Everyone who became a DM in their youth created their own fantasy world. Mine was called Midaka. It grew out of the imaginings I had as a young teen alone in my room, creating characters, making up backstories for them, creating castles they lived in, and so forth. Eventually I drew these maps of the Old and New lands of the east and west.
I have a few binders of lore about this setting, old and musty and full of embarrassing content. I might scan a bunch of it eventually. I don't know. For now I have a few scans here and there and the material is safely stored away once again, probably to be found by my kids when I'm dead. Possibly tossed out, who knows? (I kid... I think they would keep this kind of personal stuff. But that's really their choice, not mine.)
Maybe I'll post these maps again later and talk more about them, unpacking some of the stuff you see here. Like what the hell is Curab's Anomaly? There's some deep lore about that, I think. A wizard, a betrayal, a rift in reality. Stuff like that.
This sort of thing is my favorite bonus to buying used D&D books. It seems to be getting less common nowadays, but for a time there in the 2000s-2010s you could always find an AD&D1E or AD&D2E book with extra papers stuffed into it. Those memories of someone else's campaigns and characters hold a special magic to me. It's like a tangible evidence of imagination, yknow? Not for consumption, just for them and their friends.
ReplyDeleteAs I recall, there was a website some years back which archived these found materials. Scans of loose leaf character sheets, crayon and pencil maps, that sort of thing. Wish I could remember the actual site. I lost my papers in move after move after move growing up. I don't have anything from my youth like this, the binders of art and embarrassing VtM characters and monster entries and that sort of thing. It always got lost or tossed, one way or another.
Anyway, I think that you should definitely recount your ancient artifacts. It's a bit like archeology, I guess. It would be fun to see what you remember, what you don't, what still works and got reshaped or reimagined later in your works, what got left behind. Plus, there's something so welcoming to me about the aged school papers.
I think I remember what you're talking about. From the G+ days, maybe. It was a blog, I think.
Deletehttp://plagmada.org/ ??
DeleteI think that might be http://plagmada.org/
DeleteOh that's it! Thanks
DeleteMan I think a supplement/gazetteer of scanned hand written/drawn material would be awesome 😄 but that's just me
ReplyDeleteOh damn... well, I do have a decent amount that was preserved. Though not nearly all of it. I did some map games right after I learned what D&D was, but before I understood it completely. I would LOVE to have those back. But they are long, long ago lost.
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