Character Creation Challenge: Torvak Con Dain

 I only vaguely remember Torvak. He was a lawful good Paladin (as they all were back then) and dedicated to the ruler of his realm, who might have been Pathon. Not sure. He is certainly an old character, and his various character sheets show a long career, but he is not always super active.

He is a great candidate to test out the Divine Warrior class from Wasted Lands.

Torvak Con Dain

Class: Divine Warrior
Level: 16
Species: Human
Alignment: Light Good
Background: Warrior (Wasted Lands p. 185)

Abilities
Strength: 18 (+3) A
Agility: 18 (+3) 
Toughness: 17 (0) 
Intelligence: 16 (0) 
Wits: 17 (+2) N
Persona: 17 (+2) N

Fate Points: 1d12
Defense Value: -1
Vitality: 120 
Degeneracy: 0
Corruption: 0

Check Bonus (A/N/D): +7/+5/+3
Melee Bonus: +6 (base), +3 (STR)
Ranged Bonus: +6 (base)
Saves: +6 to all Wits and Persona Saves, +2 to Toughness (Warrior background)

Divine Warrior Abilities
Sixth Sense, Heal Injury and Illness (20d6), Supernatural Attacks, Protection from Evil, Turn Undead (level 15), Spot Hidden (1-3 on d4).

Heroic/Divine Touchstones
1st Level: +1 to melee attacks
3rd Level: Cure Light Wounds Spell
5th Level: Favored Weapon, Sword
7th Level: Zone of Protection vs Evil
9th Level: Special Attack
11th Level: Smite
13th Level: Extra Attack
15th Level: Great Smite

Heroic (Divine) Archetype: Justice

Gear
Longsword, Full plate armor, Holy symbol

I am really happy with the Divine Warrior class as a Paladin substitute. I played a LOT of Paladins over the years and this class feels right to me. Tweak it with some spells or levels of other classes to get just the right mix.

You can get the Wasted Lands RPG and the NIGHT SHIFT RPG at Elf Lair Games.

Character Creation Challenge: Adnerg Myrildean

 Every campaign needs a high-level wizard. Whether that is Elminster, Gandalf, Merlin, or Mordenkainen, a high-level wizard is good to know. In Grenda's campaign, this was Adnerg Myrildean.

Adnerg was a wizard supreme. He picked up some levels of fighter to stay alive, but he was a wizard through and through.

If I continue with my ham-fisted Freudian analogies here, Adnerg was Grenda's "Super-Ego." 

Adnerg was a great character. 

When my characters first met him, he was in a bar gambling. He was loud and boisterous and not at all like a wizard, until combat came around. Then he became the "nuclear option."

Notes about High Levels

Adnerg here is the third character from this collection and in many ways is the poster child for our games in the 1980s.

I have four character sheets for him at different parts in his career. The image above has hi at level 97 Magic-user / level 30 fighter. Yeah. I know. BUT there are good reasons for this. First off keep in mind that these characters are old. Adnerg here has a creation date of 8/14/1984. So they go a lot of play. I think for a while there I was playing every weekend and sometimes three or four nights per week in the summers. 

Also, there was BARDD. BARDD was our computer-based combat simulator for the TRS-80 Color Computer 2. We would put our characters in to the software and let it run. Our rule was that if the characters died in it, they were dead. This was the fate of my first and only half-orc character. Grenda put his characters in and let it run. His characters earned a lot of XP.

We were both good at math, but I was better and calculated the XP tables and spell-progression tables for levels beyond 30. These skills served me well when I would later work on my witch class and Grenda would work on his various Riddlemasters (more on that later).

Like all good wizards, he had many names. He was also known as Erife'nur, the Rune Fire mage.

