9th Grade Lunch Hour Campaign

This was the beginning of the heart of my early D&D years (1987-1991). AD&D specifically.

In the first semester of the first year of high school, we all had the same lunch period (a half-hour labeled either A, B, or C.) 

The same school at the same time as a certain rapper named Marshal.

The year was 1987. (I was introduced to the game back in 1983 with the Mentzer Red Box.)

Players ranged in number from 3-5 depending on the day. The main three consisted of a thief, a mage, and a cleric. I, of course, was the DM. 

Now, there were no dice. This was the 80s, this was stealth mode. We weren't afraid of the, Satanic Panic, but we were afraid of being labeled dorks, so dice bouncing around the lunch room was out of the question. (There was a secret society aspect to D&D in the 80s that has been forever lost.)

I had a page full of dice-ranges written down, a few charts per die type, for example, there were three or four d20 tables that looked like this:

1:2

2:16

3:12

4:11

5:6

6:20

7:1

8:17

9:13

10:19

11:3

12:7

13:14

14:8

15:4

16:5

17:10

18:15

19:18

20:9

I would pick a number on a chart then ask for a number from the player to determine their roll. Every so often, I would create new charts to prevent the players from figuring out successful numbers. Such a system depends on trust. Sometimes we would just flip a coin. (Interestingly enough, the year before, in 8th grade, myself and a different group were already experimenting with dice-less role-playing, something that did not stick with me.)

We had a basic world map, hand drawn on a blank sheet of white paper. We all took turns adding things to it, including additional pages that were taped on. Basically, the world grew with pages of mountains and forests and castles and towns as we passed the map around in between sessions. This was mainly done by myself and the guy who played the thief... speaking of: He was a real world kleptomaniac who would go around stores after school solely for the thrill of stealing. His ultimate dream for his character was to find a, ring of invisibility, his, precious, something I withheld from giving to him for quite some time. He had to earn such an artifact. Often he would ask if he was close to getting one. Often, I would say no. But eventually, in the hall, at my locker, I don't remember, I let slip the place it might be hiding, and the quest was on.

What I remember of the mage was that he wanted to be able to spin his staff like a martial artist. I eventually let him achieve this unlikely skill. He also once had a dream where I resembled Dungeonmaster from the D&D cartoon.

The cleric wasn't what you would call a gamer but played anyway. His "rolls" were always the luckiest and his character progressed the fastest to the slight annoyance of the others. He passed his Test of High Sorcery long before the mage did.

The players started out as a group, but eventually split up and scattered to different parts of the map on their own personal quests. Everyday they would each get 5-10 minutes of time as I went from player to player to player and back again. As I mentioned above, both the cleric and the mage had to undergo Tests of High Sorcery at various towers (a heavy influence from Dragonlance here; can't wait for WoTC to ruin that) and the thief was obsessed with infiltration missions, oh how this guy reveled in being a thief.

I drew no dungeons, there were no maps beyond the world map. All I had were scant notes and prompts as to what might happen. Everything else was in my head. Never again, would I play the game this way. And never again would I play outside of my, or a friend's, house.

It was all cool, but by December I was burned out, and beginning in January (2nd semester) I would pass the reins on to another friend who now shared our lunch. This angered everyone, because honestly, none of them cared much for this guy. They would call me at home or meet with me secretly in the hallway, begging me to take back the reins. They complained that he was turning the game into a fairytale... in my absence, something happened involving flowers, that was their breaking point. He simply didn't have the same source-material pedigree that the rest of us had.

So, I took control again and promptly went on to fail algebra.

Game on!