This is completely not MMOG-related, but I thought I’d share something that occurred yesterday. You may find it of some interest; if not, that’s why RSS feeds are so easy to read.

Twenty months and twenty eight days ago, myself and several of my friends began a Dungeons and Dragons campaign called “The Shackled City”. A series of adventures published in the module magazine Dungeon proved very popular, and so they were released as a hardbound book with stats updated and some plot smoothed out. I was extremely taken with the story, and at the end of August 2005 we embarked on what would prove to be one of the finest roleplaying experiences of my life.

Some background here: I’ve been playing tabletop RPGs since I was ten. My first game was (sigh) the Palladium title Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness. I played a kung-fu ferret, or something, and a good time was had by the nerdy. By the time I reached high school I’d been dubbed the GM for the folks I played with, and ran D&D, Shadowrun, and Rifts games for several different cliques between 1990 and 1994 or so. I wasn’t that polished, they weren’t that focused, and so they didn’t last that long. Except for an occasional game run for a friend in Illinois during high school, I hung up my GMing license between the start of high school and the end of my college education.

Before I’d even moved back to Madison after my senior year at Evergreen State had ended, I was planning a new campaign. That outing, called simply ‘Cormyr‘, got my GMing legs back under me something fierce, and lasted almost two years. I’ve since run two Shadowrun campaigns and a D&D/Eberron campaign, and when I went into Shackled City it was with a degree of confidence in both myself and my players. They were all RPG vets, my gigs as a GM since getting out of college had been generally successful, and the material (so I thought at the time) was fairly interesting stuff.

We dove in just a week after getting back from Gen Con the year before last, and have been playing (for the most part) every Sunday since.

Last night was the last session of the game. It wasn’t even a ‘real’ session, just a denouement for the characters and players, a look ahead to what the now incredibly powerful and wealthy PCs would do with their spare time, political connections, and ample financial assets. We also did a ‘director’s cut’ of the game, where I went back and explained the numerous additions and changes I’d made to the as-written modules. D&D modules, as you may or may not be aware, tend to be long on action and short on actual roleplaying/storytelling directions. Despite this, and what some people might tell you, D&D is first and foremost a game about playing a role. Combat is fun and all, but if there’s no reason for the characters to fight you might as well be playing nethack.

This campaign will go down in my life as a worthwhile accomplishment for a number of reasons. It seemed yesterday as though the players left the game with a high degree of satisfaction: first and foremost the goal of anyone running a tabletop game. If the players aren’t having fun, you’re doing it wrong. Another reason: we have a ridiculously complete record of the whole damn thing. Thanks to the tireless efforts of Alan De Smet (Alan in the comments here on the blog) and his brother Brian, the Shackled City Wiki alternates between the third and fourth entry on Google for the term ’shackled city’. The website documents the entire experience, from session one onward, and (as long as the site lives) will provide me with context for some of the in-jokes I expect to be with me for as long as I live. Apparently, you say the phrase ‘Unicorn-humper’ once, and you’re marked for life.

Most of all, I’m going to look back on this worthwhile accomplishment from the context of confidence building. When you’re in the thick of things, dealing with the game on a weekly basis, it’s easy to get caught up in the minutiae of dice rolls and stat blocks. Looking back on the last year and half or so … I think I’ve done a good thing.

If you have some spare time on this, a weekday holiday in the States, go read over the adventures of seven friends and their wacky alter-egos. And ehh … if you read the quotes … please try not to judge. :D