The End of the First TTRPG Era

 The graduate almost gets roped into playing Magic: The Gathering by fellow pizza drivers, but he has acquired a serious girlfriend. He, of course, has no idea that Magic’s company will soon acquire the rights to D&D. The one-week-each-summer family reunion RPG extravaganza is the only gaming he still does. When that girlfriend leaves him he spends a lot of time with the original Warcraft, the skirmish RTS game, not quite an RPG, but enough to fill the hole(s). At his first graduate school, the graduate meets the woman who will become his wife, a gamer herself, but mostly a boardgamer. She did MUSH before he knew her, but he doesn’t learn that until long after they start dating. They play Hexen as a couple a bit in the early days. 

The two move to Minneapolis to pursue serious graduate careers. The graduate tides his RPG “needs” over with the first two Baldur’s Gates and Neverwinter Nights (with the Infinity engine). He meddles with the guts of Baldur’s Gate II to create a monk based on Homer Simpson, complete with mp3 quips uploaded from the show. (The monk says “It smells like tinkle” whenever the party enters a sewer tile.) Planescape: Torment consumes every evening the graduate is away at a KiSwahili program, as the fellow students at the institute have less interesting backstories than Dak’kon and Nordom, and there’s only one other person on the graduate’s dorm floor. He travels to East Africa and London to research in archives, and his wife gives birth to their first child, whose name seems Tolkienian, but is actually Korean.

The cousins’ Dragonlance ends at DL10, another failure of campaign completion. The subsequent start-over sessions devolve to be a bit more jokey, as characters have names like “Sandy,” “Turbo,” and “Hooch,” which honestly are no less dorky than “Brightblade” and “Burrfoot.” The first week of this involves an adventure the graduate intended to try to sell to Dungeon, and a Dungeon adventure, “Trouble at Grog’s.” (He will never get the adventure into publishable form.) There is a small diagram of the planned “campaign” that is largely mysterious to the old man, though notes from it ask “Purchase: Destiny of Kings? AD&D on CD?” Somehow, for some inexplicable reason, Xvarts were supposed to figure in the story. The graduate flips through a third edition D&D PHB in a bookstore more than once, but luckily doesn’t pull the trigger. His current income doesn’t justify the cost, and if he’s honest, the covers are off-putting. His final cousin campaign idea emerges from the graduate’s scholarly work and a situation from one of Cugel the Clever’s adventures, with a few bits stolen from Ankh-Morpork. The setting is very loosely based on the medieval Swahili coast, only mages rule instead of merchants. The system is D&D 2E. He works with one cousin over email to pre-establish a character's lengthy backstory.

Perhaps not clear from this, but one of the cousins *is* a talented artist

This intended campaign only lasts a couple sessions with the six pretty-much-adult cousins. The graduate does not make the opening element of the adventure compelling enough. One cousin recalled–more than a decade after the fact–that the session seemed more like legal research than gaming, and had wondered in retrospect whether it had just been a negadungeon, a meta-commentary on the fruitlessness of playing pretend as adults. (He did not use the word “negadungeon,” but that’s what he meant.) The family reunions end, anyway, and the graduate does not play D&D for more than a decade, unless you count logging into Baldur’s Gate: Siege of Dragonspear for only a few hours, or a similar length of time running a character named “Bungo Noddycock” in a Lord of the Rings MMORPG. The box used to ship D&D paraphernalia during a move is split by the USPS machines and spilled, but most of the material is stuffed back inside, light a few Dragonlance modules and some nostalgic paperwork. The "survivors" to this catastrophe are appended to these posts.