I recently unearthed a box full of old things reaching back into my late teens playing D&D. It’s got everything- maps, character sheets, random sketches, games I was in, games I was running. I’ll do my best to recall as I go down the list.
First up is my literal first ever character I played. Circa 2008, my freshman year of college. Apparently I made it to level 4.
It was another year or so before I played in another campaign, and when I did it was a 3.5 SUPER SPLATBOOK character. The guy that ran this game never wanted to start at lvl 1 and I remember being so annoyed trying to figure out how to make a level 6 character with no 3.5 experience, I have no idea why I was using so many splatbooks, I think I borrowed them from the DM and he wanted to watch me suffer I assume.
Next up is a big map of Krynn. I seem to remember finding “Tales of the Lance” on the side of the road, with these maps and the character cards with all the stat blocks but NO BOOK. These then got folded in during a game purge some years ago I imagine. There are a TON of these cards, basically one for each Dragonlance character, which at the time I knew nothing about so I would use them when I needed NPCs for whatever game I was running. I still really love this map, the colors are great and the hex crawl on the back is such an ode to luxurious TSR mapmaking. 10/10
The next chunk of scrap paper is all from a AD&D 2E campaign I played in for a number of years after college. It was a pretty standard wilderness crawl/dungeon explore style game and I really, really had a great time with it. This was from like, 2013-2017 off and on, so it was a pretty expansive game. First time I actually leveled a character from 1-6 instead of an impatient DM just wanting to start at a higher level. I recommend not skimping on early levels, that’s your backstory. The campaign was referred to as “Suplex That Mummy” after an incident in a crypt. I’ll let you guess what happened.
It’s cool to play a character long enough that your art style changes and develops during the process. I still make Marek in various games now and then, love that guy.
this was part of a much shorter lived “monster game” in which we used some 2e splatbook to make monster characters in a sort of fantasy apocalypse world where humans had all died. The second piece was an early digital rendition of the same character. I have to say it’s kind of painful to post old digital art, my ability to draw on a computer has come a long way.
speaking of old painful art, this is a party of characters that myself, my good friend, and my girlfriend (now wife) in college made. It was a CLASSIC scenario of taking about 3 weeks making a cool party of high level 3.5 characters and we played in that game like 2 times and the DM pissed us off so we parted ways. DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS.
The next strata is a strange assortment of drawings that I pulled out of a sketchbook for some reason, only to stick the pages in this box. I honestly have no idea, but I really like some of these still.
These large, folded in half giant drawing pad pieces were part of a game I ran over Google Plus for some friends back in around 2014ish I want to say? It was my first time building a system, which was a semi success for what I tried to do with it (not publish or anything, just like, play) but the city itself has appeared in many of my games since then in various iterations. It’s called Bethodere, and the name is stolen from a book of Marc Bolan’s poetry called “The Warlock of Love” what a goddamn hero.
I did actually just run the game off of this giant paper, which was very stupid and I would totally do again. Big paper makes every task both easier and harder. The table is never big enough but you finally have enough room for notes.
These are from an era of running Lamentations of the Flame Princess megadungeon style games. The characters were all from 17th century earth exploring a big complex. I really liked having the items on cards despite it being a little clunky. Everything was designed to fit inside the envelope so people wouldn’t lose track of their stuff. It was the first open table game that I ran and it was a blast. Ran for probably 6 months or so?
some variations on characters sheets I was producing at the time. I was sometimes using LoTFP but a lot of the time it was a homebrew between that, 5e and a few other random resources. I was really into putting rules on the sheet and getting as much info as I could into a small space.
this one was for a later megadungeon game that never really took off. A keen eye can probably spot six or seven games worth of influence in this one.
sadly there were no more sheets in this, only the spell specific ones.
I did some googling on this next thing and I guess it’s what the Dragonlance Cards came as a part of before I hacked them up. There’s also a fortune telling card game thing that I think I got rid of at some point. Nice Keith Parkinson art though.
there were a few more things in the box, but nothing of note really. Fun to reminisce on what I’m realizing now is about 15 years in the hobby. I don’t think this box ever had whatever edition of rules cyclopedia in it. I’m sure I grabbed it from a yard sale at some point and it was just full of someone’s old character sheets.
