Getting Underway

Obviously, it was the Monster Manual that captivated E to start with. But he quickly got the idea of the game. First he needed to choose a KIND of character (race), then a calling/profession (class). The pictures in the Players' Handbook helped -- two page spread of all the races, in each gender. He browsed over those for a while and chose a half-elf.

Class was trickier. I explained all the options as best I could. He decided on a paladin. We knocked together some stats for him and I scribbled it on a sheet of paper, still being utterly new to D&D 3rd edition rules, and figuring anyway that "rules" were not so much the point.

"OK," I announced. "Now comes the fun part. We need to decide where he lives. Where does he live?"

(Thought) "He lives on an island."

I grab a blank sheet of paper and begin to draw coastline. Suddenly I am 14 again. Or 10, looking at the map of Verne's Mysterious Island. Here's a long peninsula called the Spike. Here three wide bays beside each other, each presumably with its dominant town. Here a wild coast that we know lies empty and unexplored.

"What's the island called?"

(More thought). "Thorion Island." I scrawl it in the corner like a dying seaman.

"OK, now we need to decide where he lives. Where on the island should Tyron live?"

"Ummm.... Dragontown."

"Interesting." I put a Dragontown dot near the center of the island, plunk it next to a lake, let a river trickle from the lake toward the eastern coast. "Why Dragontown?"

"Because ... a lot of dragons used to live there."

"Where'd they go?" (Socratic gaming)

"They got driven away by the people who came to live there. They went away to ... to the .. the Black Mountains! Because they were mostly black dragons."

(Dragons are a favorite monster and E was duly impressed by the MM's pages of dragons, and wanted to learn the different types etc. By this time he had learned many of them).

I duly draw in a mountain range and label it The Black Mountains.

One other thing E has lit on is a Giant Owl. The MM has these, and he's read that they can be trained. He wants his character to train a giant owl as a pet. (Animals have been a major preoccupation of his since he was quite young). We figure out that the giant owls live in the northern forests, and that owl trainers can be found in an around the city of Owlsnest.

And before long we had the following:



(We've added other items since then. Some roads are hard to see. And yes, my handwriting is medieval. OK, not really. For really medieval writing go here).

So his half-elven paladin Tyron came into the world high in the mountains, in Dragontown, with one goal in mind: to get to rocky Owlsnest, in its northern perch beside the sea.

Whence the name, this place, and our further adventures ...