The Front Porch...on TV!

The front porch is now on TV! Well, sort of...

Click here for a local news clip featuring my good friend Jeremy (a star of our late '80s Earth Commanders and Fantasy Quest campaigns), my father, and some footage of a very wintry front porch.

Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set

For my first look back at awesome adventures from each edition of D&D, I'm going with the 1983 "red box" edition of the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set (I also have the 1981 edition with Keep on the Borderlands -- another gift from my Aunt Nedra) in lieu of an official First Edition adventure module. I own several First Edition books, but I didn't start playing D&D until around 1985 -- here I'll give another shout-out to Kevin and his brother Brian, who introduced me to the game -- and played Basic exclusively until Second Edition AD&D came out in 1989.

Opening that beautiful red box for the first time is a moment seared into my memory. I had played D&D a few times with Kevin, Brian, and their gaming group, but the red box was my first experience reading the rules and creating characters on my own. No game product I've ever seen -- save perhaps for the much later Pathfinder Beginner Box -- has provided so engaging an introduction to both the mechanical and narrative aspects of roleplaying games. The Basic Set begins with a solo adventure in which your hero meets and befriends a beautiful cleric named Aleena, who soon dies at the hands of the evil wizard Bargle. That was powerful stuff for a little kid. The solo adventure is followed by a full-party dungeon crawl in the ruins of castle Mistamere, wherein the heroes are tasked with tracking down and capturing Bargle. I played through that one as a solo adventure and also ran it for Scott and other lads in the early days of the Front Porch (as part of the Fantasy Quest campaign -- our first foray into D&D after a steady diet of superhero RPG action in Earth Commanders). Flipping through that bright red adventure booklet today, I get the distinct urge to resume my decades-old hunt for that elusive wizard...

Quintessence War

In 2015, the multiverse goes to war.

The Story...and the Battle!

In my last post, I reminisced about Earth Commanders, the first Front Porch campaign. Today I'll talk about the game sessions. (Keep in mind that we were only about twelve years old at the time!)

Adventures consisted almost exclusively of "the story" and "the battle." The story was a brief narrative scene, usually set in the Earth Commanders headquarters in Montreal. The team would learn about a threat somewhere in the world, and they'd have the opportunity to ask questions and make basic plans. That was it for plot. And character development was virtually unheard of. Who were these guys when they took their masks off? Did they ever take their masks off?

The story may have been thin, but the combat was ridiculously fun. The Earth Commanders heroes dished out savage beat-downs to every supervillain in the Champions universe, and gave a second helping to any foe foolish enough to come back for more. Over time, though, the battles became a bit too routine. There's only so many times you can stomp Ankylosaur and Mechanon and Dr. Destroyer before you start looking for something...more.

What we discovered was that we wanted was more of "the story." That's when we turned to Dungeons & Dragons (the original "red box" product) and started a new campaign called Fantasy Quest. That was the last campaign actually to be conducted on my parents' front porch, but, as I'll explain in a future post, it laid the groundwork for all future FPGG campaigns.