About

This blog aims to share: material for game mastering role playing games, in particular Dungeons & Dragons, role playing art, and views on adventures and systems I enjoy. The the drawings on this site are by Frank Schacherer. You can freely reuse them under the CC-BY 4.0 license. 





About me

I am from Germany, born before D&D was published. I got started on role playing games in 1984 by picking up a copy of Das Schwarze Auge (DSA), a German knock-off of Basic D&D. During our teenage years, we played each week. 

A store for comics and role playing games opened in our home town, and our diet exploded into Call of Cthulhu, Rolemaster, and AD&D, as well as Shadowrun, Midgard and many others as one-offs. What got us into AD&D originally was the dearth of published adventures and monsters for DSA, and Dungeon Magazine which offered affordable adventures galore that otherwise would have required laborious conversion of the monsters, which we did for some time. Our first adventure with AD&D rules was "Ancient Blood" from dungeon magazine. Unfortunately, we started using 2e that had just come out, instead of first edition.

We all went our different ways to work or study, but we rented a cottage once a year for a full time role playing retreat. We either played Cthulhu or AD&D and later switched to D&D 3e. For AD&D I ran a homebrew campaign on the Darlene Greyhawk map populated with Dungeon magzine adventures. I moved for university, Ph.D., and work, and got to play with new people and in new games each time.

As a grad student, I played Glorantha in a group of  Runequest grognards, AD&D in a homebrew Dark Sun campaign, Warhammer fantasy roleplay, Earthdawn and other one-offs, and occasionally Pendragon. I was running a Cthulhu game. Magic the Gathering came out, and started to consume more of my spare time for a while. During my Ph. D., I got to play Midgard once more. After starting to work, I played in a campaign using hombrew rules and introduced that group to D&D 3e

Work led me abroad and I did not play between 2005 and 2008. When I returned we got the band together again for a week-long retreat, and for a couple years I DM'd a D&D 3e and then Pathfinder campaign in annual installments in my old campaign world.

In 2012, we discovered online gaming tables, and started a new regular campaign, first with Pathfinder, then with D&D 5e, playing through classic adventures like the Drow/Giant Series. That campaign ended abruptly with Total Party Annihilation at the Green Devil Face in Tomb of Horrors.

Current campaign

Our current campaign started 2018. We played through Mines of Phandelver, Dragon Heist and now are grinding our way through Dungeon of the Mad Mage. These days, most of us have kids and demanding day jobs, so we get to play typically once every fourtnight for about 3 hours. If you can read German, you can follow our exploits here

On the side I run an occasional campaign with just two players, a mage and a paladin. We started with Tower of the Stargazer, which was awesome, and right now are at a combined Keep on the Borderlands, / In Search of the Unknown. Should we get through that, next is likely a large dungeon delve that is a hybrid of Zenopus Tower, an approximation  of the original Greyhawk Castle upper levels, F'Cheralk's tomb and Caverns of Tsojcanth and Maure Castle for the deeper levels -- an amalgamation of the oldest playworthy dungeons in exsitence. I also would love to run Caverns of Thracia once. You can follow that campaing (again, in German), here


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