Stop me if you’ve heard (read really) say this before! I am a lucky gamer. I have been playing role-playing games for going on four decades. Our gaming group has been meeting every week since 1993. There has been player turnover, of course, but two members have been playing since 1994 and 2000, respectively. I am part of an active gaming community in Puerto Rico, and gaming has allowed me to make friends all over the world. I am incredibly grateful that role-playing games have allowed me to experience this.
I recently sat down with our regular six-person gaming group to play with two friends who hadn’t been at our table in a while. Sara played in the Pathfinder pirate-themed campaign, the Dawn of a New Age superhero campaign, and the Wanderers of the Outlands sci-fi campaign, about which I wrote extensively here on the blog; click on the previous links if you’re curious. I believe she last played with us in 2015 or 2016. We missed her, and I was thrilled to roll the dice with her again.
The other player had not played with us for a bit longer. Since 1996, if I recall correctly. Emilio is a childhood friend, we met when I was 10, and he was one of the original players when we played D&D for the very first time in 1986. If I remember correctly, his first character was a Fighter called Dragon Knight. He played in all my early campaigns. For a while, around 1989, my gaming group was just him and me. I ran one-player sessions of Palladium’s Robotech, AD&D in the Forgotten Realms, and a long-running Star Frontiers game for him.
He played in the very first adventure in 1987 of my still-ongoing homebrewed campaign, and he was there for the 1993 reboot, whose continuity we still play in to this day. His character was the AD&D 2nd edition Cleric, Analkyn Skyrunner. Really original name, I know! Despite what seemed like a joke name, he was a pivotal character in that campaign, eventually becoming the Patriarch of his church and Emperor when he married the heir to the imperial throne.
Emilio moved away for his military career, but his presence was felt long after. His character became a major NPC, his death and funeral part of the next campaign, and his dynasty a critical part of the world’s history.
A funny bit of trivia! Analkyn’s appearance was based on the bald man with a red beard in Clyde Caldwell’s cover for the novel Red Sands by Paul B. Thompson and Tonya R. Carter. I owned the novel but never read it. While writing this post, I discovered that the bald man on the cover is based on Jeff Easely’s appearance. According to the interwebs, the character is called Geoff of Easlon in the book, and he was card #188 in the 1991 AD&D trading card set.
Emilio and Sara sat down to play with us, and I decided to run a one-shot adventure of The Quintessential Dungeon—a one-page adventure from 2016. I don’t recall seeing the adventure before, but I found it thanks to a quick search and this review on the Questing Beast YouTube channel.
I love The Black Hack and derived games, so I used that to run the adventure, creating some 3rd-level characters for the players. You can download the pre-generated characters by clicking on this link if you want to use them. You can get the SRD for The Black Hack for free in the previous link or the excellent illustrated version on this DriveThruRPG link. The rules for the elf, dwarf, halfling, and bard can be found in the supplement The Class Hack.
Playing this dungeon with this group was a lot of fun! The Green Griffin Inn featured in the adventure, with the connection to the classic Emirikol the Chaotic art from the original 1st edition Dungeon Master’s Guide, is tied in the plot directly to the infamous Bargle, so I began the adventure in the Specularum (I never liked the name Mirros) in the Kingdom of Karameikos.
We played it a bit tongue-in-cheek, with lots of familiar D&D tropes. The adventure is chock-full of D&Disms, and it really took me back to our early D&D games. We’ll go back to our regular Savage Fading Suns game when we play next, but this trip down memory lane was great. I don’t think I would use The Black Hack for the type of long-term campaign we play, but I wholeheartedly recommend the adventure.
We got to play with long-absent friends and relive the thrill of our first games. The fun and nostalgia really hit home, which is appropriate, since 2026 will mark my 40th anniversary of playing tabletop role-playing games. I want to do something special for the occasion. I’m planning and hope to share those plans here on the blog soon enough.
Keep your friends close, enjoy the time you have, and the memories you make together. That’s really the most important thing I’ve gotten out of gaming. Thanks for reading!
