Memories of the Dead Dwarf Campaign

What I had, and how I lost it

I remember my first Dungeons and Dragons campaign- well, bits and pieces of it at least. As I age, it is approaching 2 decades since I first rolled 4d6 six times and assigned them to stats. My first character was a half-elf ranger specializing in two-weapon fighting, because I was 10 or 11 years old and dual wielding swords is cool. The first little experience of play I had was the 3.5 starter box quick start adventure, designed to be playable solo but I was run through it by my Stepdad - a long time gamer who could actually read and comprehend the rules. Somehow, my Players Handbook was a hit on the playground during 6th grade recess, and I brought it to school almost every day.
Soon enough, I had a couple of friends to play with. We assembled for our first adventure, this time my stepdad had a proper one ready to go. I pulled out my Half-Elf ranger with a Longsword in one hand and a Short Sword in the other (he had some generic elf name from the list in the PHB, I do not recall it). One friend made a Dwarf fighter name Fierston (a dyslexic misspelling of Fire+Stone) who dual wielded a Dwarven War-axe and a short sword, because we were like 10 or 11 and dual wielding is pretty damn cool. The other friend had an elf paladin (whose name is long lost to time) who dual wielded a longsword and short sword, because we were like 10 or 11 and dual wielding is fucking cool. And that was our party, for the time.

We started by sheltering in a cave from a storm, and found a dungeon in the back - we had a grand time exploring it and killing monsters. Years later, while prepping my own campaigns to run, I came across the 3.5 adventure A Dark and Stormy Knight and fell back into the memories of that first adventure with friends. To this day, I have used the basic structure many times to start a campaign off (3 characters have died to the first encounter with Giant Rats so far) and have suggested it more than once to people asking for my advice.
We kept playing, my two friends and I with my Stepdad as the GM. Fairly quickly, we decided to expand the capabilities of our party. My ranger traded in his two swords for a bow (eventually becoming an Order of the Bow Initiate) and the Paladin became instead a Wizard. We were joined by another friend who made a halfling rogue with a name also long forgotten. And later on, we were joined by another friend who claimed to be experienced at playing (he had a level 100 character in his other campaign, after all). He made a cleric. After some time, the Wizard player drifted away from from playing D&D every week and stopped showing up - the wizard became a pseudo-npc that was often played by drop in players who were hanging out for the evening and wanted to try playing too.
We had many adventures, all great fun, but much forgotten to me by now. One time, we faced some Ghouls. My vague recollection tells me that we may have been going through the classic adventure of The Moathouse near the village of Hommlet, but I may be muddling things with our next campaign which was a dedicated Temple of Elemental Evil campaign and we definitely went through The Moathouse. I wouldn't be surprised if we did it twice though, as my Stepdad is a big fan of ToEE and has spent countless hours playing the computer game based on it. But I digress; once these ghouls were defeated, the dwarf Fierston plucked out their eyeballs and put them in a jar - of course failing a roll and aqcuiring Ghoul Fever in the process. This jar with ghoul eyeballs journeyed with us for the rest of the campaign, and every defeated foe found one of their eyeballs joining the decaying, stinking mess that the jar contained.
We came across a city once, and for some reason or another we were tested by some elite military group or something to join them. There was a fabricated dungeon underneath the city that they used to test potential recruits. We learned many valuable lessons down there. We learned to make a map after getting horribly lost trying to navigate just by verbal description. We learned to always post guards when we got ambushed while searching a room. We did not pass the test.
Another time, we went into a dungeon which included a room with a minesweeper based puzzle. At that age, we were lucky that Fierston's player actually understood how minesweeper worked and was able to recognize it. When we left that dungeon, we were ambushed by a different adventuring party, something that none of had even considered to be a thing that could exist.
We were to find a wizard once, in his tower. The path to it was lined with statues of warriors and adventurers - for inside was a medusa. A ghost appeared from the tower, and those of us that failed the save had a debuff for some time - I recall trying to call bullshit on the fact that it harmed us despite turning out to be friendly. This was also, as I recall, the first time we played with the new battlemap. My stepdad had adapted a whiteboard into a combat grid, and the extra immersion from the visuals as well as the improvement to tactical depth was amazing at the time. These days, I have converted my table to allow for the entire top of it to be used as a whiteboard.
At some point we were to defend a fortress in a mountain pass against an orc attack. As we approached the final battle, Christmas came and my family went on vacation. Somehow I convinced my Stepdad to bring along a grid and some minis, and we took all the characters and rulebooks (this was before our little paradigm of play had discovered splatbooks, despite it being the end of the 3.5 era). We played through the final battle of that adventure, just the two of us. It is one of my favourite memories, the two of us playing in the grand parlour of the Polish Soviet era communal vacation home my grandparents went to every Christmas, amongst the confused retired academics who were the general clientele of the location. However, I do not recall my friends who also played in the game being so enthused to find that they were so forcefully unable to attend the climax of that adventure; alas, what could I have done?

