And So We Say Goodbye

If I'm sniffling a bit today, you must forgive me. It was an excitement filled weekend, full of nerdly delights.

Sunday we watched the premier of A Game of Thrones on HBO and we were happily transported to the mythic land of Westeros and the lands across the Narrow Sea.

But Saturday! We were saying goodbye to our own mythical land, the land of Kortoe. The D&D game that I and various friends have been participating in since 2005 is done, over, finished, complete.

This was the first RPG game I ever played in where we stuck with our characters from lowly first level (where your character can be killed by an over-eager kitten) to epic 20th level where your group can literally challenge the gods themselves, if they so choose.

The group playing the game has changed a bit since we first started. The Core Four (myself, the Big B, Mikey, and Travis) are the only ones who were with it from beginning to end. Over the years, we had over 15 different people playing in the game at one point or another.

Kortoe was something dreamed up at Travis' house after I had introduced the Big B to the joys of role playing (and he actually liked it!) and we all decided we wanted to play a truly epic game. The Big B's main complaint with RPG'g before this was that we always did short game sessions, one-nighters, and were constantly creating new characters for each game.

"I want to have a character stay constant from the beginning to end," he says to me. "I want to keep my character."

And so Kortoe was born.

Perhaps my favorite part of being a DM is drawing maps. In my 3-ring binders of D&D love at home, you can find maps to all kinds of places that never existed anywhere outside of my mind and the tabletop where the dice roll. My buddy Travis (my very first DM, sniff sniff!) also likes maps and had one drawn in topographical-style but nothing was named yet. I had a map with names already and was sort of attached to my naming scheme, so we stole my names and put them on his map.

Then the fun of world-building got started.

Because I'm obsessed with the Disney TV show Gargoyles, I insisted we create a new race that would be closely in line with the Disney mythos. I think we did a pretty good job--the race is fairly balanced and has its very own mountain to live in. Although no one really ended up actually playing one as a PC for any length of time, they were used as plot devices and NPC's by a couple DM's.

We wrote brief descriptions of each major city on the map, described the different regions, political powers, peoples, and religions. It was a dynamic thing, constantly subject to change as each player got a chance at DM'ing an adventure with the same PC's.

We decided on a rotating DM scheme since before that, Travis had always been our de facto Dungeon Master and the poor man was tired of running and arguing with us. I don't blame him! We're a difficult bunch at best to DM for.

We all pledged to respect what the other DM's had built, and stay away from the areas on the map "claimed" by a certain DM. Travis wanted to describe a city in the north that had been pounded by successive meteors due to the wrath of the gods against another of their member, I wanted to have a political-intrigue inspired game in the south where a nation had two cities on a river and was full of backstabbing and palace intrigues. Mikey wanted to be in charge of the undead city of Riazi, where a mysterious undead Emperor may or may not be running the show behind the scenes.

As the group morphed, new DM's were added. Cory joined during my game and helped teach us how to play RAW versus how we had done things before (sort of loosey-goosey). It's ironic that I credit Cory with this as he's very much a mind's eye kind of DM and plays fast & loose with the rules himself, but as we were all learning & eager to play "correctly" he indulged our questions & rules-lawyering with his unshakeably good-natured self.

By the end, our group had grown to the insanely large number of 7 PC's. My one complaint about D&D would be that it's so much harder to play with more than 4-5 people, even though you may want to include all of your gaming circle. But once we worked the kinks out and got a group together that really wanted to play, you hardly noticed the large number of PC's. Well, except when combat took hours and hours, that is! Or if you were the DM, tasked with keeping everyone involved and on track *whew*

We met monthly, often taking breaks over the summer months (it's hard for us Minnesotans to be inside when it's nice out, even for serious gamers like ourselves) and sometimes taking breaks due to schedule conflicts. Slowly and steadily, the world was fleshed out as our group of adventuring PC's, naturally named the Champions of Kortoe, journeyed around the world solving riddles, saving kingdoms, and picking up all kinds of goodies along the way.

We got to meet the gods (and mouth off to them), journey across planes besides our material one (the Astral is my favorite!), become undead and battle the loss of our inner selves, and finally face off with an elder evil that we made short work of.

It was a journey in many ways and we've all come so far since the beginning days. The characters morphed and changed as we morphed and changed, and overall the experience was a blast.

My buddy Corry is a fledgling photographer and he brought his camera & tripod to document our last night. We just had to take a shot of all of us in front of our awesome map (made extra large thanks to Kinkos!).

Back Row: The Big B (Keldon), Mikey (Daedralich), Tim (Stellan), Travis (Kevel)

Front Row: Cory (Stone), Me (Raena), Corry (Agbe)

What a good-looking group!

We're all sad to say goodbye to this fun game. But this isn't a true ending.

After all, our Champions learned that there were more continents than just the small one of Kortoe, which opens up whole new avenues for us to explore.

Kortoe ain't going anywhere just yet, even if the Champions will be retired. The hardcore group of gamers will continue the legacy started by Agbe, Daedralich, Keldon, Kevel, Raena, Stellan, and Stone.