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My Spelljammer netbooks

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  All views in this blog are my own and represent the views of no other person, organization, or institution. One purpose of this blog is to have a home for my "netbooks", pdfs I have written of fan work for roleplaying games. I have written some professional gaming material, most notably I was a co-author on Hackjammer and I used to write the "Off the Shelf" column for Knights of the Dinner Table magazine.   I wrote a great deal of material for Spelljammer that was "published" on the web, mostly on what was the official Spelljammer fan site, Beyond the Moons . It's all still there, but the site is a bit harder to link to these days. And I have been converting old works and adding new material to create unofficial Spelljammer 'netbook' pdfs. Mostly these are reference works of various sorts to the Spelljammer products.  You will be able to download those netbooks here. One piece is Spelljammer in Review: An annotated and illustrated bibliog...

Olaf Snowfalcon

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All views in this blog are my own and represent the views of no other person, organization, or institution. The next character story!  Olaf Snowfalcon ["Uller" Deities & Demigods , p123 Drawn by David S. LaForce, colored by myself.] In high school our D&D 'campaign,' at least as I experienced it, tended to be a series of PC versus PC duels and fights, interspersed with occasional team ups for adventures. We didn't have a single dungeonmaster instead several of us took over the role to run adventures. We each had our own characters of course. Just as we competed in sports, or playing Risk or Axis & Allies , we competed in the campaign to dominate each other. It's a bit embarrassing how on the nose it was for adolescent males! I was always committed to the story lines, I couldn't just min/max a character. But in order to allow my primary character, Taran , to compete better I decided he needed a henchmen. So, I created Olaf Snowfalcon. Olaf was...

Taran Goblinkiller, aka Wanderer

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Taran Goblinkiller drawn by Justin Pfeil colored by Kelly Westermeyer The first of several character stories to come on this blog! One Christmas , after I had already been reading a borrowed copy of the  Player's Handbook   for months, my parents gave me the  Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set  and the  Dungeons & Dragons Expert Set  for Christmas. I created my first character and I Dungeon Mastered my first game that day, with my father and my sister playing. My father played the only D&D game of his life that day as a fighter named Sir Grumpsalot. 🤣 The character I created was Taran, unimaginatively based on one of my favorite fantasy literary characters, Taran, Assistant Pig Keeper , from Lloyd Alexander's Prydain Chronicles . Those works were my first exposure to the fantasy genre. In 6th grade I purchased the final book in the series, The High King ,  at a Scholastic Book Fair in my school. I was instantly smitten, the following year I wou...

Mercs: The Black Guard Company

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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,...

Welcome to Lúmequentalë Númenostan!

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Welcome to  Lúmequentalë Númenostan , a grandiose title for a probably rather banal blog.  Lúmequentalë Númenostan  merely (sort of) means 'Westermeyer History‘ in J.R.R. Tolkien‘s elven tongue, Quenya.  I intend to use this blog to distribute my various fantasy roleplaying articles and works, connected to my long time Dungeons and Dragons campaigns.  Lúmequentalë Númenostan  is properly the title of the campaign history of those campaigns but this blog will also contains links to my various ongoing campaigns as well as articles that I have published online over the years on the Forgotten Realms and Spelljammer . My Spelljammer work, especially, was originally published on the Beyond the Moons  site but it is difficult to link there these days on many social media platforms, as it is an http site. So I plan to republish those articles here.  You can download the pdf for the original  Lúmequentalë Númenostan campaign history   here ....