The Berlin years

When I got to start at University, I converted Rocky Horror Picture Show, which I liked and had an audience participation tape of, into a RPG location for D&D, Frankenfurther Mansion. 

Once courses started, I wore a T-shirt with the cover Iron Crown's Gorgoroth, sporting three Nazgul riders in front of Mount Doom. That way I met Dirk, who was a D&D 1e player from Tübingen, one of the older students whose name I now cannot remember, I think Martin, and another co-student, Thomas, and we had the makings of a gaming group. Yvonne, another co-student, joined in, and one of her girlfriends for some time to, as did one more co-student whose name now eludes me, a blond guy who liked to wear black and who listened to industrial music. 

Dirk also was part Myra, of a play-by-mail from Tübingen, that was playing in a world established by a German pulp-magazine fantasy series I had never heard of nor read, but I started playing in there and played a pirate empire on the world segment of Corigani for a few years. Later I repurposed the rules mechanics to run a middle earth play by mail for a few years too, back then there was no internet quite yet, so you would get real letters and make photocopies in a copy shop to mail out the newsletters of the last turn. 

We did go to a retreat on a cottage in Schwaben that Dirk organized, and where he ran D&D Desert of Desolation, with Raoul, Yvonne and Thomas, and one where we were joined by a fun friend of his, Richie, who was super laid back. I also mastered a cottage playing Elric!, with a fantastic adventure by Dr. Stephen Schütte, Arioch's Children, one of the best I ever played. Thomas had nightmares from being in prison in game.

Berlin as Germany's biggest city of course was a heaven for role playing (or any other fringe hobby really), with several shops selling role-playing books and paraphrenalia, and several cons being organized, and there also was Nexus E.V., a roleplaying association. At these cons, I attended other play groups' tables, and ran some games too, and through this found serveral new friends and play circles. 

One of them was André, a guy from a low-education background, who lived in a bad part of the city, and was very smart and funny, but always embroiled in some financial difficulites or dubious business venture. He tried occutism and magic tricks, and he had not the most healthy eating habits and was heavily overweight. I played turn-based strategy games on the computer with him, Warlords and such, which was fun. He joined our regular group. We continued the Elric adventure, which stressed him when the weird people from behind the mirrors wanted to observe his character around the clock, and then played mostly Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay where André GMed, or Call of Cthulhu where I did. Yvonne also brought on Raoul, who was a super nice guy and one of the people running Nexus E.V., and with whom she was together for some time, but later they split and instead she brought her new partner along, and Raoul peferred not to come any more. 

At another Con I met both Pittel and Daniel. Pittel was part of a group of people that included another Daniel, a friend of Greg Stafford and Sandy Petersen and old-time Glorantha/Runequest player. I played in his Runequest group regularly, and got to meet Niels and his cute girlfriend Claudia, who also was a role player and competitive archer, Daniels wife Kerstin who would not play, but made delicious guacamole crackers for us, Robin who played a humakti duck, and Eini, an old schoolmate of Pittel. We also played regularly at Eini's place in Potsdam im Schwerterweg (Sword Way, a nice street name for a role player), also Glorantha, and Earthdawn (to this day I get an earful from Claudia that I killed her fairy with my necromancer), and we started a large scale battle game which never took off. They also organized Glorantha-related cons, were you would meet people from all over the world, many from the UK. 

The otherDaniel had a GM named Frank, who lived with his ancient grandmother in a nice old villa with high ceilings in Wannsee. I would treck out there once a week for a game in his hombrew "Silvermoon" world, playing homebrew rules derived from 1e D&D (I think). In this group I also met Stefan, and a few other regulars.

When Magic the Gathering came out in 1993 and flooded Berlin's role playing scene, I caught the bug too.  Nils, who was a mathematics student, introduced me to it, and trashed me with a black vise. Soon I was building lots of decks and playing a lot. Most of the others also did a little, and Daniel and Stefan likewise were into it, and of course we'd meet many other players, including Pischner who for many years ran an MtG blog. That is a different story, though. Pittel disliked Magic because it pulled people away from RPGs. Raoul also sold his cards after a while. I still continued to play role playing games, but not that much any more.