Adnerg "Erife'nur" Myrildean

Class: Sorcerer
Level: 20
Species: Human
Alignment: Twilight Neutral
Background: Scholar

Abilities
Strength: 9 (+0)     
Agility: 14 (+1)     
Toughness: 16 (+2) 
Intelligence: 20 (+4)  
Wits: 16 (+2) 
Persona: 18 (+3) 

Fate Points: 1d12
Defense Value: 3
Vitality: 110 (d4)
Degeneracy: 0
Corruption: 0

Check Bonus (A/N/D): +8/+6/+4
Melee Bonus: +4 (base)
Ranged Bonus: +4 (base)
Spell Attack Bonus: +10
Saves: +5 vs magic attacks and area effects

Arcane Powers
Astral Projection, Beguile, Polymath, Precognition, Shadow Walking, Telekinesis 

Spells
1st level (6+1): Arcane Darts, Black Flames, Gout of Flame, Luck Stone, Night Vision, Sense Death, Sleep
2nd level (5): Beguile Person, Conjure Flame, ESP, Lesser Renewal, See Invisible
3rd level (5): Concussive Blast, Conjure Fireworks, Dark Lightning, Dispel Magic, Fly 
4th level (5): Befuddlement, Conjure Fire, Globe of Daylight, Protection against the Deeper Dark, Serpent Arrow
5th level (4): Banishment, Command Winds, Elemental Wall, Summon Elemental
6th level (4): Dispel Evil, Evoke Weather, Move Earth, Part the Seas
7th level (4): Ball of Sunshine, Drain Life, Wave of Mutilation, Zone of Peaceful Conduct
8th level (3): Gaze of the Abyss, Mind Shield, Summon Other
9th level (3): Feedback Barrier, Orb of Imprisonment, Sleeping Village

Heroic Touchstones
Level 1: Additional First level spell
Level 3: Additional Arcane Power: Telekinesis 
Level 5: Additional Vitality Points
Level 7: Luck Benefit
Level 9: Spirit Guide: Hawk "Rynn"
Level 11: Level 1 of Warrior
Level 13: Level 2 of Warrior
Level 15: Magical Recovery
Level 17: Level 3 of Warrior
Level 19: Level 4 of Warrior

Heroic (Divine) Archetype: Magic

Gear
Staff ("Lacham"), mace ("Shatterside")

Note, unlike the Addingdales, Adnerg has no psionics. 

This is a really great build and "feels" like Adnerg. It would be a pleasure to add him to the Wasted Lands RPG.

You can get the Wasted Lands RPG and the NIGHT SHIFT RPG at Elf Lair Games.

Character Creation Challenge: Worluk Shadowreaper

 Yesterday, I introduced you to Pathon Addingdale, the patriarch of the Addingdale line. But he almost wasn't. He had a twin brother who was "lost."  Today, I'll talk about that twin.

Worluk Shadowreaper aka Torin Addingdale

The story goes that Pathon and Torin were separated at birth. Years later, Pathon was due to ascend the throne of his kingdom when he fought a notorious assassin, Worluk. They had disarmed each other, and Worluk picked up Pathon's mace Stormshadow. The mace glowed, something it only did in the hands of the true heir. Thus, they both learned that Warluk was really Torin. 

Derivative? Maybe. But like I said before, we ALL did stuff like this back then, and it was great fun. It still is, to be honest.

If Pathon was Grenda's "ego character," then Worluk would be his "Id." Worluk would show up in the game, and he ran as a foil for my largely Lawful Good group of characters. He wasn't presented as an enemy so much as a chaotic force. An evil one, but never directed directly at us. When I would play my own evil character, Death Blade, Worluk would show up as a rival. 

Years later, I revived another Grenda character, Yoln. I misremembered his last name and gave him the Shadowreaper last name as a title. 

Worluk Shadowreaper for Wasted Lands

I am going to provide playable stats for the Wasted Lands RPG from Elf Lair Games. Why? Well, one I want to do is provide Dungeons & Dragons alternatives, and Wasted Lands is my game of choice. 

Though, like Pathon, I am pulling his class from NIGHT SHIFT. While mechanically, Worluk is a survivor, he is even more of one thematically. While a Wasted Lands "Renegade" would also work, I like the idea of Survivor better.

