As regular readers of this blog likely know,

I’ve been a tabletop role-play gamer (weregamer) since 1976, when I was first introduced to Dungeons and Dragons while attending the Defense Language Institute at the Presidio of Monterey in California. Much lke the SCA, gaming has long been a part of my life.

For much of the last 35 years, gaming has involved the old SPI game, DragonQuest, and Steve Jackson Games’ GURPS systems. A couple of years ago, friends recruited me into a D&D 5e campaign using the Storm Kings Thunder module, which I really enjoyed., but scheduling for that group became too problematic as COID restrictions began to loosen up and people were required to return to workplaces; we’ve not met for quite a while now.

Our family enjoys gaming, and although my wife and I game regularly with other friends, our (now adult) kids have actually never gamed with us.

For a while, the folks at Rooster Teeth had a D&D Game running online (Heroes & Halfwits)

which we watched regularly, and more recently we’ve begun watching Critical Role (yeah, we are very late to that party.) But it’s kickstarted my desire to DM a game again.

It turned into a barroom brawl!

I haven’t DMd a D&D game since before 1986, at which time I had run a group of up to 30 players (NIGHTMARE CITY!) That group got whittled down to about half a dozen survivors in a classic barroom brawl, which was a lot of fun, at least for me.

After a major campaign event, the group gathered at a local pub to celebrate. Other patrons in the pub were disinclined to join in the exuberance of the partiers, and someone bumped into someone else, causing them to spill their tasty adult beverage, and a fight broke out. I had actually planned for something like this a few sessions previous, when things got boisterous, and had created a “brawl table” with an axis for defense and one for attack, because let’s face facts – in a barroom fight, you aren’t going to have time to think a lot about your actions. Among the options were “try to sneak out unseen”, “grab and use a nearby PC as a shield”, “grab and use a nearby PC as a weapon”, punch, kick, bite, smash crockery, and the rest of the usual things one might find in a brawl. One of the player characters, a Halfling by name of Drelgo Thudpucker, managed to slip in spilled beer and impale himself on his pointy toed shoes. Some others were outright killed in the fight, some died later of injuries, and the survivors regrouped and as a much smaller and much more manageable sized party, continued gaming until we moved from California to Washington, where we met the folks with whom we’ve been gaming with pretty much ever since.

Yeah, that was the “brief” version. 🙂

Anyway, that brings me up to now, sort of. “The Kids” and I have been talking, and they’d like to play in a D&D game, and I’ve been thinking of trying to run a new campaign. The last game I GMd was a GURPS setting using elements from World of Darkness games set in 1938, just as the War was starting to pick up in Europe, and play began in Paris. But that was then, and this is now.

So, I’ve been reading source materials, and going over the D&D 5e rules, which are so vastly different from OD&D or AD&D that it realy isn’t the same game anymore, much is better, some things are more complexe, but it’s a learning process. I’ve got begging players, and a GM who is also relearning the system.

So far, we have Carrion, a nonbinary Tiefling Druid, and Qreeh (later renamed to Fil – short for Filthy Kreechur), a masculine Kenku Rogue. We’ll see what the rest of the family comes up with.
[Edit to add: Beloved Suse is running Zev, a Half0Orc Cleric of the Great Swamp Sow.}
The middle kid has been playing D&D down in Arizona for years, I don’t yet know if they or their kids will be joining in with us. [They decided to not try and play long-distance.]
I’m undecided which source book to start us off with, either The Lost Mines of Phandelver, The Wild Beyond The Witchlight, possibly Icewind Dale: Rime Of The Frostmaiden or Strixhaven: Curriculum Of Chaos are the likely leaders at this point.

[Edit to add: We went with The Wild Beyond ghe Witchlight, and are having much fun with it, especially as they party hasa managed to circumvent the projected order of things, and stumbled their way into Prismeer without the instructions on how to get out…]

There are a couple of other local friends I may invite, but I don’t know their availability, either. [They couldn’t make the schedule, so no.]

We’ll be discussing what they are wanting in a game once the rest of the family decides what they are doing.