Today's my birthday!
To celebrate, Wizards of the Coast were kind enough to release the all new 2024 edition of the Player's Handbook for Dungeons & Dragons. But what's even cooler is that today also marks the 40th Anniversary of the day I first played D&D.
Way back in 1984, I didn't really know what Dungeons & Dragons was, but I'd seen the Basic Set in the red box on store shelves a few times and I thought it looked awesome. I kept asking my mom for it but we didn't have a lot of money back then, so I had to wait with my fingers crossed for my birthday to come around. When it finally did, I was bouncing with joy as I flipped through the Player's Manual and started to figure out how this cool game worked.
I played (or mostly just read) the Start adventure (poor Aleena). Then I played the solo adventure probably three or four times until I got the hang of it. But after that, I kind of ran out of road. My mother was not interested in this strange game (I think she preferred Backgammon back then), and with no siblings or even any family in town, I didn't have anyone to play with. I asked some friends at school, but sitting around inside writing stuff down and doing math was not a great pitch back in the early '80s. So aside from trying the solo adventure a couple more times with characters I made myself (a dwarf and then a thief), I didn't get much more mileage out the Basic Set.
The next year I started highschool, and to my great excitement, there was a D&D club, which I joined immediately. The club was organized by a friend named Sathi who put us all into gaming groups (the city of Sathirajan from the Mythmaster World Guide is named in his memory.) That's how me and my friend Dave (who I would go on to play Ultima IV with) met John, Jason and Paul, and the five of us started playing Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.
John agreed to be the Dungeon Master and the rest of us made our first characters; I was an elf fighter named Dangor (what a terrible name), Dave was a Paladin named Paladon (equally terrible) Paul was an elf cleric named Crow (myeh) who used a long sword (sacrilege!), and Jason was a thief whose character name I forget (but almost for certain was the best named of the bunch). Over the course of that campaign we confronted the threats and challenges thrown at us by our wily nemesis The Antipaladin - an evil undead paladin who sought to conquer the world from his magical, plane-shifting castle.
We played AD&D for a couple of years until John, Jason and Paul all graduated ahead of me and Dave, and our group fragmented. Fortunately, though, I was able to drift into another group with John and Jason who were playing a different game called EXP. EXP is an absurd science-fiction RPG created by a friend of ours named Hugh (you can play it here!). There were probably twenty different people in and out of the EXP group over the years. I think I must have played EXP from '88 until '93. At the same time, I also started another gaming group with Paul - and we played a few different games; AD&D of course, but we also tried Gamma World, Paranoia and others.
From the many people I met and played with in these different groups, I got exposed to a wide range of different games - many of which I only played a few times. Some of them included Star Frontiers, Boot Hill, Car Wars, Top Secret, Traveller, Champions, Shadow Run, Warhammer, and Rune Quest - and certainly others I have forgotten. My favorites, and some of the strongest influences on Mythmaster were Paranoia (for factions) Rune Quest (for progression) and Traveller (for character creation). In fact, when I started learning to code so I could build the Mythmaster character generator tool, I relied heavily on a javascript character creator for Traveller that helped me understand some of the basic architecture in order to get started.
Sometime around '93 a new core group formed with myself and Jason, along with another Jason, Greg and Pat. The five of us (and many others who would drift in and out over the years) mostly played GURPS. We played Cyberpunk, Espionage, Martial Arts, Supers, Psionics, Victorian Era, Imperial Rome, and a bunch of different universes and campaigns using the many GURPS source books. GURPS was great, because making characters was fast and flexible, and progression was thin and de-emphasized, which made it easy for us to play one-shots or mini-campaigns, taking turns as GM to suit our schedules and our wide range of interests.
I was playing with that group frequently before I left it all behind in 2001 to move from Vancouver to Montreal to start working in the game industry. Sadly, I never really got into a new gaming group in Montreal, and I largely left the TTRPG world behind for 10+ years before I started working on Mythmaster - the history of which I detailed in my previous post. Looking back on it over the last ten years that I have been working on the game, I realize I missed something of a renaissance. Hundreds of small TTRPGs have been released, and in the last few years I picked a few of them up (mostly to study). It's awesome how many systems and universes there are out there for players to dive into.
So in honour of the release of the latest edition of the D&D Player's Handbook, and to celebrate exactly 40 years of D&D for me, I decided to ship the DnD 2024 Celebration Update.
In version Beta 2.1.1 you'll find a new NPC; the Wizard Zovtecoste, and his familiar, the 1000-lb Gorilla 'Deendie'. Mythmaster is completely free for as long as it's in Beta, so feel free to check it out and let me know what you think. Maybe forty years from now, you'll be marking the anniversary of the first time you played my game (and hopefully I'll be turning 92).
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