There’s something to be said for taverns.

No, I don’t mean the aging, borderline run-down beer-and-burger joints in the side alleys of most American cities, though I’ve a soft spot in my clogged arteries and beer belly for those, too. I mean the bog-standard cliché-ridden hives of scum and villainy that lie at the heart (or at least the opening session) of nearly every fantasy campaign in the universe.

Although I play in a bi-weekly Pathfinder RPG campaign in the spacious and exciting new Paizo offices, I’ve considered myself a GM first and player second ever since I first picked up the funny dice back in the early 1980s. By that token, despite the fact that my barbarian Ostog the Unslain ravages the stunty humanoids of the world of Golarion every fortnight, I still consider myself “between campaigns” at the moment.

My last true game petered out about two years ago. It began as the official playtest of my first adventure for Dungeon Magazine’s Age of Worms Adventure Path, which I conceived and edited with my co-worker James Jacobs. The game started at a crazy time for Paizo, and since it consisted entirely of colleagues who also worked at the office during this crazy time, the game suffered more cancellations that any I’ve ever been a part of. Over time it became maddeningly difficult to rally the eight (!) players together for an evening of play, and somewhere around the middle of the Adventure Path enough employees had moved on that even polishing it off with a final mega-session became an unrealistic expectation.

Irregular as it was, though, it was a hell of a lot of fun, and the group of players became like a second family to me. We managed to squeeze a couple of years worth of bi-weekly (ok, ok, monthly) sessions out of only six magazine adventures, plus all of the random stuff about bullywugs and Wee Jas and the town of Diamond Lake that I added to fill gaps in the main plot and to maintain my players’ interest. As much as I enjoyed the Age of Worms scenarios beyond my own kick-off adventure, my favorite memories of the campaign come from the stuff I invented specifically for my players, and it’s that material I regret not following up on and tying up, far more than the big exciting fights against the dracolich Dragotha and Kyuss himself, which is where the campaign would have ended up had I followed through on its written conclusion.

Last time around, getting the player characters together was easy. After editing Dungeon for a couple of years and putting a huge amount of brain time into getting the party together for a given adventure or campaign when designing “adventure hooks” (which authors often helpfully left out completely), I decided to just say to hell with it and literally started the party at the front door of the opening dungeon.

Sure, I asked each of the players for a bit of backstory and did my damnedest to cobble together some contrived reason why the player characters all knew each other, but in the end I started them at the simplest place I possibly could have: the front door of the dungeon crawl.

But not all campaigns begin with a dungeon crawl, and I am loath to repeat myself. In the years since my last campaign began I’ve often thought about how it all started, and I’ve never been fully satisfied. Next time around, I’m going to have to do something better.

Next time around is looking like it may be sooner rather than later. I’ve got a hankering to get around to running a campaign based off of a huge edifice in the Pathfinder world called The Spire of Nex, a mile-tall tower than juts over the horizon of the fantastic metropolis of Absalom, the City at the Center of the World. Absalom is the centerpiece of the world of the Pathfinder Chronicles, surrounded by the ancient fortresses of the countless would-be tyrants, archmages, and petty dictators who have tried to take the city by force over the last few thousand years. The city itself has never fallen, but it hasn’t stopped the bad guys (or deluded good guys) from giving it a go over the centuries, and all of these ruined towers, castles, extradimensional hidey-holes, and tombs make for ideal adventuring spots just a hop away from the city itself.

I’ve been working on Nex and his tower for a few years now, scribbling hideous traps and ideas for cool NPCs into my beloved notebooks. I’ve always wanted to try a mega-dungeon campaign a la Gary Gygax’s Castle Greyhawk or Ed Greenwood’s Undermountain, and the Spire of Nex is my way of doing a mega-dungeon without all of the problems that can so easily creep into that style of campaign.

The original Temple of Elemental Evil is one of my absolute favorite AD&D adventures of all time thanks to the brilliant Hommlet and Moathouse sequence and some really inventive and challenging encounters and NPCs. I’ve run the first part at least four times during my gaming career, and even new-school players who came into the game with third edition respond well to the challenges and open-ended nature of the adventure. Once you get into the Temple of Elemental Evil proper, however, the real trouble begins, and the true villain of the adventure rears its bestial head. No, I’m not talking about Lareth the Beautiful or even Zuggtmoy the Fungus Queen. I’m talking about the REAL villain in a mega-dungeon: BOREDOM.

