Direbane is an abode to share artifacts, simulacra, histories, and other items of note related to ongoing years adventuring.
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Saturday, August 23, 2025

Anatomy of Grown-Ass Dysfunctional Dungeons and Dragons Games

 
("How it started" by Mike Morrison)

As my gaming group hit the 1990's and individual players our late 20's into our thirtysomethings, we left a trail of alcohol bottles, cigarette butts, vomit, hanger heads, stacked and painted people, and fucking hellacious games. 

Our DunDraCon game sessions were so renowned we designated them with proper nouns: The undercover Flower People ('92), Pee-Wee Herman's genie-inspired Jambicon ('93), methamphetamine-fueled Jitterycon ('94), insanely drunk dungeon mastering Revenge of the Son of Greg ('95), and the Wild Turkey 101 extravaganza Executive Decision ('96). 

Now I wouldn't recommend drinking, drugs, insanity to anyone. And eventually they exact their pounds of flesh. As these epic games progressed through the decade I entered the Dark Times from 1997 through 2004, coming out of that for our group to begin running some things where sessions were more, say, congruent?

However, while reviewing another one of our old videos, this one from 1996, I remembered we did have a rhythm to our games that sat on top of whomever was running the game and whatever the details were of the adventure. I always said our sessions were like poker games where you didn't lose any money. All night affairs to avoid imperial entanglements. In general if you were there for the game you were there for the night.

We generally ran about 6-8 games each year rotated to different locations, including annual games at DunDraCon and a variety of camping locations for our annual camping trip. 

Each game had distinct parts that recurred each session...


The Drive: Since by this decade of the 90s most of us had jobs and were raising families there was some dispersment around the San Francisco Bay Area and Northern California. Unless you were hosting there was often a 1-3 hour beer-fueled freeway trip to get to the game location.

The Jam: Many of the folks in my gaming group were either presently or formerly in bands together so there were electric and acoustic music jams to kick off the event (much to the chagrin of our non-music playing friends). 

The Feeding Frenzy: Most often BBQ, but for sure some kind feast either hosted or pot luck before the game. So everyone started the night with a good meal in their belly - sometimes with disastrous results!

Pre-Game Business: Who was here last time? How many experience points were awarded? Was their time to train and level up? What the hell is going on now??? We rotated DMs after 3 sessions for two co-DMs and after a single game for solo DMs.

The Game: This is it, the game session where all the action happens either connected or not with the prior session or any sort of campaign arc. (Our characters became unstuck in the Multiverse and could end up virtually any place or time.)

The Interlude Journey: This most often occurred around 1-2am involving Sumerled and whomever he could drag along for the alcohol/cigarettes/snacks/candles/etc.-run. That magical time during the Witching Hour when a previously bare fridge would become amazingly restocked to the brim with Budweiser.

Stacking: Did not want to be the first to pass out at our games. We practiced a parlor game we called "stacking" which was basically to see how many pizza cartons, paper plates, dog masks, candles, etc. we could build on top a dozing player without causing them to move and have the entire structure come tumbling down. Extra points for the number of empty beer can layers, the record was at least 4 and maybe 5 cans high. This might involve face painting.

Wind-down: As the sky turns from black to purple and then the Sun begins to peek our game is wrapping up, early sleepers are waking up and the hardcore beer-drinkers are still drinking beer. Might involve a little quiet acoustic guitar, baseball catch, or hurling in the corner of someone's yard.

Breakfast/The Ride Home: Some games, like DunDraCon and the camping trip, J.A.S. would break out his gas grill for pancakes. Otherwise it was some kind of fast food breakfast sandwich on the drive home, which often also involved more beer albeit not consumed quit so vigorously as the previous night's trip.

If we had an agenda for each games session this would be it. The lack of sleep and overabundance of alcohol was not sustainable, recovery time from each game increased as the years went by. Most of us are on the proverbial wagon now, and even those that still imbibe generally are not pulling all-nighters.

Amazingly, with most of the original group in their sixties now, we only lost one of our friends - Postman Bob, RIP, who passed back in 2011.

What did we earn from all of these games? Ha, one thing is we kind of do whatever the fuck we want within the context of our careers. Another is that when emergencies occur and late or all night hours are required we laugh when other more normal folks are whimpering. 

("By Crom" by Shel Kahn)



Friday, August 15, 2025

The Astral Asshole

 


The Blipping Campaign, Friday November 29, 1996

Magic Item of Note: Mithral Torch (+1 to Wisdom, True Sight line of sight, it burns twice as bright as a normal torch (80 feet). Once per month everyone within the light has protection from evil and undead within the light are effected as if by sunlight.)

