Dwarf, paid for with postal orders (!!!). I have no recollection what drove me to buy this (had I already read the introductory article by Dave in Different Worlds magazine?). But I've never looked back since those original three little booklets arrived at my parents' house. Over the years I went on to buy all the original booklets... and quite a lot of the later material (there's even a new edition on the horizon), but it's the original trilogy I keep returning to for ideas.
• Dave Arneson's Blackmoor - another first for me. After I'd purchased my Holmes' Basic Dungeons & Dragons booklet, the first actual gaming supplement I remember picking up from the Dark Tower in Tunbridge Wells was, appropriately, Judges Guild's The First Fantasy Campaign, a delightfully rough and ready collection of notes from Arneson's ur-campaign, the foundation upon which ALL campaigns that followed were built.
• Gary Gygax's Greyhawk - I've always had an interest in this campaign, for similar reasons to my love of Blackmoor: it was a campaign formulated before the rest of the gaming world knew what "fantasy roleplaying campaigns" were. Sadly, while there are early editions of the rules books that grew out of this available, there isn't the random notes and unfiltered enthusiasm of my first two choices. And, the deepest sorrow is the lack of a true rendition of the legendary Castle Greyhawk. I've seen - and own replicas - of some material, largely courtesy of Gary's co-DM Robert Kuntz. 
• Robert A. Wardhaugh's The Game 

I'm not looking for replicate these games and settings, but I definitely aspire to emulate them... because I want to play in a version of them.

It explains why I've always found myself at a loss when it comes to dreaming up scenarios. I can picture odd set-pieces (which are MOMENTS I'd love to be a part of in a never-ending old school campaign), but creating an actual scenario whole cloth always leaves me at a loss.

And this is why: I can see how a story could start, but I want to be part of the group that discovers how events unfold from there. I ant to be an integral part of the developing story rather than the gamesmaster setting out all the pieces on the board for us to play with.

If you've made it this far you're probably wondering what this all means?

Honestly, I don't know. Even after a year away from blogging I'm still no closer to reaching any definitive conclusions on the gaming front.

I want to play in a game like the ones that have inspired me, like the one I've tried to create, but nothing on the Tuesday Knights docket comes to close to this "aspirational holy grail".