One Issue Campaign - Thanks Jeff!

Dungeon and Dragons by definition is a hobby. For me, just like many of you, we use this hobby to exercise our creative imagination and also have a shit load of fun. But I also believe that D&D has many hobbies within the D&D “Umbrella” so to speak.  Some people like to draw their characters, some DM’s go into crazy world building, other’s use it to write novels, and some of us (ME BIG TIME) just love to collect as many cools things as possible (dice and miniatures for example).

For me, those cools things are collecting interesting ideas that other people came up with on the web. And of course come up with my own. I have spent many hours going through adventures other people have posted, taking the parts I like and scrapping the rest. One of my favorite resources for interesting ideas are blogs. Some blogs I go through are DNDwithpornstars and Goblin Punch. I even have massive documents that sort and filter the different articles that the prior mentioned blogs have created. But as the well ran dry on their blog, I scrambled for more blogs. And recently came across Jeff’s Blog, which I am sure MANY of you have read. As of late, he hasn’t posted much content, so I went deep into his archives. And that is where I found a gem. A gem that has inspired me to create this blog, and begin to really practice my writing skills, drawing skills, creativity ability, and begin to use the tools and tables I have been gathering over the months of DMing.

That article is: http://jrients.blogspot.com/2011/04/one-issue-one-campaign-part-1.html

The idea is simply, create a campaign out of a single Dragon Magazine. Jeff explains it as such

1. “Start with set of core rules, preferably one a small amount of setting material or a strongly implied setting.  Too much setting info will spoil the soup I think, while none whatsoever will serve as an insufficient basis.  I'll be using Labyrinth Lord(revised edition/fourth release), with its Duchy of Valnwall sample wilderness.
2. Get a single issue of Dragon or some other gaming mag.  Ideally I should have selected one at random, but for sentimental reasons I'm going to use Dragon #69.  It was the first issue I owned. 

3. Squeeze every possible of iota of usable information out of that magazine and nothing else to flesh out a campaign for your ruleset.  (FYI I'm not switching campaigns.  This is just a thought experiment.)

And when he says squeeze every bit of information possible from the magazine, HE MEANS IT! Unfortunately, he only wrote 4 parts to this little series (if anyone actually knows if he made a comment about this, or if I am missing something PLEASE DO TELL ME!). But those parts were enough for me to get my imagination running. I would recommend everyone to go read the 4 articles, and they can all be found HERE.

And guess what? I am going to do exactly what he did in those articles right here in this blog. I am going to grab a random Dragon magazine and make a campaign out of it. What you will find on this blog will most likely be nowhere near the quality of content that Jeff made in those 4 articles. BUT, I hope to slowly build some skill in creating content from resources like Dragon so that I can come up with cool stories too. Jeff is an amazing talent, and if I can even scratch the surface of what he did, then this blog would be a success.

So yeah, the writing style of this blog will be pretty laxed. Go ahead and rip apart anything about it. From grammar to actual content. I will begin my journey 3-5 pages at a time, and try to squeeze every bit of creative juice I can from Dragon magazine #124 (I already picked at random).