Game Background Music: Old Dick Dale (I think), Ministry, and the Steve Miller Band.

So from where J.A.S. is indicating in the Deities and Demigods we were battling Cthulhi Mythos, namely Nyarlathotep in this session. Plus it seems to have some friend with him. It seems creatures from the Far Realm (called the “Aberrant Realm” in my game) are fleeing from something even worse The Old Ones.

In my pre- and post-End of Time scenario then the New Old Weird World adventuring party (or parties) could encounter two Illithid time-traveling starcrafts, one from the Illithids preparing to travel backwards in time to escape the End of Time event and the second the first Illithids’ ancestors who traveled forward in time to escape the Githyanki. Both are aware of the impending End of Time event and presumably would be aware of involvement by the Old Ones.

The Cthulhu connection from the Blipping Campaign is interesting because the New Old Weird World campaign also intersected with some Cthulhu mythos after escaping from a future Sigil. We departed from the besieged Cthulhu lands by way of resetting the mysterious “Great Portal of Broya,” ending up in an unstuck, time and space-wise, Tegal Manor.

Now I have a couple tricks to play with:

1. One is my thoughts of using the Decanter Room extradimensional space broken through to the Shadow Plane (a colloquial name, not any “official” Plane of Shadow); and

2. How the Old Ones intersect with the End of Time even and their essential indifference to the rest of reality.

Wednesday, August 13, 2025

More Slippery Time ...


I have 2 D&D campaigns running post-End of Time event: Wilderlands 5th Iteration and the shared Psychedelic Deadlands / Dreamer of Dreams (co-DMed with Dr. John PhD), both running 5th edition 2024 rules. The new Wilderlands game incorporates 5e recreations of the original Judges Guild by Goodman Games (Caverns of Thracia and City State of the Invincible Overlord) and Frog God Games (Tegel Manor) with plans to very loosely lay "Tula, City of Mages" over the 5e Historica Arcanum "The City of Crescent" (Victorian-era Istanbul with magic) from Metis Creative. My Psychedelic Deadlands piece of the shared campaign is set in a nascent Outlands centered - again very loosely - around Monty Cook Games 5e version of Ptolus, City By the Spire and surrounded spreading outward, among other things, with hacked bits from the Ultra Violet Grasslands (2nd Edition) by Luka Rejec and Numenera, also by Monty Cook.

My longtime gaming and jamming buddy J.A.S. has moved to a big piece of property waaaay up in the higher foothills California side of the Sierra Nevada mountain range. The makes it quite a hoof to journey up there for D&D and playing music. After our first visit there we had an idea that we could re-enact anew one of our old gaming traditions: the annual camping trip (albeit with the comfortable situation of electricity, running water, and no Park Rangers).

We had left our New Old Weird World campaign hanging just at the time our heroes were on the the Mind Flayers' home planet of Penumbra searching for the Annulus psionic nullity device with pursuing Githyanki warriors barking at the party's collective heels. I thought a great idea would be to have an overnight affair up there with the gang for guitar jam and a tournament-style session of gaming to resolve the mess of the Mind Flayers traveling back in time to re-enslave the Gith origin peoples.

However... it seems the New Old Weird World campaign must have started before the end of time event, although definitely far in the future of the campaign multiverse and seemingly near the end of time event itself.

During the seminal sessions (heh, heh ... he said “semen”) of the New Old Weird World campaign the party met Sick Rick’s old PC “Ranger Rick” from the Original 90s Blipping Campaign. At the time Ranger Rick had been for “hundreds of years” magically kept in an undying state deep in a dungeon designed to keep something in (Deep Carbon Observatory by Patrick Stuart). When he encountered the party he offered a warning, “They’re here from the shadow,” then used the dispel magic ability from the Blipping Campaign’s Amethyst Throne to remove the magic keeping him “alive” and permitting him to die.

Now I’ve looked back to see where we left of the Blipping Campaign PCs. This was before we rolled characters for a “less good” Blipping Campaign in December 1997 when I began to have other priorities... I don’t have any notes from the last session we gamed with the original Blipping PCs, but there is a video (oh god yes) from the second-to-last session titled “The Astral Asshole” no less.

This also happens to be the last video from our classic AD&D 1st Edition period of gaming which lasted from December 1977 through February 2005. (Out of preservation for our battered original rule books and to have some welcome updates to the somewhat confusing original Gygaxian rules, whenever we’ve played “AD&D”-style since we’ve used some retro-clone.)

