Dungeoncraft #0: Introduction

I was poking around on my hard drive and found some old files for a Dungeoncraft series that I wrote once. Dungeoncraft was a column that featured in Dragon Magazine (and then later Dungeon Magazine) and the "classic" run that I was imitating was one that was found in the late 2nd edition era by Ray Winninger. Ray spells out a methodology for running the game that I quite like. Although I don't agree with him on every single point, for the most part, I find that his methodology codifies and articulates many of the elements of my own style of running the game, so I've always quite liked it, and found it a very useful resource.

The articles he wrote used to be available for free on the Wizards of the Coast website, but it's been a long time since that was the case. I originally wrote my articles in an attempt to re-present the methodology, but with my own setting taking the place of his forest world Aris. Since then, his articles in full text have reappeared at various places throughout the internet, but I still think that there's value in seeing the game-running strategy with more than one example.

However, the older files that I wrote represent a state of my campaign setting that is now obsolete. I've evolved the setting quite a bit since then, and although it may have lost some of it's most notable distinctiveness, I think it still retains enough distinctiveness for me, and it's traded some of that uniqueness for more flexibility.

So, I'd like to rewrite and repost all those articles that I wrote using Ray's game strategy, except that this time I'll do it here on my blog. I called this entry #0 as it simply explains what I'm doing.

I know, I know, I often start series that later stall or even never get finished at all. "What about your homebrew rules system?" you may ask? Well, I'm not abandoning that project. I still have most of the work done on that system, so there's no need to panic. I just haven't gotten around to posting for various (quite good, in my opinion) reasons. But since most of the work on this series is already done too, it shouldn't be a problem to start it and keep it coming at a steady clip.