Class: Survivor (from NIGHT SHIFT)
Level: 15
Species: Human
Alignment: Twilight Evil
Background: Warrior

Abilities
Strength: 18 (+3) N    
Agility: 16 (+2) A    
Toughness: 16 (+2) N
Intelligence: 16 (+2)  
Wits: 16 (+2) 
Persona: 14 (+1) 

Fate Points: 1d12
Defense Value: -1
Vitality: 79 (d4)
Degeneracy: 0
Corruption: 2

Check Bonus (A/N/D): +7/+4/+3
Melee Bonus: +4 (base)
Ranged Bonus: +4 (base)
Saves: +5 vs Death attacks and area effects

Survivor Abilities
Improved Defence, Ranged Combat, Stealth Skills, Climbing, Danger Sense (1-6 d8), Perception, Vital Strike x5, Read Languages, Stealth Skills

Heroic Touchstones
Level 1: Psychic Ability: Teleport
Level 3: +1 to melee attacks
Level 5: "Luck" benfit
Level 7: Powerful Defense vs. melee
Level 9: Reroll
Level 11: Spell: Invisibility
Level 13: +1 to attacks, checks, and saves

Heroic (Divine) Archetype: Warrior

Gear
Sword, elven chain, hat of disguise, thieves tools

Ok, I like this version a lot.  Much like Nigel, I imagine Worluk (maybe now going by Torin again) is alive in NIGHT SHIFT.

I did notice that Pathon, in his early versions, worshipped Zeus. Worluk worshiped Loki. This was common for us back then, mixing up mythologies. This was certainly the genesis of my Black Forest Mythologies. Here, Pathon and Worluk would worship Unser Vater and Betrüger, respectively. 

You can get the Wasted Lands RPG and the NIGHT SHIFT RPG at Elf Lair Games.

Character Creation Challenge: Pathon Addingdale

Happy New Year!

Other than "Fantasy RPGs," I have not worked out my theme or even my new banner for the new year yet. But I am participating in Tardis Captain's 2025 Character Creation Challenge. 

For this month, I wanted to celebrate the life of my friend and former DM, R. Micheal Grenda, by featuring his characters. When I picked up his collection from his widow this past autumn, it struck me how all of these characters' stories were never going to be told again.  My oldest immediately wanted to take them and use them all in his AD&D 1st Edition game to give it "a feeling of authenticity" and could not disagree.  

Some of these characters are old, as in the dawn of AD&D. Others came from the end of AD&D 1st edition when we were both at University. Some are well known to me, others are not. There are multiple versions of the same characters. There are even versions of some of my own characters.  I won't be featuring those, just his characters. 

Why Do This?

I got to thinking. There are so many of us, players from the first few years of RPGs, who have someone who is no longer at our tables. The Empty Chair. I can't feature everyone's character here, but I can feature his. While I am doing this, you can think back to the characters (and players) who are no longer with you and remember them.

For this, I will feature a character a day, talk about my memories of the character, and talk about how I might use them in my games. 

Pathon Addingdale

This was Grenda's "ego" character and the Patriarch of the Addingdale line. Pathon was born in Oerth CY 632. So in the future if you consider that the "current year" of the World of Greyhawk is 591.  According to his sheet he began in 1976. I know Grenda began playing around then with the OD&D rules, plus the Greyhawk and Eldritch Wizardry supplements. The sheets I have are obviously updated ones. These are newer sheets. Grenda updated to AD&D 1st ed like many of us did.

He was a cleric/fighter. Depending on which sheet I use, he was a 98th/30th level cleric/fighter (hey, it was the 1980s), a 14th level cleric, or a 20th level cleric.  

Pathon, like many of Grenda's characters were part of the Addingdale family. He was one of a twin, but that twin was "lost" in a battle, only to show up later as "the evil twin."  He will come up later.

I am going to pause here. We are going to embrace the tropes here. Sure, some of these might seem edgy, cliché, or even "cringy" by today's standards, but I will not judge them by today's standards. I will look at them in situ as they were when they were made. Let us enjoy them for what they are, not what we might want them to be.

