Highmoon's Ponderings

A funny thing happened after my last post on The One That Got Away, where I talked about my wanted-to-but-never-got-to-play character Hal Whitewyrm: Judd left one comment on my blog post that said, simply, “Let’s do it.” Before I knew it, I’d ordered Burning Wheel Gold, had it arrive at my house, read about 300 pages of it over a weekend and had my character made and ready to play.

For the past week and a few days, we have been playing via forum posts over at Obsidian Portal and we wrapped up Chapter 1 of our game. It has been a fantastic experience for me, and I am also glad to see that for Judd as well. Seriously, we went a whole chapter of play, about 10 pages of posts back and forth, in one week! I’ve known PbP games that take months to cover similar ground and here we did it in about 7 days. This can only be attributed to the fact that we’re both giddy about the game. As I told Judd, I feel 13 again: checking the game so I can post my reply, thinking about the story and characters, pulling out books and having them within easy reach for reference. It’s a wonderful experience.

Playing Burning Wheel in the Forgotten Realms has taught me a few things that I want to cover individually later on, about character creation, about how system defines setting and vice versa, about forum play. In general, I can state that my experience so far with Burning Wheel has been fantastic and I look forward to exploring this game more and more. That it is happening while I play my favorite character in my favorite setting with a dear friend at the GM helm just makes the experience all the better.

You can find our campaign at Obsidian Portal: The Ballad of Hal Whitewyrm. We play in the Forums, and you can read the Adventure Log for Chapter 1 and read through it in its entirety.

After my last post I am due for some Githyanki Therapy, a practice I am borrowing from my friend Judd Karlman.

Judd has been playing a game of Burning Wheel (which I’ve been wanting to play for a long time) set in the Forgotten Realms (which I love) and not an update of his goes by without me wishing we had Star Trek transporters, so I could go play with him in New York and then come back home to Miami. Judd asked me on G+ if we were to play a BW game in the Realms, where and what I would like to play. My reply to him took me a bit by surprise and it leads me to my therapy post.

Hal Whitewyrm is the character that got away, the one character I really wanted to play and never got the chance to.

Hal Whitewyrm is a half-elf bard living in Highmoon^[1], in Deepingdale, in the area known as the Dalelands. He has somewhere in his heritage a trace of weredragon^[2] blood which gives him orange eyes. He’s a joyful fellow who honestly loves adventuring.

Hal is the character I created back in the early 90s, when I first started to get into AD&D in high school. He’s the character I would constantly recreate during class, the one I would write short stories about, the one who was my avatar in the world of high adventure that are the Realms. He was a shallow character concept^[3] with cool orange eyes and a weredragon girlfriend who existed mostly in my 5-subject spiral notebook in story after story. And I loved it.

I just never got to play Hal. My D&D group played Basic D&D/Rules Cyclopedia and we had a fairly regular schedule, so, little time to try out new ideas. Then we played less and less, then I moved, etc. Aside from the fact that I used the name as an email address for some time, I have not gone back to this character in over a decade. Which is why I surprised myself when I answered Judd’s question about what character I would play in a Burning Wheel Realms game as follows:

* I’d play the character I’ve carried with me for years, Hal Whitewyrm, a half-elven bard with weredragon blood in his ancestry (weredragons are a race of female-only shapeshifting wyrms from the Moonshaes – see the thread there?). He’s the guy I wrote stories about in my teens yet never got to play. Hal is all about the romantic journey (as in literary genre, not mass market Harlequin titles), facing adventure in a large world, ideally of the legendary danger kind, with fast friends at his side, a love life to look forward to, and death around him to put it all in perspective. Think Aragorn’s journey, but with a bard who also deals with issues of identity.”

Wow, I’d never really put those ideas into words before but yeah, that’s what Hal is all about for me: exploring the high fantasy romantic character arc; less about killing monsters and taking their stuff, more about zero-to-hero who saves the princess and loses friends along the way.

So, what about you? Which is your character that got away? The one you always wanted to play but didn’t? And what’s their story like?

1. ^[1] Yes, this is where my online nickname comes from. ↩
2. ^[2] In the D&D 3e edition of the campaign setting, they were renamed Song Dragons. ↩
3. ^[3] He was originally called Daniel Stephaln Whitewyrm–yeah, talk about transposition–which then changed to Daniel Whitewyrm, and eventually to Hal Whitewyrm. ↩

My friend Judd Karlman has been talking both on Twitter and his blog about a new Burning Wheel game he’s started set in the city of Waterdeep, in the Forgotten Realms (FR), arguably the most detailed campaign setting for Dungeons & Dragons. This, of course, has gotten me thinking about FR as well, and has brought a flood of nostalgia washing upon me, causing me to write this post where I can wax poetic about my love for this world.

Let us travel back to the last years of the Rubik’s-Cube-and-leg-warmers era and to the little island of Puerto Rico. In 1986 I was introduced to Dungeons & Dragons, or more precisely to Basic D&D. To say that I fell head-over-heels for this game of the imagination would be an understatement. We played the game as much as we could, as much as 8th-graders can manage, as much as was humanly possible at our age. And given we were playing Basic D&D, all our adventures were in the Known World (later to be known as Mystara): we played through B1-9: In Search of Adventure straight through, once, twice, more. The Known World as our world far more than the real world was. But this isn’t a post about the Known World (though I certainly think one will eventually have to be written as well).

A couple years later, we finally got our hands on Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D) books. Getting RPG books in Puerto Rico during this time was about as difficult and exiting as Indiana Jones finding the lost ark (sans snooty French nemesis), so these were great treasures and the literal keys to even more adventures than before. Problem was, AD&D didn’t come with a built-in setting. There were a couple to choose from: my friend Braulio wandered down the road to Greyhawk, and me, I took the road leading to a brand new land just recently discovered, a placed called the Forgotten Realms.

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