Campaign Breakdown & Update The Valelands & The Nerath Timeline The current year for our Valelands campaign is set during the year 103AE. Inspired By Gary Gygax

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons has been a focal point in my TTRPG gaming for the last 40'ish years and it's been a fun ride. For the last couple of years I've been out of the game only recently returning. I thought of making a return to Advanced Dungeons & Dragons but this prospect really didn't excite me much, maybe I was just burned out on it after 40'ish years of playing/DMing games with it.

I decided to take a step back and look at my options and decided in the end that I would move to some form of OSR system other than Advanced Dungeons & Dragons but after doing some serious thinking, I decided to stay with Advanced Dungeons & Dragons as our core rules. I love the simplicity of the system plus I like how it is fully compatible with B/X, BECMI and even Advanced Dungeons & Dragons—which is good because it allows me to run basically any OSR systems modules.

Another thing I love about Advanced Dungeons & Dragons is how all of the books are structured, everything is easy to find and understand and they are very well organized. The biggest thing is, it's something fresh and new for me allowing me to experience a new system but still run adventures that I love. I really am excited about returning home to Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Most of my Dungeons & Dragons gaming has also revolved around the World of Greyhawk although I am a huge fan of the Dragonlance setting as well. I've been to many Dragon Con's and at several of them I had the pleasure of meeting Gary Gygax himself and three different times was a player in one of his games. It is safe to say Gary Gygax had a huge impact on me and my gaming. It's also going to be a lot of fun adding my own house rules to this system.

I am also the proud owner of the original 1st edition Dungeon Master Guide, Players Handbook and the Greyhawk Adventures hardback books that were all signed by Gary Gygax himself - Gary is an inspiration to me. I've been out of the game for many years but have recently returned and have settled on a "modifed" OSE system which I absolutely love. It's a breath of fresh air from the WotC garbage.

Gary Gygax made such a huge impact on me that even today I am a classic D&D dungeon master and player. If I haven't made myself clear as to how I feel about this modern fantasy of the WotC 5th edition D&D then you haven't reading my posts lol. It all goes back to that old saying - "if it ain't broke, don't try to fix it".

We are using a slightly modified race & class system with our AD&D core rules. I considered using Old-School Essentials but the more I researched the more I fell "back" in love with AD&D. We will also have a few house rules added to our system of rules but not many. I think most of these house rules will be more about quality of life rules than anything. The plan is to run a long last campaign that takes multiple "years" in real life to complete, if the party survives lol. This campaign will be played online using Roll20 & Discord.

Each session will also be locally recorded and after a bit of editing be uploaded to our Youtube channel in a playlist. We may stream our games "at a later date" once we get more comfotable with online play. Stay tuned for more news & updates because as this campaign progresses the more content will be getting posted.

Goodbye WotC/Hasbro The Valelands & The Nerath Timeline The current year for our Valelands campaign is set during the year 103AE. Inspired By Gary Gygax

This guy touched on a lot of stuff he pulled from Twitter and one thing I want to make clear, all of these people I am about to highlight are affiliated with Hasbro/WotC in one form or another . . . some are editors, writers, executives and content creators. They publically say stuff that is pure racist and WotC/Hasbro lets them get away with it, and as a matter of fact Hasbro/WotC does its best to go along with these people and what they say. It's disgusting and embarrassing.

It's bad enough with how WotC/Hasbro tried to redo the OGL to screw everyone over, sure they backed down but only because the entire community rose up against them and forced them to back down. It's just sad how this game has went down the toilet. These are just a few of the tweets that were found on Twitter. Dominique Dickey posted a couple of tweets here and here. How much of a racist can someone be?

Then you have Sadie Lowrie who assisted as a writer for Call of the Netherdeep making tweets like this. I send her a tweet asking her about her tweet and this is the reply I got from her. Instead of explaining herself, she blocks me. Typical racist hiding from what she has done. The exact same thing happened with Sarah Madsen . . . when I sent her a tweet about these tweets that she made and I got another reply just like I got from Sadie Lowry.

Lets look at Makenzie De Armas with her tweet or how the one and only Christopher Perkins tweeted this and to think, it pretty much all started with this from Kyle Brinks. Now the latest news is WotC is saying they are removing the Half Elf and Half Orc races or half ANYTHING from D&D because it's racist. It's just gotten out of control. I have been playing Dungeons & Dragons since it was called Basic D&D, hell . . . even before Basic, back when it was called Chain Mail and I've never been this dusgusted with a game, it's people and it's company than I am right now.

Sure, myself and my group had originally planned to get into 5th edition D&D — until now. With that being sad, I want to make one thing perfectly clear, I'll never buy another product from WotC. You know, back when we played classic Dungeons & Dragons, we didn't have all this drama, it was all about the game and we had one community that stuck together. It's simply not like that anymore. This game is a mess. We are now 100% an Advanced Dungeons & Dragons group.

Ready, Set, Go! The Valelands & The Nerath Timeline The current year for our Valelands campaign is set during the year 103AE. Inspired By Gary Gygax

I have some things that I would like to touch on with those of you that are first time readers on this blog. The first thing that I kind of want to get into is what many call the "Matt Mercer Effect". I think one thing we all can agree on is Matthew Mercer is ranked in the top level of Dungeon Masters.

The man knows his stuff, but it isn't just about Matthew, his players bring a huge part of what makes Critical Role special to the table. To quote an old saying ... "it takes two to tango", or in this case, it takes a Dungeon Master and a group of players to make a game special.

One thing I very much want to emphasize on is "I am not Matthew Mercer" and if you expect me as a Dungeon Master to be like Matthew Mercer then I would say "go find you another campaign to follow" because I am not on his level, nor will I even try to be and to be perfectly honest I am not sure if the world has a Dungeon Master that even comes close to his level of story telling "well maybe but I have yet to see one". I try to run a good game where my players have a good time (plain and simple) and in the past my players have all had a great time so I guess I am doing something right.

Critical Role is a staged game, with some scripting involved - Matthew and his players are all voice actors. When you watch his campaigns, this is not what Dungeon & Dragon games are really like. His campaigns are strictly constructed to bring entertainment to his viewers.

What we try to do here is get together as friends (this is important) and enjoy our time playing Dungeons & Dragons like it was played 35-40 years ago. We don't bring anything from the real world to our table, we simply get together as friends and enjoy this beautiful game called Dungeons & Dragons in all its glory.