Old DSA Games of our youth

We originally played Das Schwarze Auge (DSA). We played it for several years, with me as DM and mostly the same party, from 1984, when DSA it came out, to about 1989, when we started to explore other systems. Four years of magical childhood and youth. 

Before we brought in other players, my brother and me we wrote and played a couple own adventures, that each would run for the other, one-on-one, to learn the ropes. The oldest one where some notes are still preserved was from him. It was written and played in the old Black Forest Libding-Cottage where we spend many of our childhood vacations. I recall it had a Tazelwurm, the most terrible monster in the origianl rules, and likely a deadly fight for a first level character, but he also put a weapon in it that could kill or scare off the wurm with a single use. Soon brought in other friends from school.

The original play-group consisted of my brother Marc playing first an adventurer called Frodo (yes, I know ... we were kids and it was not that unusual for early RPG to have blatant ripoff names) and later a druid named Bombax (and even later, another one named Dan Gat). His friend and classmate Andi played first a dwarf named Ragondir Zornbold, the name was from the intro booklet, and later a wizard named Madruk; my friend and classmate Dieter played a rogue ("Streuner") called Spuk, later a fighter called Quintus; and another of Marc's friends and classmates, Marian, was playing a fighter called Tschaba de Hut -- he dropped out after some time. The rest of us are still playing, 40 years later.

The first adventure was "Silvanas Befreiung" (Freeing Silvana), the intro adventure from the rulebook, sporting a small dungeon under the house of the initial self-play adventure in the port city of Havena. After the players cleared that dungeon, they made it the basis for their adventuring, outfitting it with traps and a treasure vault. 

We played nearly all the available official modules. From todays view, I would say that some of these adventures were badly designed, badly executed or generally boring, but when we were kids, and we knew no better, these worked for us.  We missed playing "Das Wirtshaus zum Schwarzen Keiler" (Black Boar Inn) for level 1 characters, the most well-known one of the original four modules, as we played others first then our characters were already too high level to go back to it.

• "Wald ohne Widerkehr" (Forest of No Return), level 1-2, you had to defeat an evil necromancer in a ruined castle in the eponymous forest. This was fun, fond memories.
• "Schiff der Verlorenen Seelen" (Ship of Lost Souls), level 1-3, a ship with bullywugs and crocodile lizard men; cannot recall much. Not great.
• "Die Sieben Magischen Kelche" (The Seven Magical Chalices), level 1-4, from which mostly an atrociously out-of-universe riddle is memorable - the answer was "Rolling Stones" and the riddle was talking about the real-world rock band 

Other adventures were published by Schmidt Spiele. Of those we played the following (the order might have differed, my memroy is vague after all these years):

• "Unter dem Nordlicht" (Under Northern Lights), level 3-8, an adventure in an ice palace, with puzzles. I think it had a puzzle with symbols that were the numbers 1-9, with their mirror images aligend to them. Not as cool as it sounds. 
• "Durch das Tor der Welten" (Through the Gate of the Worlds), level 3-8, a weird adventure on a huge "world-tree", where I checked the weight of equipment the party carried the first time, and was shocked that some lugged around 400+ pounds of armor and stuff, with extra full plate mails in their backpacks. I had them drop all the excess. The module sucked so we cut it short. 
• "Der Streuner Soll Sterben" ("he Rogue shall Die), level 4-8, nary a recollection of details other than of the undertaker who had entirely black skin, and that is was quite OK.
• "In den Fängen des Dämons" (In the Demon's Clutches), level 5-10 - this had a great scene with the wizard casting an illusion, and a nice cupboard of magic potions. Overall this was fun. 
• "Der Strom des Verderbens" (River of Doom), level 5-10. First PC death due an instant-death critical hit to Dieter's character by an Ogre. Otherwise so-so. 
• "Zug Durch das Nebelmoor" (Trail through the Mistmoor), level 1-3, this was fun, with an annyoing Kobold. It worked even though it was for a much lower level range, as it was not focused on combat, and DSA characters were less crazy at higher levels than D&D ones.
• "Die Verschwörung von Gareth" (The Conspiracy of Gareth), level 7-12, a medieval tourney.
• "Die Göttin der Amazonen" (Goddess of the Amazons), level 7-12. This was OK.
• "Die Fahrt der Korisande" (Journey of the Korisande), level 9-13. 
• "Der Wolf von Winhall" (The Wolf of Winhall), level 10-14, we played this at school, in a project week. Dieter's fighter Quintus cought Lycanthrophy and nearly would have been burned at the cross.
• "Verschollen in Al'Anfa" (Lost in Al'Anfa), level 10-14. A puzzle dungeon, with was entertaining, with a nasty twist at the end.

