Dungeons & Dragons

​Greyhawk
Saltmarsh
White Plume Mountain
Slave Pits
Barrier Peaks
The Sea of Dust

To some these places may not ring a bell. To others, they are part of growing up. Growing up Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) caused a mix reaction to people. Some people thought it was the spawn of the devil, for others it was a world that allowed their imagination to grow.
 

​For me this was a place that influenced my imagination. It started when I received a red box that contained two things, a red book and a purple book. Within the red book, it had pcitures showing a world to explore. It was filled with information that contained different characters, spells, weapons, and monsters. The purple book describe a keep located on the Boarderlands. It talked about the Caves of Chos nearby that contained monsters to encounter. At first I just read through both of them, not understanding what to do with them. This was around 3rd or 4th grade.

Then one day at school a firend told me about a game and started explaining it to me. Then I started to put two and two together and realized that I already owned the game. From that point until college I would play this game off and on. There were different people i played with, but many adventures. I went into the Ghost Tower of Inverness, traveled into White Plume Mountain looking for Blackrazor. There was another time I decended into the depths of the earth and explored a downed UFO in the Barrier Peaks.
 

Even though I played it off and on, I started to collect a lot more rules, books, and modules. I would pick most of them up from Paradise Valley Mall. First at Toys by Roy then at Hobby Bench. One of my purchases was the World of Greyhawk boxed set. This contain two books discussing the world of Oerth in which the Free City of Greyhawk was located. It also included a huge map where I located the sites of the modules I had collected.

Here I located where the Slave Pits were, see the location of Saltmarsh, and create my own adventures that would take place in this world. During the course of the next years I would take them out and review them. Read more details or create places in my head.

Once I was familar with Greyhawk, something new came out. Another friend took me to a place called Ravenloft, then through the campaign of Dragonlance. Other times we started to use the book Orient Adventures to introduce elements from Japan. Then there was the town of Lankhamar that was brought in as a playable adventure that was based on story outside of D&D.
 

​​At the heart of my travels they always took me back to Greyhawk. Even now in my mind I can bring these worlds back. But why this travel down memory lane? If you talk to anyone who has played D&D they can relate their own adventures and stories, but there is something more that people who have never played don't understand. It is storytelling.

As the Dungeon Master (DM) you create a story that you tell others about. As they navigate through it, you can alter the story to adjust for their actions. As a player, you can explore a story then make decisions that alter the outcome of it. The story grows and lives as it proceeds. At the heart of it D&D is involved storytelling.

Now you might call me a geek, a nerd, or any other type of names you come up with because of how you remember D&D. That game played by the outcasts either in the corner of the playground, or the library. This does not bother me, because it is part of me. I think back to those adventures and the fun that was enjoyed playing them.