Flashback to 1974 and Dungeons & Dragons

Flashback to 1974, the first landmark on the way back to the present...

Dungeons & Dragons

D&D is rightly considered one of the best RPGs ever made.  And that's a good thing as it really started the hobby and might not if it had any less potential.  For all that, I don't typically run D&D and haven't since the Nineties.  It is not that I don't like D&D.  I do!  It is just that everyone runs D&D and me running it is like choosing to be the tenth burger joint in town rather than the first, say, boba tea place.

In my life, I have met people who have had the luck of travelling to another country, the kinds tourists seek out.  And they shop at the airport gift shop and eat at the nearest McDonald's.  Some players are like that.  They play D&D, good game that it is, only because it is the game that they grew up with.

That said, D&D probably has more excellent material written for it because it simply has, IMO, by far the most material available written for any game (and I include its OGL kids, legitimate and otherwise).  The material is scattered amidst D&D's many campaign settings, themselves scattered across the decades, companies and editions.  These generally excellent campaign settings were usually mutually exclusive, a character from one universe would have almost no in-character reason of being able to be in another.

Two of TSR's (the original owner of D&D) later campaign settings, Planescape (which linked the planes) and Spelljammer (D&D in SPAAAAAAAAAAAAACE!!) were two excellent reasons of how characters from separated settings could meet and interact.  Why the new owner of D&D, Wizards of the Coast, did not actively continue with those two settings is beyond me.  The first thing I would do, if I was designing a D&D campaign, would be to make both Planescape and Spelljammer a large part of it.

And there is one other campaign setting that has a unique edge, you are currently in it.  Urban Arcana is a campaign setting set in the world we think we know.  Monsters and Magic are present but the minds of most humans are clouded by Shadow so they don't notice, rationalize away and then just plain forget any supernatural elements of the 'mundane and normal' world around them.

It is here I will start with my campaign...