A Lifelong Love of Dungeoneering
How I grew up with Tabletop Roleplaying Games and how they have occupied almost every waking hour of my life
For the month of July, the birth-month of two men who inspired—as the title suggests—a lifelong love of dungeoneering in me (Gary Gygax and my dad), is going to be dedicated to Tabletop Roleplaying Games. The hobby and my own involvement in it has changed considerably over the last decade, but I have never lost my interest to keep dungeoneering even in the face of mounting responsibilities and conflicts that would prevent me from doing so. When I say “dungeoneering” I don’t just mean to associate it with solely Dungeons & Dragons (although that is where my love of TTRPGs began) and not just dungeon-crawling as a player (although that is one of my favored modes of play). The term, to me at least, sort of encapsulates my philosophy of game design or simple immersion in the hobby of tabletop roleplaying; it is mostly the idea of creating some kind of adventure or scenario (the proverbial “dungeon”) for players to get lost in. This may take the form of a three encounter “delve”, a treatment for an entire campaign that might never get played (sort of like how players constantly create characters), or a simple, one-line note in my ColorNote document on my phone.
This post is mostly my personal history with the hobby, but subsequent posts this month will be providing some advice on game design as well as some free content at the very end to use in your own games!
The earliest memory I have of Dungeons & Dragons was when I was no older than 10 and hanging out in my dad’s basement office. He had a small, old box of pewter figurines on his desk of warriors, wizards, and monsters with the label Dungeons & Dragons on them accompanied by art of a dark, greenish dungeon inhabited by a sluggish wyrm resting on a mound of gold. I asked him about it and he explained that it was a game he and his friends had played back when he was in middle and high school in the ‘80s—my dad very much had an archetypal Stranger Things-like childhood, sans the evil government conspiracies happening at the local powerplant in his small town.
After a visit to my grandparents’ house, my dad’s old Advanced Dungeons & Dragons manuals showed up in his office. Some nights, he would show me and my brothers parts of his Monster Manuals and read some of the lore aloud. I remember being particularly scared of the ghoul, lich, specter, and zombie art—which likely sowed my lifelong disdain of undead, but also paradoxically my habit of using them liberally in my own campaigns. At this point, I still had not picked up one of the polyhedral dice or jotted down a fantasy name on a character sheet, but already I had been thinking of stories inspired by my dad’s rulebooks. I knew that someday I wanted to play D&D or some variation of it.
Our very first session took place at our kitchen table on an early summer evening. I had just turned twelve years old; my brothers and I were gathered around our shared laptop playing an online flash game. Our dad called us in and we gathered around the table where he had printed out a grid map, and a short, arena-style module meant to introduce younger players to D&D. It had hand-drawn, doodled artwork of player characters and monsters; I took control of a human fighter and elf wizard. Our demo session was quick and rocky at times as we tried to learn the basics of this new game, but it engrossed me and my brothers nonetheless.
Sometime later, we started gearing up for our first, proper adventure in the most recent edition of Dungeons & Dragons—the controversial 4e. When I explain to TTRPG veterans that 4e was my first introduction to the hobby, following it up with the fact that my dad played AD&D, they wonder why he didn’t show me and my brothers AD&D. I asked him once why he chose the latest edition rather than to show us how to play what he and his friends played back in the day, his response was simply that 4e was the most recent and had a decent learning curve for new players; 4e also has his stamp of approval for anyone curious about his stance on it. Since 4e was the first major edition to begin incorporating online/digital elements into it, we downloaded the demo character builder to help create our very first characters. I remember a while afterwards spending hours scrolling through the multitude of options that were steadily released throughout 4e’s lifespan. To keep things simple, our dad urged us to start with the four standard races and classes he was familiar with, those being humans, elves, dwarves, and halflings and clerics, fighters, rogues, and wizards (even to this day I call them “magic-users”). I created a human wizard named “Taloc”, my younger brother made a dwarven fighter named “Graven”, and my youngest brother made an elven rogue named “Elton Ravenwood.” To round out the party, we also created a fourth player character we at first thought to share control of; this was Brother Bob, a nondescript human cleric (initially) we represented using a generic Lego minifigure.
