Deities and Demigods and Ravenloft

I'm continuing the theme of D&D because it's so integral to the foundation and history of Relentless Blades, as well as being a huge part of my life. I originally remembered Grim and Vig were created in 1984, but that's not possible, because we played them in my favorite stand-alone module of all-time, Ravenloft, which was released in 1983.

Ravenloft is an iconic module created by Tracy and Laura Hickman. Tracy Hickman is part of the duo, along with Margaret Weis, who created Dragonlance, which is also a seminal foundation of my childhood and a huge inspiration for me to want to write. The Dragonlance saga is so iconic, it will have its own post.

Ravenloft introduces Strahd von Zarovich, easily my second favorite vampire ever, right behind Dracula. My friends and I played countless hours of D&D so I can't remember most individual play sessions, except for our times playing through this module. Those I remember. Jace was our Dungeon Master and did a great job setting the right eerie and creepy mood. I still remember one of the sessions, we started early on a Saturday afternoon and played late into the night, going so far as to set up candles at the table to set the vibe. The session was intense, and we were all creeped out by the end, but it was very memorable and fun!

I'm skipping ahead in the timeline to talk about Deities and Demigods because my friend Randy reminded me of this book.

Deities and Demigods were released in 1980 but I didn't get a copy until around 1982 or 1983. As the name implies it was a source book with statistics and backgrounds for most of the major gods of the various religions. This book is very personal for me. My mother worked in downtown Sacramento for the State of California. As I mentioned in a previous post, she was a very practical person, so didn't really "get" my love of D&D, but she did love me. 

I remember being home sick from school and she knew I was feeling bad and wanted to cheer me up. She went out on her lunch break and walked the six blocks to a comic-book store downtown called Comics and Comix. She came home from work that day with this book and gave it to me. It did wonders to cheer me up. I love you, Mom!  💓

Fast forward to the late 80's/early 90's and my D&D career was coming to an end. By this point we no longer had regular D&D sessions, but every once and awhile Charlie and I would get out the dice and play for a bit. Grim and Vig were something like level 25 by then and had become basically godlike. 

Like I assume many D&D groups, we initially started by trying to stick as close to the rules as we could and played things pretty straight, but as time went by we morphed into power-gamers. It became all about defeating the toughest creatures and getting the "phatest" loot. Back in those days we were known as "Monty Haul" gamers. I think the term now might be "munchkins" but am not sure.

We were not satisfied just having run of the mill magic items, nope, we took several top items and smashed them together to make them even more powerful. I think by the end Vig had a silent, vorpal sword that instantly decapitated opponents on a natural roll of 17 or above, as well as making him permanently stealthy. Grim was permanently enchanted with a girdle of storm giant strength and his two-hand sword was a +8 defender (granting him that bonus to his armor class) and was +8 against dragons and did double or triple damage. 

In those last sessions Charlie and I played, we no longer bothered with full campaigns. We'd just grab the dice and the Deities and Demigods book, open a random page and have some god appear to fight our characters. Of course, we won virtually every fight and if by some miracle we lost, well we had high level clerics on standby to resurrect our characters. By that point death was only an inconvenience.  It's no way I'd ever want to play now, but as late teens/early 20-somethings it was the ONLY way that was fun for us. I remember those times fondly.