Shortly after I joined the staff at Wizards of the Coast in 1999, I received a gift from the gamer gods when Monte Cook invited me to play in his official playtest for his revised third edition version of that adventure, Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil. I subsequently played in Cook’s Ptolus campaign for seven or eight years. I consider Monte the finest DM I’ve ever had the chance to game with, and the lessons I learned watching him over this time could fill a book. I consider his “Return to” the best nostalgic adventure of its day, and a lot of the stuff he added flat-out improved the original module. But even Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil gets boring in parts (how many times do you have to fight gnoll guards before you get the idea?). Even in this vaunted playtest with a vaunted DM running his own vaunted re-take on a vaunted mega-dungeon classic, there was an everpresent risk that things could get a little repetitive and boring.

So why do I want to inflict a mega-dungeon on another group of gamers, when even my own experiences suggest that the format doesn’t stand up well to long-term play? Well, I’m a bit of a glutton for punishment, I suppose, and now that the final Pathfinder rules are out a lot of my friends have been bugging me to start something up. I’ve run a few levels of the Spire of Nex at various conventions over the last couple years, and I really miss the thrill of GMing a semi-regular game. I also have a hankering to run an entire campaign in which the players are trapped in an inescapable multi-dimensional prison with lots of linkages between “worlds,” and to see what happens when a mega-dungeon becomes the total framework for a campaign. What I envision is a sort of Castle Greyhawk meets the TV show Lost, with the PCs essentially marooned on an anchorless amalgam of “stacked” demiplanes that they must explore one by one to find a way out.

My notebooks are filled with scribbled notes about planar mechanics, gateways between realms, concepts for imprisoned demiplanes and the creatures who empower them, and all sorts of other crazy ideas and schemes. I know who the ultimate villain of the adventure will be, many of the key encounters along the way, and the solution to the riddle that binds all of the demiplanes together. I’ve got plenty of notes about fun encounters that I know my players will enjoy. Hell, I’ve even outlined a novel featuring a couple of my fiction characters exploring the dungeon. But it’s all been organic, day-dreamy “fun” design, and only now am I thinking about the adventure in terms of something I will actually play, and will most likely play soon.

Which brings me to the same problem a GM must face every time he sits down to conceive a new campaign. How is it going to begin?

The very first adventure in the Spire of Nex arc, wherein the PCs become imprisoned in the dungeon, is set at level 5. I did this to give the players some practical experience before they set out on a very dangerous adventure, but now I find myself with five levels to fill. Before I figure that out, I’ve been agonizing over how to get them together.

At the same time I’m also writing a big two-round adventure for Paizo’s Pathfinder Society organized play campaign. Getting the party together there is easy, because all of the players belong to the Pathfinder Society, a sort of adventurers’ guild. The four-hour events are essentially missions given to the PCs, and the PCs comply because they belong to the organization. Well, really they comply because they know they only have four hours to get from the beginning to the end of the adventure, which means as little time as possible needs to be taken up by technical stuff like getting the party together.

But a home campaign is not the same thing as a four-hour convention event, and I feel like my players deserve something better than “so you’re standing outside the dungeon” or “so you somehow all know each other.”

In the past I’ve started the action right in front of the PCs, so that they’re all riding in the same carriage when a strange event occurs, or they’re all walking down the same street when chaos ensues. I don’t want to do either of those again, and nor do I want to do the same old trick of “each of you knows this NPC in peril” plot hook that was so popular with Dungeon authors that we started cutting it after a while. For the time being, I am well and truly stumped.

Which brings me back to taverns.

Starting off a campaign with the PCs randomly wandering into an adventure hook in a tavern and then randomly deciding to team up to take on said challenge is a perfectly functional way to start off an adventure or even a campaign. It’s popular (and cliché) because it works. But I’ll be damned to eternal hell if I’m going to use it on the gang of persnickety game designers and professional writers who call themselves my friends. I’d never hear the end of it.

So I’ve got to put some serious brain time toward this issue, and I need to come up with something creative. Sitting here at this desk hasn’t generated any ideas, so perhaps I need to change my environment. I do most of my best thinking in public, and I’ve found that nothing calms the mind like a nice, frosty alcoholic beverage, the dingier the source the better.