Now that I am getting closer to the End of Time event, I'll also note (again) the New Old Weird World Campaign wasn’t the only party of PC adventurers who had reached the Mind Flayer home world of Penumbra. Our “Blipping #2” campaign from a far-future Wilderlands had discovered in undead caverns on Ghenrek IV an Illithid Spelljamming Nautiloid ship which had an autopilot taking that party to Penumbra.

So there are two parties on Penumbra as the Illithids attempt to flee. Could there be two sets of time-traveling Illithids? There are for sure the Illithids planning to escape the End of Time event by time travel to the past. But there are also the ancestors of those Illithids fleeing the past back to the future. Should they meet, hmmmmmmm...

Friday, July 4, 2025

Slipping Time in Dungeons and Dragons (Another Essay Wherein It Is Good Players Do Not Read My Blog)


I have devoted lots of hours (weeks, months, years, decades) toward the Dungeons and Dragons game, right up there with jobs, and only essential compensation having been companionship with my fellows of the game. (There is also a distinct possibility based on personal and family history I am somewhere on the spectrum for autism and that D&D helped me build self-esteem and rewrite my personal narrative, ha, so there is that too.) The campaigns I run I attempt as best I can to all fit together in strange and wonderful ways into a single overarching setting. This banks time I can re-use to construct narrative background and provides great rewards forming common existential bases for the variety of adventuring party settings and events.

However, several campaigns over the past 5 years have reached a point where they have begun to approach and even wrap around an “End of Time” event where I feel the need to at least make an observational leap to what happens at the “End of Time” for my game.

The caveats are that my observations must be somewhat in harmony with how the still-developing adventuring campaigns have already “wrapped” around the end of time. And also be as best as I can manage philosophically consistent with the game Multiverse which in various magic and lore has already co-signed time travel itself as a thing. That said, I am not too much worried about specific outer plane Gygaxian metaphysics because what I imagine is a moment where time and space do, or at least seem to, cease to exist – temporal movement, the Multiverse, and all related planes are gone… or perhaps almost gone. Of necessary the event itself is beyond experience for any planar and extra-planar beings or spaces.

****NOTE: I have used in-game the apocalyptic description for the “End of Time” reckoning from Star Rovers RPG, co-written by David Hargrave, which I loosely pasted over some Judges Guild Traveller background… 

For Time has begun to run out. The Hurrakku — they who would gnaw their way through a starcluster and leave nothing in their wake — had already starswarmed. And even though they were still more than forty galaxies away, they were headed in the Empire’s direction.

But they were only the messengers of a great doom. What goaded the Hurrakku onward was the fear of impending annihilation. There loomed behind them an expanding, starless, blackness — A rift in the Space/Time fabric grown so large that it consumed the Past, the Present, and the Future. This was the Final Darkness that Would Cancel Everything!

And also the description from the 3.5 supplement Lords of Madness that Illithids existed “… at the end of time.” “Facing annihilation,” Illithids “… traveled to the past, arriving roughly 2000 years before the present in any given D&D campaign.” Mind Flayers are almost always lurking in the background of my campaigns.

Otherwise, without so far having researched in any depth folks smarter than me on the subject, either in a game sense or our own “real world” physics, I am attracted to 4 possibilities that might fit given I’ve already gamed adventuring parties whose adventures at least seem to have wrapped beyond the end of time relative to parties prior to the “End of Time” event.

Full Stop / “Dead End”: The Multiverse “births” then events unfold in a singular routine. Time travel past and forward is unable to change events because appearances in the past/future have or will have already happened or deigned to occur. This is Robert A. Heinlein’s “The Door Into Summer” version and how I generally structured time travel in my game without having yet added the “End of Time” epistemological considerations. But with time travel another possibility arises for perpetuating the game Multiverse...

The Loop / “Roly Poly”: The existent “wrap” in my game may indicate time folded back on itself as characters or beings head back in time before the “End of Time” event, but appear early in the generation of the Multiverse such that it only seems new. Yet ultimately, given “The Door Into Summer” the Multiverse unfolds exactly the same as a result of no change with the inputs (i.e. anything that happens in the past has already happened). A game could have new characters and delve deeper into incidents for how this or that history actually occurred – but characters would have no agency to change actual events that are “known,” either in game or meta–game. That is sort of a bummer given my sanboxxy sensitivities, which leads to my next possibility…

Re-Birth / “New Big Bang”: Something nature to the “End of Time” event, or perhaps some interruption or alteration or missing/hidden piece of the Multiverse re-births into a new multiverse, sort of a new Big Bang with new possibilities, and explains the formation of a Multiverse some ways similar to, but not exactly same or maybe very different than, the former Multiverse. There is also a possibility of entities from the old multiverse to jump through time over the “end” and “bang” events into the new Multiverse.

