D&D Origin Month Part II: Eye of the Beholder

In the last entry I discussed playing Warriors of the Eternal Sun, not knowing that it was my introduction to Dungeons & Dragons, despite me not knowing what Dungeons & Dragons was.  All I knew was that Warriors of the Eternal sun was different from the other two RPGs that I played.  It required a lot more tactical thinking and resource management.  A few years would pass, and I would enter into one of the darker moments of my life, stretching from 7th Grade all the way through High School.  Yes, this mope is necessary to the story.

Things change when you enter Middle School and such.  Suddenly, people care, and care a lot, about: their appearance, taste in the "right" music, being seen with the "right" people, etc.  I found myself an outcast.  In this loneliness coccoon, I turned to anything to make me feel alright.  This is not an anti-drug story, in fact, seeing how things turned out, this is an anti-fundamentalist-religion story.  Yes, I became, for about a year and a half, an Evangelical Christian.  I watched TBN religiously, went to Christian websites, and was all-in-all Rapture ready.  Never tried to convert anybody, partially out of social anxiety, partially out of the fact that, deep down, I really didn't believe in it all too much.  Too much of it conflicted with my inner nature, they said that things were evil that not only did I disagree with them on it, I discovered I was that.  A self-hating bisexual does not a very merry Middle School experience make.  However, it would take Da Vinci Code, Final Fantasy VII, and the suicide of a close friend in the UK to lay my Evangelism to rest in Freshman year and turn it into a sort of live-and-let-live Deism (until becoming Pagan at 17), but I digress.

During this time, I read quite a bit and played a lot of RPGs (no wonder I wasn't an Evangelical deep down :P), and one game that I came to again and again was Cadash.  Now I already explained a bit about Cadash in the previous post, so I won't go back into it.  What I will say is that in the Caves that were home to the Kraken, there were these tree/root monsters with one eye that shot fireballs at you.  Something about that specific monster always stayed with me.  So I'm walking around Target and go to the video game section, and imagine to my surprise on a GBA game, what I mistaken for that tree/root monster.  So I scoop up the game, bring it home and played it.  By this time, I played Final Fantasy Tactics, so I knew a bit more about grid-based tactical battle.  I played the shit out of this game, and when I beat it, I wanted to know more about this world.  "What is this city of Waterdeep?  I've never heard of Half-Elves before?  So that one-eyed monster was nothing like those tree/root guys from Cadash."

Behold then, the internet.  At the time, we had a Windows 98 that was virus ridden because, like any teenage boy, I needed to see titties that bad.  This was also back in the day logging onto the internet made a bunch of scratchy dialing noises and took out your phone line.  Dial-up everyone, annoying and slow, but it worked.  I found out that Eye of the Beholder was a story that took place in the world of the Forgotten Realms, and thats when I was finally introduced to Dungeons and Dragons.  I also could have looked at the box which said D&D on it, but I was young, I didn't waste any time on boxes and manuals!

The plot of Eye of the Beholder?  Wikipedia says it better than I could:

The lords of the city of Waterdeep hire a team of adventurers to investigate an evil coming from beneath the city. The adventurers enter the city's sewer, but the entrance gets blocked by a collapse caused by Xanathar, the eponymous beholder. The team descends further beneath the city, going through Dwarf and Drow clans, to Xanathar's lair, where the final confrontation takes place.

This game was also my first introduction to Drow, even though they were in Warriors of the Eternal Sun (Dark Elves in Mystara).  Ironically, despite being impressed with the Drow, I rarely use them in campaigns.

Also, despite being the game that had me learn about D&D officially, it never had much of an impact on how I make settings or encounters.  The game, looking back, was very good at being a dungeon crawl, and giving me a taste of what D&D is like, but its definitely a lackluster title.  In fact, as blasphemous as it is to some gamers, I really am not the hugest fan of Forgotten Realms.  My main two settings in D&D are Mystara and Eberron, and they reflect in my settings.  I think the only major effect it has had is the use of Beholders, as well as the pacing towards the Big-Bad.  I will discuss this more in the next Table Plan in May.

But this game set me off on a journey unlike any other.  From here I would walk one day into a Waldenbooks store (again, back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth), and make a life-changing purchase.