In short, I’m off to go solve this problem over a beer.

At the tavern.

--Erik Mona
Seattle
October, 2009

Erik Mona

Ten years ago I moved from Minneapolis to Seattle to take a job at Wizards of the Coast. The company was, at the time, in the final stages of development on Third Edition Dungeons & Dragons, and was cresting into the excesses of the Pokémon era. None of my fellow employees had yet cashed in their considerable stock options for party favors like new cars and houses, but there was a palpable feeling of success in the air. It was an exciting time to join the top RPG staff in the industry, and I was excited to get a chance to be a part of it.

Landing a job as editor of Polyhedron, the official newsmagazine of the RPGA Network, was a dream come true. I’d wanted to work on D&D since I first learned to play the game in an after-school class in third grade. My love of Dragon Magazine and the vocabulary instilled in me by the eldritch prose of Gary Gygax virtually dictated my education, pushing me toward English and work on several school and college publications, all with an eye toward one day getting a chance to make my own mark on the game that had been such an important part of my life.

My first game book was AD&D’s Deities & Demigods, which easily bridged my early interest in Greek and Norse mythology to a love of this new game that allowed you to create brave (and sometimes not-so-brave) heroes in their image. I spent my allowance on most of the early First Edition AD&D adventures (and their “Basic” brethren, though even as a little kid I knew I wanted to be “Advanced” as soon as possible). I studied the encounters in these adventures to determine how to build my own games, and I evangelized D&D to just about every kid who would listen.

I played on the bus, and at recess, at the “Kid’s Club” where I had to wait out the hours between the end of the school day and the end of my parents’ workday. I hosted numerous campaigns at the family house (complete with homemade snacks from my mom), drew covers for my own adventure modules and did my best to lay them out in two-column format, collected and painted miniatures, and eagerly snapped up Dragonlance and the Forgotten Realms as they first came out. I had a Warduke birthday cake. In short, I was that kid. A total D&D nerd.

Junior High brought an influx of kids from other schools, many of whom shared the “D&D bug”. Around this time First Edition turned into Second, and while I still remained true to my main squeeze I started exploring other RPGs as well. My friends and I shot up Seattle in a series of Shadowruns. We adored the grim critical hits and exciting careers of the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying Game (complete with short jaunts into the various associated tabletop wargames), and rolled up dozens of characters for Traveller, even though we never managed to actually play much. We tried our hands at games like TORG, Star Wars, Renegade Legionnaire, and others. Somehow we never managed to make it out of a game of Call of Cthulhu without murdering each other in insanity-induced gunfights. It was a grand time.

College brought a greater focus on studies and a new city, as I moved from Minnesota to Boston. No longer did I throw dice with the same buddies I’d known for years. Instead I was in undiscovered country, seemingly at a college with exactly zero other roleplaying gamers. Desperate for a game—any game—I resorted to relying upon the local game store’s “Gamers Seeking Gamers” corkboard, which eventually led me to sample some of the best—and worst—campaigns that the greater Boston area had to offer. All of a sudden I had a chance to put away the DM tools and be a player. Seeing how other game masters ran their games was a revelation. While I had always clowned around with miniatures, the best of my college DMs showed me how scenes could come alive on a battle mat. Somewhere along the way I discovered the internet, first through Gary Holian’s super-secret GREYtalk discussion list and later through TSR’s dedicated area on AOL. These forums taught me that there were other Greyhawk fans out there in the world, and that their passion, like mine, had managed to survive more than a dozen years of gross mismanagement of that brand. Even the designers at TSR were grudgingly forced to admit that, at least at the time and at least online, Greyhawk fandom rivaled their favored Forgotten Realms. For the first time ever the fans and the people who created the game we loved were interacting in a real way online, and we all hoped the interaction would improve the products.

About the same time, on summer trips back to the homeland, I discovered the RPGA Network and its popular Living City campaign. Set in the Forgotten Realms city of Raven’s Bluff, the campaign featured thousands of players from all over the country, and each major convention brought with it a handful of exciting new events. Unlike “classic” RPGA tournaments, you could play these with the same character, in any order. Several years later the Living City campaign would lose a lot of its players to new Massively Multiplayer Online games like Ultima Online and Everquest, and it’s not surprising why. Minus a computer, Living City offered an experience very similar to that of an MMO, complete with the problem alpha players, the greed, and the genuine fun that combine into very addictive qualities.