There was a German fanzine called "Fantasywelt" (Fanatsy World), that included D&D adventures which I converted to play with DSA. As I recall, we played the following adventures, ther first 4 were of the "Shadow" story cycle:

• # 4 "Der Priester des Chaos"(Priest of Chaos)
• #6 "Das Geheimnis des Silbernen Drachen" (Secret of the Silver Dragon)
• # 8 "Der Schattenwald" (Shadow Forest)
• #10 "In den Klauen des Schattens" (In the Claws of the Shadow). This ones I remember most clearly as it had great imagy of a shadow plane.
• #11 "Mutter der Skorpione" (Mother of Scorpions). This was an Arabian-Nights themed adventure that I extended a bit. Drasula, the evil wizardress escaped, and I wrote a sequel for it, "The Manticor's Trail".

Because there still were not enough adventures to keep up with our teenage spare time, So I wrote some myself. 

• A short overland travel adventure contained a scene with an ogre out of the introductory booklet turned into playabel content. I even sent in to the publisher, with hopes but of course no chances to this being used  in a publication. Since that was the handwritten original, I have no copy.
• "Die Spur des Manticor"(The Manticor's Trail) A continuation of the Fantasyworld desert adventure Mother of Scorpions with the same protagonist wizardress; memorable is a wizard duel between her and Madruk (which he unfortunately lost), the players getting captured and Dieter managing to hide a magical ring in spite of being stripped. They eventually escaped, won their equipment back and succeeded. 
• "Die Schwarze Perle" (The Black Pearl), set in the swamps near Havena. I vividly recall pacing on the upper floor of an exhibition space on a summer day, , thinking through the story, while my parents were putting up paintings for an exhibition, Unfortunately, while the thinking up was fun, this played boringly.
• A wild goose chase around the continent of Aventurien with several short scenes, Dieter guessed right at the start this would end up in the Aventurien in the Cyclop Islands, but they still needed to follow the whole sequence of clues to learn where exactly.
• "Der Fluch des Vampirs" (Curse of the Vampire) a vampire adventure with a castle ruin in the fog, faces at the window at night. Madruk nearly died, and the characters had a surprisingly hard time with skeletons that shot at them from a guard tower. This was great fun, and atmospheric. 
• A Puzzle-Dungeon, that had an actuall puzzle gimmick as a hand-out. The PCs ended up in an ancient dungeon complex and had to solve a number of riddles to figure out the exit password. This also was fun, although the players peeked in my notes when I went to the bathroom because one of the riddles was too hard. 
• A fight against a bandit gang in their camp, unnamed. One of the bandits, a huge bloke with a two handed maul was named "Hänschen" (litte Hans) and terrified the players. Many of the bandits were written to match to the pewter figurines we had bought at Games Workshop in the UK.
• The party eventually received a fiefdom, it may have been that won it by defeating an evil mage and his dragon [fragment]. This of course let to adventure set there.
• "Das Gemeinnis des Klosters" (The Secret of the Monastery), level 12-16 (?) (1989)  A monastery adventure for higher levels, where an evil minotaur good was to be summoned threatening to trash not only thier fiefdom. Among other things, the treasure included a magical gatling gun transported in a coffin (I had seen too many spaghetti westerns). I also learned that you can overdo the prep on boring mundane details like sleep schedules for the monastery. The level ranges are a bit mysterious in retrospect (it variously says it is for level 2-4, 2-5, 2-6, 12-16,). This was played towards the end of out DSA time, so it cannot have been low level, at this stage the characters must have been above 10th level. 