We had rules back then that if you had psionics, your children were more likely to have them as well. Also, we felt that psionics was a sex-linked trait (thank you, high school biology and X-Men comics!), so women characters always had a +5% chance of being psionic. So. You are going to see a lot of psionics here.

Pathon Addingdale for Wasted Lands*

I am going to provide playable stats for the Wasted Lands RPG from Elf Lair Games. Why? Well, one I want to do is provide Dungeons & Dragons alternatives, and Wasted Lands is my game of choice. 

I say Wasted Lands with an asterisk because I will also add material from NIGHT SHIFT and Thirteen Parsecs. This works since there is DNA from my games with Grenda in all the O.G.R.E.S. games, especially NIGHT SHIFT and Thirteen Parsecs.

Class: Theosophist (from NIGHT SHIFT)
Level: 14
Species: Human
Alignment: Light
Background: Warrior

Abilities
Strength: 18 (+3) N    
Agility: 13 (+1) 
Toughness: 14 (+1) 
Intelligence: 16 (+2) N 
Wits: 18 (+3) A 
Persona: 14 (+1) 

Fate Points: 1d10
Defense Value: 0
Vitality: 76 (d6)
Degeneracy: 0
Corruption: 0

Check Bonus (A/N/D): +6/+4/+2
Melee Bonus: +4 (base)
Ranged Bonus: +4 (base)
Saves: +5 vs Wits 

Theosophist Abilities
See Dead people, Turn Undead x2, Summon Dead, Channel Dead, Death Knell, Suggestion, Command the Dead, Life Drain, Slay the Unliving, Call the Reaper

Heroic Touchstones
Level 1: Psychic Ability: Body Control 
Level 3: Additional 1st level Spell: Mend wounds
Level 5: Level 1 of Witch/Sorcerer
Level 7: Psychic Ability: Bio-feedback 
Level 9: Level 2 of Witch/Sorcerer
Level 11: Smite
Level 13: Great Smite

Spells
1st Level: Bless, Cure Light Wounds

Heroic (Divine) Archetype: Divine Warrior

Gear
Mace, Armor, Holy symbol

Not a bad version. I could tweak it a bit, but in truth, I am happy with how he turned out. There are differences between Wasted Lands and AD&D, and thus some differences in characters. I went through these all last year, but I have been pretty happy so far.

Looking forward to seeing how the other characters turn out.

You can get the Wasted Lands RPG and the NIGHT SHIFT RPG at Elf Lair Games.

Boxing Day: Haven the Free City

 I did not get any new D&D or RPG material this Christmas. No big deal, really; the only new things I wanted were those I wrote! But I did get a chance over the last couple of days to go through a boxed set I got in that lot from my late friend. 

I spent some time in the Free City of Haven.

In his collection was a copy of Haven the Free City. This is the second edition/printing, and it is in fantastic shape.

Fantastic is an understatement, really. The contents are in pristine shape. The box has a blown-out corner, but that is really it.

I am rather thrilled, to be honest. This is not just a great find; I have wanted this boxed set for, well, forever, it seems. Back in the day, Grenda and I spent a lot of time playing in cities and urban areas in our games. So to see this now from his old collection is not just a great gift, it is an emotionally charged one. 

We had planned to write our own "Urban Survival Guide" back then. He had created his own city with a giant map. The map is mixed in with all this stuff. I hope to get to it someday soon.

I didn't even know he had this; we would have played the hell out of it back in the late 80s. Given the material it was bundled with, he must have picked it up in late 1988 or 1989. 

The contents, as I mentioned, are in fantastic shape. I am not sure he used it all that much.

This is great stuff. I could spend days going through all of this. A true gift. 

The R. Michael Grenda Collection - Forgotten Realms

 I am still working through this large collection from my old DM and high school/college friend when I discovered something rather unexpected. Mixed in with all his stuff was a busted Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting box.

I am quite excited for this.

First, I had no idea he was into the Forgotten Realms at all. His game back in the day was 100% solid Greyhawk. In fact it was so famously Greyhawk that this is where my whole Mystoerth game world comes from.

Secondly, I have needed an empty Forgotten Realms box for a while!

