Favourite Character You Have Played.

Of the handful of characters I played my all time favourite was an AD&D 2nd edition Chronomancer called Garvine of Shadowdale.  The class came from the TSR supplement about a specialist wizard that could manipulate time and was probably the only sort of specialist I ever played.

He was human and hailed from Shadowdale in the Forgotten Realms and always had his quartz crystal in the shape of an hourglass.

There was something special about him, I enjoyed the fact that the spells I had may not directly injure people but could do other fantastic effects; like push an opponent a few minutes into the future which would temporarily remove them from combat.

Early on in his career he obtained a wand of lighting bolts which proved to be very useful to the group and he wasn’t shy of entering hand to hand combat either with his staff and battle cry of “swingy-swingy-clonk”.

The funny thing was that if I was to say the battle cry before I rolled the die to hit, I was nearly always successful in my endeavours to strike my target.

We stopped playing when Garvine got to 8th level, which was the highest level I had ever reached as a player.  Somewhere in a folder I still have the character but I guess it would need updating to the latest rules to play him.

Favourite deity

Without a doubt it has to be Cthulhu.  I know it’s a bit of a contentious choice but according to the first printing of Deities and Demigods he’s a god and that’s good enough for me.

Favourite Gameworld

The Forgotten Realms is by far my favourite because of the amount of detail that has been lavished upon it.

I remember seeing all the adverts in the comics I used to read advertising this wonderful new land to explore and play in.  It was my friends who first got me interested in the realms as they were reading the novels and I thought it sounded a pretty neat place to run adventures in.

I remember that I was overcome with joy when I finally got the original grey box edition and poured over the books inside, it left me feeling ecstatic and determined even more to use this world for my campaigns.  After that I bought each book I could and devoured the realms lore contained within; each volume adding more layers of detail that could be peeled back and digested at will.  For the hard to get stuff I tracked down the miniature reprint editions and did my best to read them.  Somewhere I have the Undermountain reprint boxed set signed by Ed Greenwood himself.

I really liked the Volo’s guides as they were written as a travel guide so I could hand that volume to my players and they could get a taste of what the area covered was like.

I even managed to get hold of the Forgotten Realms atlas and the CD-ROM with the Campaign Cartographer maps.  Now I had the ability to print out the areas that the players would visit, going down to the smaller regions for the hamlets.

I was less enthused when the world was updated for 3e as the physical geography changed and so all the lovely maps I had were pretty useless if I wanted to keep using the setting as is for this edition.

For the last campaign I started I went back to Greyhawk as I knew very little about the realm and thought it would be a different change of pace.

Favourite playable class

I’ve always had a soft spot for the magic using classes, mainly the arcane not the divine wielder.  That’s not to say that I haven’t played clerics or the like but I could never really plan ahead to master the strategy of spell selection.  For the main part the cleric doesn’t get the respect they deserve; if there are no undead to be had then you get treated as a walking healing machine.

For a long time I played wizards, I could understand the spell strategy required and it was easier to select what spells to memorise for each day.  When 3rd edition appeared I was still looking at wizards and the fact you got a familiar to start with.

It wasn’t until a short time later I decided to try the new sorcerer class and I’m glad I did.  I felt that what you sacrificed in additional spells was compensated by the fact you could cast whatever one you needed at the time and the bloodlines gave you more definition of the sorcerers personality.

Favourite playable race

For me you can’t beat playing a human.  Part of me could see the appeal of all the wonderful races but none of them really appealed to me; that’s not to say I haven’t played other races but I keep being drawn back to the human.

This was before the human was buffed up in 3rd edition or later volumes; once the new game hit the shelves I still played humans as there was more of a balanced reason to do so.

If push comes to shove I do like playing half-elves as I like any race that has some sort of magical aspect to it.

How you got started.

I covered this in a previous blog post which can be found here.