I was addicted. I joined a motley gang of Twin Cities Roleplayers (TwiRP, for short) to play more RPGA events. Together we launched dozens of Game Days and Weekends in Raven’s Bluff and honest-to-god local conventions. We formed huge caravans to hit shows in places like Milwaukee, Iowa City, Toledo, and Columbus. If the modules on offer were right and we knew the right people would be there, a few of us even hopped planes to places like Atlanta or Orlando. I started to meet gamers from all over the country, to see how different people played the game differently, and to see the true potential of a giant organized play campaign. I even started to write scenarios for the Living City campaign, finally succeeding, in some small way, at contributing back to the game that had given me so much over the years.

When college ended I sidelined the dream of a career in gaming for an exciting life in the world of consumer public relations for the Minneapolis branch of an international PR firm. It was good work with fun, creative people, but it was a far cry from where I wanted to be, in Lake Geneva Wisconsin, following in the footsteps of idols like Gary Gygax, Roger E. Moore, and Jeff Grubb. Most of my free time still went to gaming. I became the president of our local RPGA chapter, worked with fellow Greyhawk fans on AOL and the greater internet to create the Oerth Journal, one of the very first RPG e-zines (and it’s still around today, I might add), and continued going to cons and writing scenarios for the RPGA. Rumors soon came to me that TSR might, just maybe, be looking at relaunching my old love Greyhawk, and everything was right with the world.

Then, out of the blue, two words emerged that shook the foundations of my hobby and nearly destroyed a couple of decades worth of well-laid plans. Those words? PRINTER PROBLEMS. All of a sudden, production out of TSR ground to a halt. Their well-traveled AOL area was mothballed. The company reps and designers, some of whom I had grown to consider personal friends, grew silent. All they could say was that TSR was experiencing “printer problems,” and that they hoped to resume production as soon as possible. It didn’t take long for the game theorists and conspiracy nuts among D&D fandom to suss out what was really going on. Sure, TSR had “printer problems,” but the problem was that they couldn’t afford to pay their printers, who refused to print new books and (rumor had it) may have even been holding on to some fully printed books as collateral.

Boom. No more TSR AOL area. Boom. No more TSR. Boom. Maybe no more D&D. It was a tense time for RPGers in general, especially for those of us who had been planning our entire lives around one day getting a job at the company. Somehow, the RPGA survived with a shoestring budget, still putting out scenarios, still sponsoring conventions. With no stable group and an uncertain future for the game, the RPGA alone carried the D&D flag, and I was thrilled to follow along and, every so often, help hold the battle standard steady.

Then, in quick succession, Wizards of the Coast swooped in to save D&D, Greyhawk was put on the fast track for development, and rumors swirled of a new massive “Living” campaign in the works and a brand new edition for our favorite game. The Greyhawk design team engaged my services as a continuity checker and sounding board, and my name started to creep up in Wizards of the Coast’s TSR products. I wrote more and more RPGA scenarios, got to know more and more of the TSR design staff at RPGA conventions and leadership retreats at the Renton offices, and started to believe once again that I might one day get a shot to make the hobby of my life a career.

That chance came in a flash. The Polyhedron job opened, I submitted my application, and within a few weeks I was out in Renton again for a formal interview and editing test. Evidently they liked what they saw and heard, and before I even had a chance to travel back home they offered me the job.

Me, the ponytailed 24-year-old kid who had once sent his junior high campaign notes as a formal submission to TSR (notes which surely ended up in the garbage shortly after some poor sap opened them). Me, the eager up-and-comer who had once been transferred from the TSR switchboard directly to Roger E. Moore, who personally crushed my hopes of getting a college internship with the company (“We don’t offer internships,” Roger said, “and we probably never will. Good day!”) All of a sudden I’d been called up from the farm league to get a shot in the majors. I couldn’t have been more excited. Within a couple of months I folded up my life in Minnesota to embark on the journey I’d prepared for almost since the day I’d first learned how to read.