I have all these articles from Dragon Magazine written by Ed Greenwood and others about the Forgotten Realms, and I have had them spread out amongst all my other boxed sets. Now, I can gather them all up and put them into this empty box. These all come from my coverage of "This Old Dragon."

I am still looking for all the articles I have. I know my copy of "Down to Earth Divinity" somewhere. 

This was among some other random and partial items that are not overtly part of the Realms. Things like a partial of A3 and some damaged copies of D1-2 and D3. I might also throw those in and figure out how to make them part of the Realms. Could I place Erelhei-Cinlu in the Realms? Could I edit the adventures to jive with Menzoberranzan?  No idea yet, but I will have a good time figuring it out.

I still have a stack of material here I have gone through. So who knows what other treasures are here to discover.

The R. Michael Grenda Collection - The Characters

 I am still in the process of working through my friend's collection of old D&D material.  While I have put his books on my shelves and given my current copies to my kids, I am still working through all the characters.

And he had a LOT of characters.

There are some here dating all the way back to 1976. The vast majority are for AD&D 1st ed. There is a long period of post 1987 to 1989 where there are dozens and dozens of characters. And then there are a few 2nd Edition ones as well.

Among these I found versions of my characters Retsam, Death Blade, Rogue, and Phygor. But those are not as interesting to me as my nearly forgotten and abandoned SpellJammer characters. And these pale to the shear weight, number, and import of his own characters. Names I have known now since the early 1980s.

Even Yoln is here in his original form.

Here are my problems.

What do I do with them all? And what story about them should I tell? 

Also, they have been in a house with cats, and I am deathly allergic. I can only handle them for a little bit. So my son suggested putting them in sheet protectors. That was smart. It will take me a bit to get them all in, but it has been fantastic so far.  Plus, he wants to use them as NPCs in his AD&D 1st Ed game (more on that later).

Here is what I am considering.

I am thinking about participating in The TARDIS Captain's New Year New Character challenge/fest. These are not new characters by any stretch of the imagination, but I feel the need to share them with you all. 

I just hope I can remember enough about each one to do them justice.

In addition, I am considering taking these characters and putting my spin on them. I might even post Wasted Lands or OSE or ShadowDark stats for them. I am still deciding. 

The R. Michael Grenda Collection

 This past weekend I went downstate to see my family and celebrate my Dad's 95 birthday. Yeah, he still doing great at 95! I also stopped by my old friend Michael's house, where his widow gave me a bunch of his old D&D stuff.

There is so much here. That black grocery bag is filled with character sheets dating back to 1981. There were a lot of duplicated books too. Much to my surprise and delight, a few of them were mine!

I have always talked about here how in the 1990s I lost a lot of my Basic and 1st Ed AD&D collection in various moves. I know where some of it went. I guess I lent some of it to Grenda back then.  There was my Fiend Folio, Manual of the Planes, Tales of the Outer Planes adventures, a bunch of other modules, and more. My oldest got my replacement copies, and I reclaimed my originals. 

There is so much more here too. 

In addition to a bunch of city books, I found a ton of his notes on our house rules for playing in cities and urban environments. By the way, other than some box damage, that Haven set is in fantastic shape. 

Maybe our "Urban Survival Guide" will see the light of day. 

There are also hundreds of characters here—so many that I don't even know what to do with them all. Some of the main ones, the ones I remember from our time playing, are going to get some airplay here. 

I found maps of our shared world, maps (so many!) of his city, the Riddlemaster, Shadowmaster, Beastmaster, and Starmaster classes—they were so overpowered, but it was a blast when we were teens. Details of his Greyhawk campaigns into CY 800—just so much stuff.

It is also sad. I would have loved to have gotten this stuff out there for others to enjoy while he was still alive. I could have asked him about these complex family histories and the differences in these maps. 

There is so, so much here. It is like walking into a past I only vaguely remember. It is also a reminder of how long ago some of this actually was.  

