…but you have to buy me one to hear the talk
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Confessions Of A Dungeon Master
I DMed my very first game of D&D here in Sacramento back in late January of 1978. That first session, contrary to what 95% of D&D groups were doing, was not a dungeon crawl. It was pretty much what is now called a “Session Zero”, a session where characters were created, discussed and then I ran them through a short adventure. That adventure was mostly about buying their stuff and fighting a couple of young thugs.
The second session was the start of a dungeon crawl.
But even that did not start with them walking out of town to the well known Local Dungeon #7,931. No, it started with them riding into a Spooky Woods to look for the entrance to the dungeon. Once they found it, typical late 1970s dungeon crawling happened.
My 4 players enjoyed the 4 sessions we played together, and later, two of them joined up with two new players for a few sessions in an underground world blatantly based on Edgar Rice Burroughs “Pellucidar” series.
By February of 1979, I had stopped playing D&D so I could concentrate of my new girlfriend and the pleasures we created together. But I spent some of my spare time drawing a very large above ground “dungeon” that was more like a combination maze & museum. I called it “The Maze of Xask” and it just kept growing and growing.
Flash forward to January, 1981. Girlfriend is long gone, I’m out of work, and my best friend needs a roommate at his apartment in San Jose. So I move there, get a job in less than a week, and spend a couple of months working, partying and chasing women.
Then one day I walk into a game store, look at the bulletin board they have, and changed my life for the next 40 years. Somebody was looking for an AD&D group to join. I called the number and found out it was two married couples looking for a DM. I said the fateful words “Well, I’d be glad to DM.” and that was that.
We started out meeting on Wednesday nights from 7 to 10 pm. After our third session at my place, we decided to switch to one of their houses and play from 6 to 10.
The game I ran for them (a dwarf fighter, human ranger, human fighter and elf wizard), was mostly a series of 1 or 2 session adventures, some in dungeons, some in towns. By the time we had been playing 3 months or so, we decided to also play on Saturdays from noon until “about 10”. For those of you keeping track, that’s 14 hours of D&D a week. Every week. And we almost never stopped on Saturday until after midnight.
About 3 weeks into this twice a week gaming, I decided that all those hours would allow me to set up an epic world and storyline. Storylines, actually, because I had very quickly learned that players zig when you think they should zag and will go off the map in a hot second.
My way around all of that zigging & zagging was The Maze of Xask. I would drop my hearty adventurers into it, lock the door, then give them a time limit to find the exit, lest they spend a century in the maze. My newly 3rd level players jumped right in and spent the next 3 months in that maze, fighting monsters, saving a village made up of adventurers that never escaped, and learning tons of lore about the world they lived in.
The last session, which lasted 14 hours, was a fast paced run through a hidden second level. The big boss battle was fighting versions of themselves in order to leave. It was thrilling, satisfying and came just before we all had to take two weeks off. I promised them something bigger and better when we got back together.
That something was a continent spanning epic series called “The League of Wizards”. Our Heroes, now at 5th level, were tasked with first finding out what the League was (spoiler: Evil Wizards) and what the wanted (world domination, duh!) and finally hunting down and stopping (mostly by killing them) the league. It started on New Year’s Eve, 1981.
It ended in July of 1983. As I recall, we took a grand total of 4 Wednesdays and 3 Saturdays off in all that time.
Someday, I’ll write the details of that series, but suffice it to say that they went up to 10th level, saved the world, and then decided that their characters were going to retire.
The whole damned thing, from start to finish, was a near perfect story arc. My players and I loved every minute of it.
After we took a week off, we got back together and one of the players and I took turns running other games, including Traveller, Runequest, Tunnels & Trolls, and a Star Trek based series using modified AD&D rules.
Then my dad was diagnosed with cancer, one of my male players got a new night time job, one woman got pregnant, and our gaming got very infrequent. I think between October 1983 and June, 1985, when I moved from San Jose to Woodland, we played maybe 8 times. Life happens.
I learned a whole lot from that series, stuff that has shaped me as a Game Master ever since. And that’s what I’m going to be writing about here for the next few Thursdays. I hope you’ll join me.
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