I can’t quite explain how thrilling it was to join the Wizards staff in the summer of 1999. D&D was clearly in safe hands, and the editorial staff at the time read like a who’s who of game design. Very shortly, I came to meet many of the authors whose work I had admired for years. There was Jeff Grubb, author of the Manual of the Planes, creator of Spelljammer and co-muse of the Forgotten Realms. Over there was Planescape’s Monte Cook, hard at work on the Dungeon Master’s Guide in a cubicle covered with comic book action figures and other interesting ephemera. Not too far away sat the legendary Skip Williams, The Sage himself, tinkering with the manuscript that would become the Monster Manual. And there, directly on the other side of the cube wall from my chair in RPGA land, was none other than Jonathan Tweet himself, lead designer of Dungeons & Dragons.

In his mid-30s at the time, Tweet was already a legend in the RPG world. He was the major creative force behind the hugely admired and influential Over the Edge RPG from Atlas Games, from my old home state. He’d moved over to head Wizards of the Coast’s RPG division, where he designed the innovative Everway RPG, which incorporated cards and new free-form elements into a well-regarded design. But most important to me, he was the guy rewriting the Player’s Handbook. While Jonathan, Monte, and Skip were a triumvirate and just about everyone in the department was making important additions to the game, Jonathan was clearly the “lead” designer, at least from where I sat. You could tell by the way the whole department seemed sort of in awe of him, the way they deferred to his wishes, and the way that he always seemed to get what he wanted.

You could see it in his eyes. Genius mixed with a giant helping of disdain mixed with perhaps a touch of well-deserved arrogance that immediately commanded respect from just about everyone. Jonathan Tweet wanted to make D&D the best game that it possibly could be on his own terms, or at least as much as was possible for a boat with so many captains in so many different divisions of the company. Deep in the zone of design on one of the company’s most popular and valuable brands, Jonathan clearly didn’t suffer fools, and was doing his best to keep his focus on making the game better and not getting too distracted. Given our proximity, I’d often hear him state a design philosophy or defend some design decision in such a way that left no doubt he was a genius and his rhetorical opponent was an imbecile. There was something to the cold logic of his arguments that suggested a robot. With death-ray eyes. Because his tenure predated WotC’s purchase of TSR and because he was thought to have the ear of management, it was easy to see Jonathan as the “company guy,” or at the very least as a guy who you definitely didn’t want to upset.

Which was cool, because, so far as I know, absolutely everyone there admired the hell out of what Jonathan was doing with the game. Though I later came to realize that many, many hands were responsible for the changes in the game to the point at which singling out any one person as responsible for a specific change was far, far too simplistic for such a holistic process, in my own way I sort of saw Monte and Skip as the guys defending the gaming traditions I held dear, whereas Jonathan was the guy who questioned a lot of those assumptions and who propelled the game into the future. And as much as I loved where D&D had been, after 10 years of Second Edition it was obvious that the future was where the game really needed to be. Sitting so close to Jonathan and overhearing so many fascinating design discussions was one of the absolute joys of my first few weeks at Wizards of the Coast.

I enjoyed it so much, in fact, that I couldn’t wait to get involved myself.

Back then, Wizards had an internal message board system that allowed its hundreds of employees to discuss matters of company policy, upcoming special events, who was out sick for the day, and other administrivia. One of these folders was for discussing the drafts of the Third Edition rules currently floating around for office playtests. I had just acquired such a draft copy, and I was certain I had a suggestion that would save everyone some grief. I sat down to compose a message with my suggestion, knowing that it would be my first real introduction to the D&D design staff and indeed many of the employees of Wizards of the Coast.

The message went something like this:

Hi! My name is Erik Mona. I’ve just been hired by the RPGA to edit Polyhedron and develop a new Living campaign for the World of Greyhawk. I was looking over the draft of the Player’s Handbook, and I noticed that in the cleric section St. Cuthbert is listed as the God of Retribution. In fact, Trithereon is Greyhawk’s god of retribution. St. Cuthbert is more known for honesty, wisdom, and zeal. Also, the chart lists Heironeous’s favored weapon as a longsword, but in fact it should be a battleaxe. I have an extensive collection of Greyhawk materials here at my desk and I’m more than happy to help out if anyone has any questions about this material as it applies to the core game.