I tend to think of my University days as being "not that long ago."  Maybe because I am still hanging out with the same girl I was then (best friend. totally married her). But it really was. There is sadness in that. It is sad to know that Warluk, Adnerg, Danis, Finn, Tali, and Alix will never have their stories continue. Well, they can, with me I suppose, but that is really not the same is it?

I do take comfort and joy in the fact that my oldest has been converting over to AD&D 1st ed and will use all of this stuff and my own stuff with his group.

I'll spend more time with all this material and see where it takes me. 

#RPGaDAY2024 Game or gamer you miss

 This one is very easy, and hard. In fact I am sitting here drinking a Mt. Dew (though now a Zero sugar one) in his honor.

My friend and old DM Michael Grenda, died last year. It was a rather sudden and unexpected death. We had not talked in years (jobs, marriages, kids), but we had met up about this time last year, and we fell right into old patterns. 

I was very happy that his life had turned out happy. Maybe not exactly like we used to talk about in High School, but really who can say that.  I still feel sorrow for his wife and daughter.

I have been working on an adventure that I want to get out dedicated to him and based on his version of the "Mad Archmage" archetype. No, it's not a mega-dungeon, but it's certainly closer to a funhouse dungeon.  He, his wife, and his daughter all used to work at this haunted house, one of the largest in the state of Illinois. I was comforted in seeing that there were so many of these "Boo Crew" folks at his funeral. It seems right that the adventure should be a large haunted house-like deal.

Me and Grenda at Dell Rhea's Chicken Basket on Rt. 66 in July 2023

Yeah. I wore that Radio Shack shirt on purpose. We bonded over our love of the TRS-80 Color Computer.  I still have his old computer.

It was his birthday a couple of days ago. To be perfectly honest I am still coming to terms with the fact that he is gone. Weird. 

--

And that is all for Dave Chapman's #RPGaDAY2024 for August, 2024!

The Empty Chair: R. Michael Grenda

 Well. I didn't expect to be doing this today. I just got word that my old High School and College DM, R. Michael Grenda, died yesterday.  The cause of death is unknown, but it is suspected it was a heart attack.

I have mentioned him here many times, usually not by name, I don't name people unless they have explicitly said it was fine. But we began playing in my early high school days. We met via our school's theatre group. Yeah, we were both theatre kids. We bonded over our shared love of D&D and the fact that we both owned TRS-80 Color Computers. 

He had his world, based mainly on the World of Greyhawk and I had mine, based on the Known World, or what would later be known as Mystara. And we would go back and forth between these worlds. Eventually, we would merge them and he made a map for it that I would eventually lose and then much, much later find the Mystoerth map I still use today. We played chess together often, had similar tastes in fiction, and discovered computer games together.

When I left town to go to University, he eventually followed me there. He was a computer science major and would eventually end up working with databases for the State of Illinois (which is as much archaeology as it is computer science) and met his future wife while we were all at school together. His wife (then his girlfriend) introduced me to Gopher sites and even this new thing called the World Wide Web.

Much of what happened in our games lives on in my work here.  The "Big Bad" of my Buffy campaign "The Dragon and the Phoenix" was Yoln Shadowreaper, one of his NPCs. The entire background of TDaTP was my big War of the Dragons, which was our world-ending battle before college.

Our "D&D on the Computer" game BARDD was largely written by him. When I6 Ravenloft came out I bought it and then made him run it. Back in college, we even did the "Dreams of Barovia" campaign where the characters shifted from one reality to the next, with him running House on Gryphon Hill and me running the original I6. I ran my first test of my witch class with him and we tried out his Riddle Master, Beastmaster, and Shadowmaster classes.

We had met up recently, back in July, and that was great. We had not seen each other in a long time. Family, jobs, kids. You know the story.  I hate to say it, but when his wife called me last night, I was not 100% surprised. I thought he looked a little unwell. But hell, we are all in our 50s now. None of us look "great."  

I have not quite processed it all yet, to be honest.  I owe a lot of my my current writing to him and the games we played. Thought we might roll some dice one more time, but I guess not.

I'll end with him flipping me off at a party a bunch of us were at in college. He would have found it funny.