Murkmoldiev's page

About Murkmoldiev

My life is a vast plane littered with glowing invisible Leprechauns , eight-shot ballistas, endless hordes of faceless scrawny rusty knife wielding Gobbos in wicker armour, the Rod of seven parts, 338 on line goth metal radio stations, spirits that poke at me while I sleep , troglodytes, vampires, and +7 mithril broadswords of frost; all set in a neo-post-industrial steam powered castle with teleportals and rope winch pulley basket systems and weapon racks in every room. There I am an undercover half fey sorcerer / ninja carrying a vorpal dagger which drips with purple Yin poison while riding a flying slug into a roman coliseum to battle a Dire Penguin controlled by a Ghost Emperor, which is actually a time traveling nanobot , battling for domination over a fictional kingdom that exists only in my mind and the minds of those who I can convince that this is just as real as the mouse you are holding.

I’ve been in the game since 88 and it all began when I was 8 I met a Kid called Ben, who introduced me to a game called Tunnels and Trolls.
Tunnels and Trolls is a role-playing game that was first released in 1975.
His father - who we called Pip was a professor at the University of Christchurch ( New Zealand ) and he played this game and had taught his son.
Ben and I played this game a lot over that summer and I even played in his fathers game with my characters Rambo I , II and III.
My foolish and reckless play style got me killed often but undaunted I made my own dungeon and killed other peoples characters.
I remember Pips Dungeon had a stone Donut in it that could teleport you or something and there was a group of orcs or something that would shriek PRESS GANG !! And fling gas grenades down the corridor.
This was represented by Pip throwing pens or dice at you and if you diddnt catch them then you CHARACTER diddnt catch the bombs and you were Knocked out - with the resultant and attendant disappearance of all your hard plundered stuff.
It was in that summer of 85 that the Gaming Juggernaut named THE WEZ was born.
Then When I was 12 I could finally understand the Red BOX I got for Xmas when I was 10. Then a teenager sold me all his 1st ed books at the same time 2nd ed came out. So by 13 Im playing a bastard mix of all of the above and did so until 16. Every weekend and holiday … A good 20 hours a week + 15 hours creating adventures
Then from 16- 21 being a womanizing wastrel took precedence… as well as being to munted to perform the mental gymnastics of DMing…
21 – Detox and my creativity came back so it was back into the hideous behemoth that become 2nd ed and leaving the party scene for a cool gamer crowd.
25 – took a year off to travel…
Resisted 3.0 – 3.5 all the way until I was 26 when I was up in a cabin in the wilds of BC and a guy had a 3.0 PHB and some dice… he said “you seem to me like a Dungeon Master….” Then I made claim that I was not only a 47th level Dungeon master, but one of the top 10 on the planet.
They forced me to read the book cover to cover and kept me as a captive for 26 days while I took them on an immense campaign – all adventures run from memory.

Now Im 32 – I have a “D and D room”in my house and 7.45 gig of D and D pdfs and Text files on my computer. When Im not away from home on work I play 12-16 hours a week – with 5 campaigns going at once… 4 full shelves of books – EVERY Dungeon magazine and my poor 14 year old step son starts every second sentence with “In D & D…”

I don’t keep him home from school to play D and D though… well …. Not much…

As I have all the main books from 1st ed – Basic- to 3.5 and mix in a horrendous number of house rules plus pathfinder ( rad ) I tell people I play 10 .0 . And they look at me like Im a complete lame ass which I utterly deserve.
Yet good old 3.5 forms the spine of it all.

If someone had told me as a child that I would spend countless hours over the next 20 years scribbling into notebooks , rolling dice, making funny voices and would go with out food , sleep and even destroy perfectly good relationships with perfectly proportioned women all for the thrill of helping others follow me through a glowing green portal into an imaginary world populated with fairies, elves and gremlins I would have grabbed them by the arm and said...
“THERE’S A” PORTAL????!!!!!”
I once added up all the time I have spent hunched over books and peering from behind screens and the number of consecutive days that I had spent gaming totaled almost four years...
I rechecked the numbers THAT CANT BE RIGHT Wez said to Wez.
That’s preposterous , astounding and hideous !!!
It just wont do !

Its not enough!
Efforts must be redoubled!