As promised, I added a little bit of content today.  There is a new monster posted, the carnivorous flower.  I have also added more pictures to the Dawning Horror story arc page.  As I posted in my credits section, those pictures were taken by my father in 2005 when we went to Philmont, NM for a backpacking trip.

While I was on CQ yesterday, I guess I miscalculated the amount of food my Army would consume, because when I logged back into Evony after my shift half of it had starved to death :(.  Very sad.  Remember, your soldiers need to eat!

 

Back to Evo...I mean typing up content.  Right.  That's what I'm doing.  Really!

I finished a 24 hour CQ shift this morning at 9:00 AM, but couldn't go to sleep because I had an appointment later that morning.  By the time I was done with that, it was too late in the day to go to sleep or else I'd wake up just in time for bed, and mess up my sleep schedule even more than it already is with all these CQ shifts I've pulled in the last two weeks.  So, I figured I'd better get myself a hell of a lot of coffee.  Not the hot stuff.  Hot coffee is for squares.  It's all about the ice, baby!  I ended up having two Americanos (iced, of course!) with lots of that "Sugar in the Raw" stuff.  I like how it doesn't dissolve well in cold liquid, so if you use a straw you can suck in tiny granules of sugar with each microsip.  I love the texture of that stuff.  So, I am now awake again, but extremely jittery.  I can watch my hand twitch and vibrate and everything!  

Anyway, to the point: today I intend to start typing up some of the spells and monsters that have source headings but no files, as much of my content remains in the handwritten format I originally wrote it in.  Right now with my confusing duty schedule, I can only really handle adding simple, self-contained content, at least until things settle down and I can go back to a regular sleep schedule.  So I should have a little bit of new content up by the end of the night.  I'll get it done, I swear!  Scout's Honor!

So I followed one of the ads posted on my page because I was curious where it would lead.  I found myself in control of a small midaeival kingdom, managing my resources and citizens, recruiting heroes, and building armies to gain control of the region.  It's a hell of a lot of fun, and sure is a good way to kill time. 

I'm on server 37, and my username is Theevenger.  If any of you want to join and play with me, here's the signup link: www.theevenger-onlineads.evony.com

I'm home again, so I'll slowly start adding content again.  Recently I added a bunch of new rules, including those for creating dragon characters!  My next goals are to clean up the Dawning Horror story arc page, and to add more optional rules.  The next optional rule I hope to add is called "Wheaties", which allows characters to build up extra emergency hit points to allow for more heroic acts, as well as lessen the lethality of a campaign without having to pull punches, which every DM hates to do.

Still on vacation, but bored.  I've cleaned up a few small things, such as properly linking the story arcs from the front page to their respective pages, and taking care of a few other notes to myself that I use to draw attention to something I need to fix.

I am still working to get all of my content that is already digitized up, and once that is done I will polish up what I have before slowly adding in the rest of the supplemental material that is currently hard copy only (such as hand drawn maps, keys, treasure tables, ect).  I hope to have the majority of the project completed by the end of summer, my schedule pending.  Keep coming back regularly and you should see frequent changes and additions.  Tell your friends, too, once I get this thing more polished.

I'm going on vacation and won't be back until the 19th.  No new content until then.

I have moved the Dawning Horror page onto a page dedicated to the Story Arcs.  You can find Dawning Horror there, along with the other story arcs that I have uploaded.  The adventures that I created to occur in the Darrowshire Universe naturally fell into several distinc story arcs, so this format change made the most sense to me.

I want to share my creation with the world, so that others may extract joy (or at least feeling) from my work just as I have.  My site, and hence my presentation of my world to you, is far from complete, but it is at least beginning to take shape around me.  It is an exciting time.  Please come back often to see me, and I promise that I will have somewhere new for you to go.

I was first introduced to Dungeons and Dragons by my father, who has been playing since the1970s with the launch of the original Three Pamphlet Edition.  Once a month, my father and his friends would gather together to spend an evening exploring a magical world that I didn't understand.  A world with orcs, zombies, demons, magic users, and fireballs.  Though I didn't understand this world at all, I loved it, and when I turned 9 I began to learn how it worked.  Before long, I was playing with them, and my little Dwarven fighter lived long and slew many nasty critters. 