With the party formed, we finally began the adventure, following the module “Keep on the Shadowfell.” From the outset of the first encounter, the combat-oriented focus of 4e was made apparent. Our characters weren’t exactly “optimized” and since it was our first official jaunt into the system, we struggled for most of the introductory encounters. To remedy this, my youngest brother and I decided to incorporate new characters into our party using some (at the time) obscure resources; we both made warforged characters, mine being a rogue and my youngest brother’s being a fighter. They didn’t fair much better, likely because I didn’t know how to properly play a rogue. We got up to the showdown in the quarry against a gnome, his human thug minions, and a mysterious apparition before taking a break from the game to engage with other summer vacations and activities. Towards the tail-end of that summer, I started writing my own adventure modules inspired by the Cartoon Network show Adventure Time. Granted, I hadn’t seen the proper format of a module and didn’t fully understand the improvised aspects of the game so the enemy statistics were rather barebones and the supplemental text read like a script. Most of the encounters were derivative from media I had been watching at the time, so in addition to characters like the Ice King from Adventure Time, it also had H. M. Murdock from A-Team, Sauron the White teaming up with Severus Snape, and the dreaded lich of Richard Nixon. Even though it seemed unlikely I would ever run these adventures, I kept working on them wherever I went.
After school resumed, my younger brother and I voiced interest in resuming our adventure through “Keep on the Shadowfell.” We realized, however, we needed to switch some things around if we were going to have more success in the module. At the time, the 4e Essentials line had just released, giving new and streamlined options for the basic classes and races. Taloc, Graven, and Brother Bob got revamped as we resumed and I took control of one of the premade characters contained in “Shadowfell”, a dragonborn paladin I named “Draco.” Although this collection of adventurers still wasn’t quite so “optimized” and wasn’t being controlled by the most experienced of players, we faired much better with the easier options offered by the Essentials and gradually just “got gud”1 at D&D. Soon after we resumed, normal playdates with friends turned into Friday night D&D sessions where we would often take turns DMing for each other. Whenever my dad wasn’t around, I would most often be the default Dungeon Master for my brother and friends. I remember the first time I DM’ed an encounter was when I got home late from a birthday party, my dad was in the middle of running an encounter for my brother and his friends. He needed to check on something so he brought me behind the screen and quickly showed me how to run the encounter. I can’t remember exactly how it went other than that the players were victorious, but from there it inspired me to want to start running and making more adventures.
For a while afterwards, my mind was consumed with coming up with ideas for modules in D&D. I had a journal I kept in my desk for doodling and often I would use it to make dungeon maps or plots for adventures. Even when I didn’t have access to materials to put down ideas, I couldn’t help but think constantly of exciting new scenarios. It got to the point a few times that it overshadowed my efforts for schoolwork or other activities; there was one time when I finished a cross country meet and as soon as I crossed the finish line I started talking to my dad about D&D and his response was, “Ethan, was that all you were thinking about?” It was and it would be for quite some time.
In high school, I regrettably didn’t play as much D&D as I could have as interests and obligations around the house changed. In the meantime, I still tinkered around with ideas for player characters and modules. It wasn’t until my senior year when my friends from the LARP summer camp I went to decided to put together a remote D&D campaign. This was a while before online tools for playing TTRPGs really took off so the plan was to use Skype for everything. At first, I was planning to be a player but in the midst of trying to make a character I didn’t feel quite inspired to remain a player, so I reached out to my friend who originally volunteered to DM and asked if I could run the campaign in his stead. He agreed as long as I came up with some plan, so I started stringing adventure modules together loosely using some of the lore of the LARP camp we all attended. This first full campaign I ran was honestly rather rocky; for combats I had to constantly point my computer’s webcam at the battle map; all but two of the players were consistently absent; and as younger DM I hadn’t developed exactly collected method of running such a game. The campaign ended abruptly after I began college the following semester.