That was it, in a nutshell. Simple. Helpful. Informative. My first formal contribution to the design of Third Edition Dungeons & Dragons. It didn’t take long for the message to make its way through the design department. Within minutes I heard Jonathan Tweet’s strained, angry voice roll over the cubicle wall:

“WHO THE HELL IS ERIK MONA?” he said, his tone dripping with disdain.

It turns out that the whole “use the Greyhawk pantheon” thing had been a huge internal fight tangentially related to the cancellation of Second Edition settings and somewhat forced on the game by management. The design team wanted to be able to change Greyhawk elements to better fit the concept of the game they were creating. You expect a paladin to use a longsword, so it doesn’t make sense to make his main weapon a non-intuitive choice like a battle axe. They only wanted so many gods. They needed a god of retribution and Trithereon was not invited to the party. The wounds about these decisions, apparently, had only just healed over about a week before I arrived, and more than one person in the department felt that my innocent suggestion risked shoving everything back into turmoil.

After I sheepishly walked around the cube wall to (re)introduce myself to Jonathan, he explained all of this to me in a way that somehow didn’t cause me to melt into the carpet, and the rest of the day (and indeed week) was spent with well meaning TSR employees, shellshocked from the last couple of years of madness, quietly coming to my cube to offer polite suggestions about how to not rock the boat and basically keep my mouth shut. Not quite the introduction to my dream-of-a-lifetime job I had been hoping for. Even today, Jonathan’s “WHO THE HELL IS ERIK MONA” question still colors my memories of my first year at WotC.

In the time since I managed to fit in a bit better with the official D&D design crowd. I had a chance to work on a big map of Greyhawk with Skip Williams, who pointed out all of the circa 1980 TSR inside jokes hidden in the names of various kingdoms, cities, and rivers. Monte Cook eventually invited me to play in his Ptolus campaign, a weekly sort of D&D All-Star Game that lasted some seven years. We still gather occasionally to play. I even published Jonathan Tweet’s d20 Gamma World project in Polyhedron, an experiment I called Omega World as a joke about how it would be the “last” time anyone did it. Two subsequent editions have been released.

Along the way I co-launched the Living Greyhawk organized play campaign, got to sit in the editor-in-chief chair for both Dragon and Dungeon magazines, contributed some monsters to the Fiend Folio, and co-wrote an “official” Castle Greyhawk adventure as well as a campaign setting book for that world. I’ve participated in more exciting elements of RPG production than I would have dared imagine when dreaming up my career in that third grade after-school D&D class.

Nowadays I’m the publisher of my own RPG company, Paizo Publishing. We’ve just released an OGL 3.5 variant called the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, which supports the Adventure Paths, modules, and world guides we’ve been releasing for the last few years. The game and our other products remain popular, and we’ve just moved into a new office over the course of the last two weeks.

When Russell Morrissey asked me to write a new column for EN World (my favorite website 10 years and running!), I jumped at the chance. In my tenure at Polyhedron, Dragon, and Dungeon, I wrote more than 100 columns on gaming, and even though I once thought I’d said everything there was to say on the topic, in the last few years I kept finding myself wanting to get back into the old habit.

It’s customary for a new columnist to introduce himself in his first column. So here it is, the answer to Jonathan Tweet’s question those 10 years ago.

Who the Hell is Erik Mona? I’m a guy who has edited some magazines, written some gaming books, and been very near to the center of much in the gaming world over this last decade. As I unpacked my boxes while settling in to my new office, I uncovered an artifact from my life before Wizards of the Coast, before I’d added all the notches into the belt of my RPG career. It was an old desktop pen and paper tablet holder, inscribed with a message from my old RPGA buddies back in Minneapolis. It reads: “Erik Mona: Once a TwiRP, Always a TwiRP!”

Who the Hell is Erik Mona? Despite everything I’ve seen in the last 10 years in the trenches of the RPG industry, I’m still that same guy who loves to play games, at home or at conventions. I’m Truan Iolavai, Ellund Torvin, Ghorus Thoth, Zophas Adhar, Barbatos Kem, Ostog the Unslain, and dozens of other characters, honorable and treacherous, humorous and severe.

Most of all, I’m a gamer just like you.

--Erik Mona
Seattle
September, 2009

Erik Mona