Not long after I began playing, I became a Dungeon Master out of necessity.  I was at my annual church family camp, and my best friend, Collin, and I had just realized that the other played D&D.  We literally had no materials.  But I did my best, and we made it work with 4 sheets of paper (to double as character sheets, maps, monster rosters, and anything else we needed), two pencils, an eraser (so that we could reuse our 4 sheets of paper, 3D6 (stolen from a Monopoly box),and some rocks to substitute for avatars.  That was one of the most fun campaigns I ever played in.  More importantly, it awoke in me a passion for storytelling. 

As the years went on, I spent time slowly improving my skills as a Dungeon Master.  My early attempts were certainly lacking polish, but I kept trying.  The content I turned out was really not that bad, and I have been able to get away with using some of it in an adult game that I wrote when I was in the 8th grade.  Nobody noticed or said anything, so it seemed to me like it was OK.  

Three campaigns that I DMd in recent years that really hold a dear place in my heart were the Endhome Campaign, taking place in and around the City of Endhome from The Lost City of Barakus from Necromancer Games, the Diablo Campaign, which followed the path of the first game, and my Darrowshire Campaign.  Each of these campaign worlds became mine in a way that is uncommon.  In the case of Endhome and Diablo, both were sourcebooks and modules published by someone else, and in the case of Diablo, based on a preexisting computer game.  But the extent to which I took the devlopment of "my" version and interpretation, Endhome truly became mine.  I will never forget those gaming sessions during my freshman year in high school spent in the sewers of Endhome, or the characters slowly learning of the presence of Devron, the evil lich buried deep within the lost city of Barakus.  Likewise, I will never forget Diablo, because the game resonated with my spirit for many years when I was a young boy.  Back then, I was truly full of imagination, and I sucked the marrow out of every pixel, reimagining my character with each new piece of gear.  Everything about that experience, from the haunting strumming of the guitar while in Tristram, to the serious tone of the game and its throwbacks to D&D, made my heart sing.  When I found the module for that world, I dove in and made it my own.  I made the dungeon come alive with the ever-tricky Garbhad the Weak, transformed from a minor bit player monster into a recurring friend/villain, always keeping the party guessing as to his true loyalties and intentions.  Which did he turn out to be, you ask?  Friend, foe, or something in between?  Who knows?  he changed sides often enough. Death didn't stop him from returning and changing his loyalties back then.  Why would death stop him now?

And finally, Darrowshire.  Though I stole the name from World of Warcraft, I did it only because I thought the name was cool, and my Darrowshire shares nothing but the name with that town in the ruined countryside of Azeroth.  It reminded me of dark and nasty things, like the barrows in The Fellowship of the Ring.  I purchased a book almost 10 years ago called Minions, and in it there was a template that alwyas tickled my curiosity.  The monster was called "the crowd".  It is a sort of distributed intelligence shapeshifter that grows by killing and absorbing its victims -- and putting an identical copy in their place!  The possibilities made me shudder.  I thought for many years about using the creature, but I never felt that I was up to the task of doing the concept justice.  Finally, in my senior year of high school, I had one of those rare bursts of creativity and I outlined my fictional Darrowshire, and the events that would unfold there as the town was taken over by a Crowd.

I created such characters as Voidwalker Marley, a misunderstood cleric of a strange church, who could easily be mistaken for the source of the trouble.  Ogden (for every tavern owner in every campaign of mine will always be named Ogden) the tavern owner and his runaway sign, Old Bill, the salty old hermit who lives in the Badlands, and Corporal Norris, named after my beloved minister, who would play such a large part in the final events of the story.  All of these characters had become real in my mind the instant I put the words to the page,but during the progression of my work, something strange happened.  Like real people, the characters I created grew and changed.  It got to the point where I really didn't know who was really the bad guy and who was really just caught in the middle.  I didn't know because I kept changing my mind.  I would make a decision, and then the story would take me somewhere else entirely.  The conclusion to the Darrowshire arc was certainly unknown to me when I began the undertaking; indeed, I had always intended for a much lighter ending.  The moment when I realized how it was going to end hit me like a 2,000 pound bomb, blasting me off my feet and into my chair, where I sat aghast at what I had allowed to be created for several minutes before I could come to terms with it.  Read my words.  Enter my wonderland.  Live in Darrowshire.  It will happen to you, just as it did to me.  You will see.