This post is for folks who are new to the Front Porch Gaming Guild (FPGG) and want to learn more about The Druid Cycle, our "flagship" campaign. The Druid Cycle is late-medieval (roughly equivalent to the mid-fifteenth century) high fantasy set in a world whose major cultures and countries are derived from the legendary and literary traditions of our own world.
The roots of The Druid Cycle go all the way back to the summer of 1993, when I started up a fantasy campaign on Sugar Mountain, a computer bulletin board sytem (BBS) based in nearby Elmira, New York. For those too young to remember this archaic online experience, a BBS was like a mini-internet hosted by a person on his or her own computer. Your computer would call up their computer and then you'd interact with the features of their BBS -- email, games, downloadable files, or whatever.
This early campaign, titled Fate of the Grand Duchy, established a few key components of the "modern" Druid Cycle world, most notably the geography of the world's main continent, known as First Home, and its principal human nation, Teyrnas. (Interesting side-note: One of the players in Fate was Timothy, whose character Lwcus is still going strong, more than twenty years later.)
By late 1993, Fate of the Grand Duchy was history, having been relegated to the graveyard of failed campaigns. One afternoon I got a request from my good friends and fellow Porch players Scott and Jason (joined shortly thereafter by Tony, an occasional Porch player) to start up a new D&D campaign, so I resurrected the world from Fate and moved the timeline ahead by five hundred years.
Thus was born The Druid Cycle, named for the original team of heroes. The main non-player character (NPC) was a stern druid named Cyfrinach, and the players were heroes whom he had recruited to conduct clandestine missions on behalf of his organization, the Druid Council. With Scott and Jason as the primary players -- joined here and there by other Porch players and guests -- The Druid Cycle roared ahead with year after year of sustained success. Our imaginations ran wild, and we began to delve into weighty issues such as race, social class, gender roles, religious intolerance, political corruption, and many more.
It was all too good to keep to ourselves. In early 1998, we expanded this campaign by inviting all-star Porch players Timothy and Kevin to join the team. With a new band of heroes, the focus shifted toward character-driven storylines that were centered on the widely divergent motivations, objectives, and allegiances of the player characters (PCs). Each of the four main PCs carved out his own narrative space in the game world, enriching the campaign immeasurably.
The timing, however, could not have been worse. By the spring of 1999, several of us (myself included) were graduating from college and moving on to graduate school and the working world. Our opportunities for paper-and-pencil gaming, for gathering around a table together and sharing pizza and laughs along with our roleplaying, were coming to an abrupt end.
The Druid Cycle then went online, like Fate nearly a decade earlier. Between 1999 and 2004, we had a series of email games (in which the players exchanged emails to move the story forward) and chat-based games (in which the players gathered at the same time in a private internet chat room) involving a large cast of Front Porch veterans, including Timothy, Kevin, Tim B, Chris, and Matt, to name but a few. These games featured new PCs and, for the most part, were set in regions other than the continent of First Home. Concurrently, I was running a rollicking Druid Cycle campaign for some of my fellow University of Rochester graduate students, although it was set in an alternate version of the world.
Since 2004, we've had a renewed focus on First Home and those "classic" characters from the '90s. They're in a much different place in their lives than they were ten or fifteen years ago. No longer a rag-tag band of adventurers, they are now the leaders of cities and global organizations. They are also the parents of what may be the next generation of champions. Moreover, we've been fortunate enough to add some new players along the way. My wife Amy started playing 2005, Timothy's wife April started in 2009, and Timothy's friend Alex started just last year, in 2011.
As we look forward to 2013 (marking twenty-five years of the FPGG and twenty years of The Druid Cycle), we'd love to add even more new folks into the mix. We've learned over the years that the secret ingredient to a successful campaign is a core group of players who feel invested in their characters. Druid Cycle players tend to play their PCs for years, or even decades. Together we create an immersive world where -- although it may be fantasy -- the stakes feel real.
The heroes of The Druid Cycle have come a long way since the early '90s, and I hope that there is still a long way for them to go. I surely do not look forward to the day when I will have no cause to intone that most famous FPGG phrase: "When last we left our intrepid heroes..."
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