Of course, it could be that “The Door Into Summer” set history is not the nature of the Multiverse, leading into the 4th possibility I consider…

Temporal Branches / “Time-Stems”: This is a William Gibson-esque infinite multitude of potential universal timestreams where time travel does not change the source Multiverse, but rather produces an alternate branch of time. While it is not possible to physically pop over from one time-branch to another, characters would still meet beings from their origin Multiverse altered only in the sense of their contact with different branches. Potentially an infinite number of Multiverses from which, as a result of cross contamination through time travel, it would be virtually impossible to discern which is the “real” Multiverse, or even if that really matters. 

Anyhow, that is a long explanation being the good news is that I do not need to answer any of these questions quite yet. I can preserve a timeline of my campaigns to date (below) to set some parameters, then just see what direction where go the present campaigns.


I have 2 campaigns on hiatus that both are approaching near the “End of Time” event that some of the players are encouraging me to run “tournament style” and the remaining campaigns I feel are post-”End of Time” event, so possibilities 1 & 2 seem to be excluded and I am leaning into possibility 3.

CAMPAIGNS TIMELINE

The years are 1st Year 0 relative to the High Fantasy campaign (where the time stuff began to loosely cohere), 2nd the Wilderlands Balozkinar’s Corrected Commoners Calendar (“BCCC”), and 3rd Greyhawks Common Year calendar (“CY” and “BCY”). Note that many dates are approximations.

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-47,733 / -43300 / -47,158: Uttermost War comes to an end.
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-35,000 / -30567 / -34,423: During Century Wars of Domination Agent Smith arrives from early 21st Century Earth and is transformed into cybernetic unit 718552.
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-2,000 / 2433 / -423: Future Illithids arrive in past.
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-200 / 4233 / 376: Githyanki uprising, future Illithids disappear from past & Astral Plane.
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0 / 4433 / 576: High Fantasy Campaign begins in the Wilderlands, Blipping #2 Campaign begins in Sigil, Wilderlands of the Torment Nexus Campaign begins in the Wilderlands and a cursed scroll from the ancient Markab ruins in Ashenshaft and found in the library of the Wizard Korpauntarl transported the adventurers through time and dimensions in space to Cube World.
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1 / 4434 / 577: Blipping Campaign begins in Arduin. High Fantasy thermonuclear-like explosion resulting from Tharzadu'un traversing portal escaping to Arduin - Artaban/Codex of the Infinite Planes intervenese saving party; throws Blipping Campaign to be "unstuck" in the Multiverse.
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2 / 4435 / 578: Baron Uther of Blackmoor activates the “secret weapon” from City of Gods in Valley of the Ancients, unwittingly a massive terraforming device, and the planet Ghenrek IV is forcibly tilted from its axis.
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4,000 / 8433 / 4,576: Blipping Campaign #2 arrives in future Comeback Inn.
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16,345 / 20778 / 16,921: Blipping Campaign #2 arrives in late 20th Century Earth.
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16,355 / 20788 / 16,931: Blipping Campaign arrives in late 20th Century Earth.
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16,565 / 20998 / 17,141: Blipping Campaign #2 arrives in late 22nd Century Demonic Earth.
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20,000 / 24433 / 20,576: Space/Time Rift approaches Imperium, Blipping #2 Campaign arrives in future Ghenrek IV/Ghostring to discover Illithid Spelljammer which carries them to Illithid origin disc-world “Penumbra.” New Old Weird World Campaign adventurers also end up on Penumbra after visiting future Sigil and future Illithids depart the future to the past. 

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Out of Time and Wrapped Campaigns
  • New Old Weird World Campaign: A flat disc planet (on the back of a turtle?) on pocket plane (post “End of Time” event) but passes through a far future Sigil to Penumbra prior to Illithids fleeing (pre-"End of Time" event)
  • Wilderlands of the Torment Nexus: Wilderlands of High Fantasy on Prime Material Plane (Pre-"End of Time" event), sent to Cube World on pocket plane (Post “End of Time” event)
  • Psychedelic Deadlands / Dreamer of Dreams Campaign: On Outlands and Prime Material Plane (Post “End of Time” event)
  • Wilderlands 5th Iteration: Wilderlands of High Fantasy on Prime Material Plane (Post "End of Time" event and pre-"End of Time" event???)