The Berlin years

When I got to start at University, I had some spare time and 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 Nazgûl riders in front of Mount Doom. That way I met Dirk, who was a D&D 1e player from Tübingen, and also a cool older student whose name I now cannot remember, I think Martin, and another co-student, Thomas, and we had the makings of a gaming group. Yvonne, also a 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 skinny blond guy who liked to wear black and was into industrial music. 

Dirk also introduced me to 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. I started playing a pirate kingdom 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. 

Berlin as Germany's biggest city of course was a heaven for role playing (or any other fringe hobby really), with multiple shops selling role-playing books and paraphrenalia, and several cons being organized, and there also was Nexus E.V., a roleplaying association. Yvonne dated Raoul, one of the people running Nexus who was a super nice guy and native Berliner. At these cons, I attended other play groups' tables, and ran some games too, for example a Castle Ravenloft one-shot with pregenerated Characters, and through this found serveral new friends and play circles.  

One of them was André, a guy from a low-education background, was another native Berlier and  lived in a bad part of the city. He was smart and funny but always embroiled in some kind of financial difficulty or dubious business venture. He tried occutism and magic tricks, had unhealthy eating habits and was heavily overweight. I played turn-based strategy games on the computer with him, Warlords and such, which was fun. 

We did go to a retreat on a cottage in Schwaben that Dirk organized, and where he ran the D&D classic Desert of Desolation, with Yvonne and Thomas, Raoul (Yvonne's boyfriend), and were joined by a Richie, a super nice and laid back friend of Dirk from Tübingen. I also mastered a cottage playing Elric!, with a fantastic unpublished adventure by Dr. Stephen Schütte (that I got via Pittel, see below), Arioch's Children, one of the best I ever played. Thomas had nightmares from being in prison in game. We continued the Elric adventure in Berlin, and Andr'e joined us. It stressed him when the weird people from behind the mirrors wanted to observe his character around the clock. We also then played Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay where André GMed, or Call of Cthulhu where I did. 

At another Con I met both Pittel and Daniel, both also native Berliners. Daniel 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" version of Dark Sun, playing homebrew rules derived from 1e D&D. In this group I also met Stefan, and a few other regulars. These were nice adventures, although Frank ran a tough, though campaign. You had next to no resources, and were constantly struggling to just survive. 

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 Runequest on 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. 

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, Yvonne and Raoul. Daniel and Stefan likewise were more seriously into it, and of course we'd meet many other players, including Pischner who for many years ran an MtG blog and was a regular author in the German MtG scene. 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 Marc and me we wrote and played a couple of our own adventures, that each would run for the other, one-on-one. The oldest one where some notes are still preserved  is from him. It was written and played in the old Black Forest cottage where we spend many of our childhood vacations. I recall it had a Tazelwurm, the most terrible monster in the origianl rules, and 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 we 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 after that, another one named Dan Gat). His friend and classmate Andi first played 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 (I think named after a character in pulp horror magazines he enjoyed), and later a fighter called Quintus; and another of Marc's friends and classmates, Marian, played a fighter called Tschaba de Hut (yes, like the villain from Star Wars) -- 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 a house in the port city of Havena where the initial self-play adventure in the intro booklet also plays. After the players cleared that dungeon, they made it the base for their adventuring, outfitting it with traps and a treasure vault. 

We played every week on Fridays, and in the beginning, there were only four published adventure modules available.  From todays view, I would say that some of these early adventures were badly designed, but we were kids, and we knew no better: these worked for us.  

• "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 

We missed playing the best-known one of the original four modules, "Das Wirtshaus zum Schwarzen Keiler" (Black Boar Inn) for level 1 characters, as we played others first then our characters were already too high level to go back to it. 