I also wrote the "Bierabenteuer" (Beer Adventure, this link is a polished version that others could run), on a school trip with our class, which was played with Dieter and another classmate, Michael, not with the main characters. The original notes wer lost, but here is an ad-hoc recreation early on I made to play it with someone on a train ride to introduce them to RPGs, and here is a later sketch, where details differ as this was also from memory, Similarly, my bother and I made and played side adventures with our friend Stefan while we were visiting the UK with a hostess family for a few weeks. The Palace of the Ice Witch for 2 adventurers of level 1-3 may have been from then (sporting snow wolves, an ice devil hating the witch, ice-kobolds, an ice dragon, ice gargoyles, and the ice witch/queen herself). 

"Nedime, die Tochter des Kalifen" (Nedime, daughter of the Caliph), a level 1-4 was solo adventure I played left an impressions from the layout of the house around a central courtyard. I also read/played "Borbarads Fluch" another solo, but it was a sore disappointment, because it was a scifi mashup with a spaceship and no Borbarad to be seen, rather than a cool adventure to meet Borbarad, the bad guy behind Schiff der Verlorenen Seelen und Die Sieben Magischen Kelche.  I also bought "Das Große Donnersturm Rennen" (The great Thunderstorm Race), an interestign adventure about a horse race, but we were off to playing D&D by then and never played it. 

At the end we started to convert D&D adventures from old Dungeon Magazine issues, as they had a lot of cool monsters and settings. Among them were

• Out of the Ashes, issue #17, from May/June 1989, levels 8-12, a red dragon in a dungeon in a overing crystal, I recall Madruk negotiating with the dragon in a separate room. 
• The hunt in Great Allindel, issue #17, levels 4-7, I remember the forest adventure part of this, which was quite nice. We also played The Pit from the same issue, with my brother as GM, but used Midgard rules.
• The Dark Conventicle, issue #11, levels 8-12, with an unfun witch hunter NPC I added, which taught me to not overshadow the PCs with powerful DM pet NPCs. We also played The Black Heart of Ulom from this one, again run with Midgard by my brother. I think this was one of the very last ones we played with DSA.

Towards the end I started tweaking the rules more and more too, using d20+mod to beat 20 or an opposed roll as a resolution mechanic. We started to experiment with other systems, like Midgard, that Ligi introduced, and Ligi mastered Call of Cthulhu's  Corbitt House for us, also introducing us to Call of Cthulhu that his group played. We joined them in a vacation retreat, that happend to be in the same village in the Black Forest as our vacation house. We also started MEPS/Rolemaster that my classmate Thomas had the rulesbooks for, and played a Rolemaster campaign in Middle Earth, and a few sessions of rolemaster Mythic Greece. Because I was of tired of converting D&D monsters, we started playing D&D with Dungeon Adventures outright.

That began with Ancient Blood from Dungeon #20, together with serveral people from Ligi's group, Ligi, Harner, Mehler, which was a fantastic kick-off and a lot of fun. By then my brother was in the US for an student year, and I was doing civil service and moved into my uncle's flat in Freiburg, where we played laying out the dungeon plans with paper strips on the carpted floor. Harner's character got maimed by the blob behind the crevice. Lots of memories of that one. Afterwards, we tried to play Tomb of Horrors, and Markus also joined in, as did one of Dieter's freinds, Kauff. But that was so tedious that we broke off. The most fun part was during a small prequel I ran, an underwater adventure where the party was trying to learn the background poem and its clues from a marid: Mehler cast lightning bolt with his fresh-minted 10th level wizard, and died in the resulting-self centered electroball. 

There were too many other things going on, Thomas ran Rolemaster in Middle Earth, playing fantastically stupid orcs and handing Grond, Melkor's hammer to my character, which turned out to be a mixed blessing. We also tried Shadowrun, run by Oliver, one of Marc's friends who went to another school, in his fathers house, and played more Call of Cthulhu. The DSA era had ended, and then the civil service eventually ended too, and we all moved to different places to study and my youth ended with it.