A Bag of Dice, Lined Notebook Paper & the Imagination of a Handful of Highschool Kids
I don’t pretend to be some amazing writer. I don’t. But I feel I am creative enough to create story arcs that will be very interesting, add in characters that will develop and battles that are written out to follow like it really happened. I only say that because many time my grammar and the like is not good. I have improved a lot over the years, but I have a ways to go. I am too old and too cranky to really learn the little things I mess up on time and time again, so when ready my writing; keep that in mind.
Growing up in rural New York sometimes can leave you with limited activities. Back then we didn’t have computers, flat screen TV’s or obviously the internet. My friends were always looking for things to do. I was very active, and played a ton of sports for school and with my friends. There was a side to me, many of them did not understand, I loved being creative and RPG’s like Dungeons and Dragons was a way for me to express that.
It started out with the basic rule set with that amazing art by Larry Elmore. That is what inspired us to play D&D, even with some of my more athletic friends. After a while we started getting more creative with characters, maps, dungeons and worlds. Most of my friends outgrew the “phase” but me and my friend Todd, did not.
We experimented with many things and a few caught on but you could only buy so much with your allowance. One day Todd called me and I went over his house, expecting to play some D&D. He opened his bedroom door and there was Legos all over. Some of them were built in castles, dungeons and Inns. I had my reservations, but when he showed me the lego “people” can be medieval with helms, shields, swords… I was convinced. Instead of buying 3 small figurines that we had to paint, we could buy some Legos and use them. We had 3D battle maps! Needless to say we spent a lot of money on them, and it was worth it.
Over the years we moved away from each other and outgrew the Lego’s but during that time we had created our own world, our own realm. Hundreds of hours poured into adventures, quests, locations, characters and lore. When we decided that this needed to be it’s own “place” and to name it we were at a loss. The internet was just starting to really take off, and we would play over AOL instant messenger. One day while we were talking about things, I asked Todd about the Lego’s and if he still had them. I was doodling on a paper when I wrote down L E G O and then wrote down N. It was fitting that our world have a call back to the toys we used to create it. The World of Legon wasn’t born, that happened a decade ago, but it was finally named. It is pronounced World of leh-gone. Sounds kind of french, but I soon found out there is a location in Ghana with the same name. So Google searches are a bit tricky.
I set up many websites, most of them free like Angelfire or Geocities. I realize I am dating myself. During this time I have taught myself to build websites, so the sites kept getting more elaborate. Eventually I became a Web Developer in the mid 2000’s and it was my career. in 2010 I bought the domain worldoflegon.com and that is where the home of this realm has lived ever since.
The Adventures of Vulcuran
Todd had a character named Vulcuran, and I had a character named Finster. Vulcuran was a ranger thief, though he always hid his thief side. Finster was an lawful evil cleric bent on conquest. Eventually we cemented ourselves in our roles though, so Finster kind of faded away. I was always the DM, because I love story telling, character creation and map making… Todd was always the player. So Vulcuran flourished. I still have cassette tapes of our adventures in my bedroom, on the phone or in our camper.
There is 40 complete adventures you can read through, and they do become addicting. I lost the first few adventures leading to the 1st and I lost an adventure inbetween as well. Through so much time and different computers, I could not find them. In the 40th episode, Todd’s character dies in a swarm of crazed undead after saving the realm from a very powerful master liche. It ended an era that lasted over 20 years.
Time for some fresh blood and a new adventure.
The Adventures of Chance
Now you can read the poorly written origin story of this character on the page; The Story of Chance. I wont elaborate to much on this character because you can find out all you need to know on the adventure pages and the ever growing number of new episodes.
The world is now much more fleshed out, though it still needs a lot of work building up past the eastern section. In the adventures I now try to add in visual elements including characters, monsters, scenario profiles and more. As the story / adventure progresses you can now see one of many portraits of the character (npc), possibly see what the area they are in looks like and if they are fighting a monster, that too is represented.
It would be wrong of me to not address this. The stories have many levels of adventure, hack & slash, political intrigue and love interests. Some of the language can be NSFW, and the love scenes, most definitely are not safe for work. I am a guy, I like naked women, what guy doesn’t. There will be parts of the adventures that might not be suitable for younger or sensitive viewers. Mind you, it is less than a HBO series in terms of violence, language and sex.
The majority of female character portraits are from nudie sites. The images are extremely high resolution and I can get great portraits from them. The men is a mixture of male models and screen captures of some fantasy shows and movies. I am just looking for representation to give the reader a good idea of what they look like. Just relax, read and enjoy it.
I love creating characters and I have a boat load of them for you to peruse through using characters / NPC drop down in the navigation. They have all made some sort of appearance in the adventures and I have divided them up in groups; Main, Royal, Black Ward, Sub, Lesser, Summer Isle and Deceased.
- Royal characters are self explanatory, only NPC’s that are part of the Camerondale Royal Family.
- Black Ward is the special forces / FBI agency working under the Army of Camerondale. Each NPC is directly related to this faction.
- Sub characters have a lesser role, but are well known. They do not appear in the story as frequent as others.
- Enemies of Chance. Ones from Animax, ones from his past and ones far far away.
- Lesser characters are passer-bys, ones that Chance has met but are not in the story much at all.
- Summer Isle characters are directly related to that Island where Chance grew up.
- Deceased is self explanatory.
How our adventures work
We usually have a two to three week gap in between adventuring. This allows time to do the following before each adventure.
- After the adventure in discord (it is written out in text), it is exported and put into google docs (5)
- Then it is run through the spell check (and it takes a while, we are not the best spellers or good with grammar) (10)
- Then the elements are introduced. The DMASTER and CHANCE are swapped out with the discord names (5)
- After all that it gets put into the post on the site that was started with the “First Five” (more about that later)(1)
- I go through the entire text episode and do re-writes so the story flows and makes more sense (240)
- A banner is made for the episode trying to capture the events that took place, insert it in the EP and the listings of adventures (90)
- Create little graphical images to emphasize the story, whether it be a character, a place or an event (90)
- Officially launch the EP, send it to Twitter, Facebook and Reddit (10)
- Start writing the First Five, a short story to lead into the next adventure (120)
Not including the actual adventure that takes place in Discord. This is roughly a 9 1/2 to 10 hour process to create. I love doing it, but man it does take a lot of time and effort.
I hope you enjoyed the walk down memory lane for Legon and its rich history.