Monday, July 21, 2008

The Gospel of Saint Zalazar

I happened to have the good luck to marry into a family of gamers. My wife isn't a gamer, though she's played a couple of games of Illuminati over the years and she's currently obsessing over the GameBoy version of Lego Star Wars. My brother-in-law Jim and his sons play boardgames and wargames. Sister-in-law Anne will plays some games from time to time.

But this post comes courtesy of Anne's husband Rod. He's a D&D man going back to the Basic days. He played in my 3E campaign and the 1st edition campaign I ran immediately afterwards. Back in the Navy he played D&D, Traveller, Champions, and Gamma World. His game group got a lot of playing done because there wasn't much else to do on a ship all day.

Now here's the cool part: In most of those games Rod played the same character. When his group switched games they all converted/translated characters. Rod's played other characters over the years, but Zalazar, his primary PC, has adventured under Basic D&D, 1st edition AD&D, 2nd edition AD&D, and all those other games I named above. Behold, the Purple Grimoire of Zalazar!




A metal bound tome, with each page encased in plastic and back by black construction paper, this dread volume tells the tale of a world-hopping 32nd level magic-user and the artifact sword known as Niffelheim. Click on a page and bask in the unbridled awesomeness.








4 comments:

  1. Is that a dot matrix printed character sheet with the artifact description done by typewriter?

    Having a particular PC for that long is definitely playing the character for keeps.

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  2. Calling it a "Purple Grimoire" brings back very fond memories of my own "Green Grimoire," a similar piece of office-supply arcana from my youth (which later supplied the name of a local-RPG-newsletter column I wrote for a while, which was even later immortalized via the "Green Grimoire" entry in GURPS Warehouse 23).

    But the whole time, it was a flimsy little folding-tab binder thingy. >happy sigh<

    Hm. The guy who published that newsletter (back in Virginia) now also lives in Denver. I wonder if he has any old copies lying around ...?

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  3. Very cool! 32nd level is amazing! That Niffelheim is badass.

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  4. This is one of the coolest pieces of gaming relics that I've ever seen. Incredible story!

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