Phystus

Hello everyone! This will just be a short post to let you know who I am, and why I’m here.

My name is Walt, and I’ve been playing and running RPG’s for a long time. I got started with D&D back in 1979, using the original books plus Holmes Basic, and I started as a DM in 1981. I’ve played or run at least 25 systems, and in a range of genres, but the great bulk of my GM experience is with AD&D (1st edition) and D&D 3.5.

I run homebrew settings almost exclusively. When I started out, one of the big attractions of RPG’s was that once you had the rulebooks and dice all you needed was paper, pencils and a good imagination. As long as you had those, you could play for as long as you wanted. Since I didn’t have a lot of money, that sounded very appealing.

I had a hard time finding anyone locally who played (I lived in a small town in Iowa at the time) but eventually I found a group and talked my way in. In one session I was hooked, and there was no looking back.

My first experience as a GM was in 1981, running a summer program at the local library (where I also worked). My original plan had been to run the only module I owned (B2, Keep on the Borderlands, which came with the Holmes Basic set) but some of the kids had already played it, so I had to write my own dungeon. It went pretty well, and the die was cast (so to speak).

In college it was easy to find games, and I spent much too much time playing all the RPG’s of the day. I was usually asked to DM, and I didn’t mind doing it, but since I still was broke I still had to write my own adventures and settings. Eventually, though, I moved out of state, as did some of the other regular players in our group, and that was that. I tried to find or start groups in my new hometown, but they never stayed together for long. I still stayed in touch with my old college chums, and we all still wanted to game, but of course we were spread all over the country by then.

In 2008 my wife and I were at Gen Con, and we happened to see the Smiteworks booth. We hadn’t really heard of virtual tabletops before, but the rolling dice caught our eye, and the promise of gaming with our old friends held our imagination. We downloaded the demo and tried it with several folks from our old group, and everyone agreed that we should try to reboot the old campaign and play it online. We purchased our licenses, and we have never regretted it. We play once or twice a month, as schedules allow, running in the same campaign, and with some of the same characters that we started with back in 1988. It has been huge fun.

In this blog I plan to write about my experiences with reuniting the old group and rebooting the old campaign. I also hope to write about some of the things I have learned in 35 years of DM’ing and creating homebrew campaigns, as well as some of the things I have learned about using virtual tabletops in general, and FG in particular.

If you have questions, comments, criticisms, or something you’d like to hear more about please leave a comment. Thanks for reading!