Mercs: The Black Guard Company

The first Play by Email ("PBEM") campaign that I created and ran was "Mercs." In 1996 the tabletop game I had been running for the past three years in college was shifting from a primarily AD&D Forgotten Realms campaign to a White Wolf World of Darkness Storyteller campaign, and we also were meeting less often. Those truly epic tabletop AD&D campaigns had included James B ('Helix'), Brian H. ('Hathron'), Chad ('Antontio'), and Stephen ('Marik') amongst others who never joined the PBEM games. (The adventures of that party, the Oathbound, will eventually be told elsewhere on this blog, but can also be found in the pdf for the original Lúmequentalë Númenostan campaign history here .) The world wide web and email were just becoming common in the academic world and I had dipped my toe into play by email games as a player - rather unsuccessfully, I clashed right away with the DM. I realized from that, however,...