Other adventures then were published by Schmidt Spiele along with an Expansion rule set. Of those we played the following (we mixed them in with the self written ones listed further down but my memory is vague after all these years to reconstruct any exact order):

• "Unter dem Nordlicht" (Under Northern Lights), level 3-8, an adventure in an ice palace, with puzzles. I recall a puzzle with symbols that were the numbers 1-9, with their mirror images aligend to them. Not as cool as it sounded. I wrote my own ice palace adventure, too (see below).
• "Durch das Tor der Welten" (Through the Gate of the Worlds), level 3-8, a weird adventure on a huge "world-tree". 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. It think this experience is why to this day I'm a stickler for encumberance rules. The module sucked so we cut it short. 
• "Der Streuner Soll Sterben" ("he Rogue shall Die), level 4-8, only recall the undertaker who had entirely black skin.
• "In den Fängen des Dämons" (In the Demon's Clutches), level 5-10 - 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 from new critical rules we used.  
• "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 "project week". Dieter's fighter Quintus cought lycanthrophy and nearly was burned at the cross.
• "Verschollen in Al'Anfa" (Lost in Al'Anfa), level 10-14. A entertaining puzzle dungeon, with a nasty twist at the end.

We also played solo adventures, but they did not count towards the campaign, and did not use our normal characters

• "Nedime, die Tochter des Kalifen" (Nedime, daughter of the Caliph), a level 1-4 was solo adventure impressed me with  the layout of the house around a central courtyard. 
• "Borbarads Fluch" (Borbarad's Curse) was a sore disappointment. I expected to explore the tower of and meet Borbarad, the legendary evil necromancer behind Schiff der Verlorenen Seelen und Die Sieben Magischen Kelche. Instead it was a scifi mashup with a spaceship and no Borbarad to be seen. Big letdown, a little like D&D's 2es Castle Greyhawk.  
• I also bought "Das Große Donnersturm Rennen" (The great Thunderstorm Race), not a solo and an interestign adventure about an overland race with many parties, but we were off to playing D&D by then and never played it.

I also wrote the "Bierabenteuer" (Beer Adventure, this link is a polished version), on a school trip with our class, which was played with Dieter and another classmate, Michael, not with the main characters. The original notes are lost, but here is an ad-hoc recreation early on I made to play it with a stranger on a train ride to introduce her 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). 

There was a German fanzine called "Fantasywelt" (Fantasy World), that included D&D adventures which I converted for play with DSA. As I recall, we played the following adventures, the 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 I remember most clearly as it had great imagy of the shadow plane.
• #11 "Mutter der Skorpione" (Mother of Scorpions). This was an Arabian-Nights themed adventure. Drasula the evil wizardress escaped, and I wrote a sequel for it, "The Manticore's Trail".

Intially there were not enough published modules to go around for filling our needs, so I as the DM wrote my own ones to fill in: 

• A short overland travel adventure contained a scene with an ogre mentioned in the introductory booklet turned into playable content. I even sent in to the publisher, but my early teenage handwritten scrawlings on a scrap of paper of course had no chances of 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 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, the settings port city where the intro adventures played, and for which we also had a Boxed Set. 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. 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 Cyclop Isles, 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 very atmospheric. 
• A Puzzle-Dungeon, that had an actuall puzzle gimmick as a hand-out. The PCs had to solve a number of riddles to escape an ancient dungeon complex. 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 side-trek fight against a bandit gang in their camp. One of the bandits, a huge bloke with a two handed maul was nicknamed "Hänschen" (Little 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, won if I recall right by defeating an evil mage and his dragon [fragment]. This of course let to adventure set there.
• "Das Geheinnis des Klosters" (The Secret of the Monastery), level 12-16 (1989)  An adventure for higher levels, where an evil minotaur god was to be summoned threatening to trash their fiefdom. Among other things, it 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 detail like sleep schedules for monks. The level ranges I gave vary widely - I think the monastery investigation part was low level, as there was little combat, the figth for the summoning gate againste demons was high level, as this was played towards the end of our DSA time. 

We also 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 hovering crystal, I recall Madruk negotiating with the dragon. 
• The hunt in Great Allindel, issue #17, levels 4-7, the forest adventure part of this 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 DM pets. I think this was one of the very last ones we played with DSA. We also played The Black Heart of Ulom from this one, again run with Midgard by my brother. 

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.

Around this time I finished High School ("Gymnasium"), and my brother and Andi went to the US for an exchange student year, bringing our regular play group to an end. I however was still in Freiburg, doing my civil service, moving into my uncle Hans' flat, and continued to play with other gamers.

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. We played laying out the dungeon plans with paper strips on the carpeted 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 friends, Kauff. 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.  But the module itself was so tedious that we broke off. 

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 - it was super powerful, but somehow it was not clear if the hammer or I was in charge now. 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.