In a new place with not a lot of friends, I started at once looking around for a D&D group that might be willing to have me. A sophomore who lived nextdoor to me invited me out of the blue early in the fall to talk with one of his friends he knew was starting a D&D campaign. I met up with his friend who immediately launched into asking me about my experience with D&D, so I explained most of my background in it and (for once) he didn’t seem to look down on the fact I played 4e. By that time, 5th edition was in vogue and I had only seen glimpses of what it was like, but I was nonetheless hankering to get back into the game. I joined him and about six other people at a commuter student’s house nestled in the woods. We all rolled up characters around the table and launched right into the game. I made a gnome druid inspired by Henry David Thoreau which would unknowingly begin a trend inside my future gaming group that led to my new friend’s hatred of gnomes. This campaign continued semi-regularly throughout the year, switching partway through the spring semester to a different DM and smaller group of players. Near the very end of the year, I got the itch to run my own campaign at the start of the next fall semester. Since I usually got ahead of my classwork and readings, I stayed up late one night writing down ideas for a world inspired by Celtic, Norse, and Anglo-Saxon mythology, jamming out to Eluveitie and Suidakra (metal bands with heavy influences from Celtic history and myth).
(Picture above: Custom poster I made for the second half of the campaign using free software on my laptop)
I hit the ground running that following September with big ideas and a big player base of nine people. That number would shrink by a little after the first, rather chaotic session, but neither that nor the “off-the-rails” approach my players had deterred me from wanting to run the game. This one was also rocky at times, as I still figured out my exact DMing style, tried to balance multiple player character backstory sessions, and introduced scenarios that didn’t gel all the time with what some players expected from the game. Most of my friends from that campaign I’m still in contact with look back fondly on it. I would say I have a more “nuanced” view on it, not in the sense that I believe my friends remember it incorrectly, but the rougher edges of it and my shortcomings stand out a bit more to me in hindsight. At first, in my early 20s angst, I took an approach of outright disliking how the latter half of the campaign ended up. Since then, I’ve come to appreciate the fact I got to play for almost two years straight with my friends, and I can look on my mistakes more as learning experiences for myself as a hobbyist and creator of TTRPG content. I do still keep in touch with several of them and hope to have some kind of reunion session; one of my friends is a fellow author, Cameron Bolling, whose character in the campaign actually became the protagonist of his trilogy Battle of the Horizon; my other friend, Ebert Diaz, boxes professionally now under the moniker “The Richmond Rifle” and was the guy who welcomed me into my first D&D group in college. Since, then, I haven’t had a campaign that has run nearly as long as that one. Sometimes I jokingly wonder if it was a curse left on me by a disgruntled former player, but it’s more likely that gaming sessions are downright difficult to organize in adult life.
Since then, although I haven’t had longterm campaigns or projects concerning D&D or other tabletop games, I am constantly thinking of new ideas for games and jotting them down on whatever material I have at hand in the event that I do get to run another game. I’m still waiting on that opportunity, but in the meantime I keep working on things that I think could be fun since I just cannot stop thinking about dungeoneering.
Thanks for reading this week’s post! Do any fellow TTRPG players, game masters, or designers among my readers have stories about their introductions to the hobby? Leave them in the comments!
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“Git gud” (get good) is a common term used by players of FromSoftware games such as Dark Souls and Elden Ring urging other players who struggle with the games’ challenging combat.
Our family DnD origin story is already a little blurry in my mind. I am sure your recollection is the correct one, but in my version of events, we went right from Ghost of the Witchlight Fens straight into Keep on the Shadowfell and played it straight through over multiple weeks. Your version with the slower start and life interruptions is likely more accurate. I do remember those first Warforged player characters. I believe one of them (named “Five”) still serves as the sheriff of a small hamlet in the region around Winterfell.
What great memories, from months-long campaigns to random one shot encounters. I think that TTRPGs can enrich anyone’s experiences. And it doesn’t matter what Version or system you play.
Very interesting, Ethan! I know you have a great love for D&D. I was especially fond of hearing how your knowledge and interest in it was inspired by your father. I still remember him downstairs in our basement playing D&D with his friends. They spent many hours there, enjoying it. I’m so glad you were introduced to it by him. He will be very pleased when he reads this article, I’m sure! I hope you do get to establish another session with your friends. Keep it up, Mr. DM !