Later, there is an adventure I remember somewhat better. I think mostly just the timing of it in the context of life was great. This would have been two years or so into the campaign, we were no longer children playing but teenagers (albeit just barely). We were certainly smarter, certainly more capable, but still dumb as bricks in the way that young boys are. In a way, I think we peaked in this moment for maximizing the fun of Dungeons and Dragons - we were able to comprehend the game and play it well, were willing enough and comfortable to do some proper roleplaying, but were not yet burdened with problematic things such as life, thought, and opinions that could interfere with the purity of fun. We came to a forest under attack from many threats, and came across an old Treant who would assist us in whatever our main quest was if we could just help him protect his people of the forest. First, we cleared out an army of invading kobolds led by a young green dragon - who managed to fly away moments before death - but still, our first dragon ever and we defeated it! It was during this battle that the Rogue coined his infamous battlecry:

"I cleave his face off, why my face!"

A warcry oft repeated for years to come both in and out of game, long after we had eventually drifted apart and he stopped participating in RPGs. Following that, we had to deal with the Troll threat. During ane of the battles, the Elf Wizard was ripped in half - but we had learned the secret of defeating the trolls, Fire and Acid! The Treant, an accomplished Druid, managed to resurect the Wizard, but he returned as a goblin (mechanically: a benefit. narratively: fucking hilarious). With the power of fire, acid, and some well placed entagles we managed to defeat the main troll horde and their minions and were sent off for further questing onto the giant infested plains on the far side of the forest.
Sometime soon after, Fierston the dwarf was crushed by the club of a hill giant and we had no way to bring him back to life. The corpse was promptly tossed into a cart, jar of decomposing eyeballs and all, and we progressed on with the adventure until a time when he could be revived - as the player played a new "temporary" character. And thus the campaigns name was born, until its end it was "The Dead Dwarf Campaign" and it still is to this day. Fierston never did come back to life. It was not long after that we met some hill giant slaying gnomes and were invited into their safe and protected outpost. We were all around level 8 or 9 at this point, and since it was a natural break in the campaign we were met with "Why don't we take a break and try something different for a bit" to which we all agreed might be a fun idea. This different thing ended up being The Temple of Elemental Evil campaign, so not a short little break - especially since we never finished that one, or even got particularly far (I think we had just barely gotten to the temple proper). During the ToEE campaign, many things changed. My friendship with the rogue player and Fierston's player slowly fell apart as we started High School and went our different ways in life. Another friend introduced me the Magic: The Gathering by this time, and although he was in the ToEE campaign we ended up playing more MTG. My mother and stepdad had their second child together, with the older one still being younger than the Dead Dwarf Campaign, and thus he had much less time for D&D. So ended my initial years of D&D; we played very little until close to the end of High School when I took up the mantle of Dungeon Master and started on the first bits of what turned into the setting that I still run now, over a decade later. But those are stories for another time.

But now, here I am, steeped in RPG theory, playing many games with much better design. I read GMing blogs, dive into theory, now I write my own. I think about RPGs obsessively, while I am trying to finish my Masters in Computer Science I have found myself accidently working on a secondary thesis on applying certain concepts of Philosophy of Language to TTRPGs to find the meaningfulness of statements. And I am left wanting, searching, for what we had then, what has been since lost. When I play now, I have opinions and thoughts on how it should be done. My GMing is filled with systems and methods, striving for the right way to do things - striving to find what it was that we had then. When I play, I am jaded and grumpy - I hide under the character of a grognard, but in truth I can no longer feel what I once did. I know too much, I have thought about it too much. In an objective sense, the Dead Dwarf Campaign was bad under most metrics: there was no plot structure, our characters were shallow, the setting barely existed beyond the next encounter. NPCs were merely delivery methods for themes of combats, I don't think I remember a single name. Our adventures were more or less a random collection of whatever caught the DMs eye, with no real connection to each other or any greater meaning. But there is a metric in which that campaign excelled, and it is one that through all my research and study I think I have somehow gotten worse at: just plain fun. It was just a fun time, we were just friends doing dumb shit and having fun. We didn't care about things, we didn't think about things, we just went where the finger pointed and killed monsters. Half the time, we didn't know how the rules worked and just did things anyways. We had real surprises and new experiences, we didn't know everything about every monster. When the trolls regenerated, we were horrified. When we got ghoul fever, we were shocked. Nobody could know that a dragon can breath acid instead of fire. The game had one thing that I have lacked in all others since: a sense of wonder and magic.

And I think this is what I have lost. Every time I read something more, I have reduced the chance that I will feel it again. Every moment I spend obsessively thinking about how things should be done is that much less that could actually give me that feeling. The very nature of my relentless pursuit of that magic and wonder I once felt is what has driven it further and further away, and I think it may now be lost to me forever. I know too much, I understand too much, I have too many opinions, playing has become a constant analysis of methodology.

So for now, I will accept that I must be Sad Like Mushroom; and hope that maybe I am mistaken.