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Udra: My RPG Campaign History in Several Parts

1989 to 1994: Udra Becomes More Serious, if Schitzophrenic.

After a long hiatus, between '84 and '89, where I pretended I was normal person and denied my true nature, I met a new friend who revived my interest in roleplaying games again. To start with, his first character he built was a cleric! No one had ever, in six years of play, built a cleric in my game. This foreboded a new direction. Coming up with campaign background actually made sense now because here was a player who actually appreciated and demanded it. He wanted names, gods, local histories, heraldry, politics--he wanted the lot. He also GM'd, like myself. His campaign and style became a model for me. It was very inspiring all of a sudden.

Significant events in this period

Notable characters

Also during this period I changed the rule system twice. Originally, my rule set was a mix of TRS' AD&D and Dave Hargrave's Arduin. Then I coverted to the rules set used by my friend: Palladium. This I stuck with through most of 1990-1994 period despite it's poorly balanced magic system.

Also during this time, another friend introduced me to the Hero System. I also began exploring GURPS. These were very powerful and flexible rules systems that could, in theory, model anything. They were like Unix. I was sorely tempted but I decided that most of my players would find such rules systems too complex.

Anyway, by the end of all this experimentation, I had decide to reign in all the chaos and dithering and present my players with consistency and unity of theme and genre. I threw out all the science fictional dabblings. I threw out the all the rules extensions, variations and so on and focused on playing strictly by AD&D rules. This takes us to third period.

Posted by Pace Arko on August 31, 2006 10:43 PM

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