The rather confusing text you're about to embark upon is a compiliation of two sets of more or less (mostly less) complete recollections of the origins of the P.C.A.G., as remembered by it's two principal founders: The Cleric and Hawk (yers truly). To make it as confusing as possible, I've mixed the two stories together to make history soup. I'll stay in the regular font, The Cleric'll use this one.
September, 1981
A dorky young freshman stumbles into the William Allen High School cafeteria, wandering around while waiting for the rain outside to stop. To his surprise he finds a group of other freshmen attempting to start a game of AD&D (the original, Gary Gygax version, mind). With nothing better to do, he introduces himself and shares his extremely limited experience with the game. He is introduced to the circle of players (whose names he promptly forgets), is given a character sheet, and starts off with the others.
I forget the name of the original gamemaster, indeed many of the events and scenes of my life in High School are long since dispatched to the great beyond. But one player in particular's name stuck, well his game name at any rate. He was the party Cleric, usually the most difficult, most easily killed character. Most kids avoided it like the plague. Our cleric had a flair, however. He not only survived, but actually managed to thrive, to the point where the other players gave up with his character name and player name, simply calling him The Cleric.
Part I: The TriCharliad
"A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away..."
Star Wars
Once upon a time, Charles "Cleric" Fusner had an overly ambitious idea for a board game. It was based upon fantasy
adventure themes, and involved completing a quest, which would evolve from game to game, so it never got boring, and there'd
be enemies to defeat, traps to avoid, items you could pick up along the way that would help you reach the end. He wildly
overdid this idea, like he does most everything he comes in contact with. Before long, it was so ambitious that it didn't really
work well as a board game at all, and Charles was agonizing over how to make so many ideas fit in one game.
Then a guy named Paul Boyer, who had always had a flair for crushing great ideas, looked over what he had made so far, and
said, "Why don't save yourself some trouble: just play D&D instead." So it was that Charles, who, until that time never knew
there was already a game of this nature, was introduced to the Allen High School D&D club, and the band of rougish knaves
who plied their gaming skills therein.
They aided Charles in constructing his first character: A cleric (remember that, it will be important to our story shortly).
Actually, he just wanted something that could cast spells, but someone had already chosen the magic user, and for reasons that
were not yet clear to him, everyone insisted you didn't want more than one of those in a group. The only thing that seemed to
leave (from the way it was hastily explained to him) was the holy man, or cleric, which no one else ever wanted to play because
they always had to be a goody two shoes all the time.
And so it began. Our gamemaster was the legendary Chuck Smith, aka The Exercising DM. (Don't ask, it would take too long
an explanation for such a brief sight gag --- you had to be there). Also present were Charles Fusner, and Charlie DiEdwardo.
This was problematic. We have entered the brief, but confusing phase of our early years that I call "The TriCharliad". With
three people who were all used to being called "Chuck" in everyday usage, the games (which were then daily events) were, as
you might imagine, nightmarishly confusing (well, for the three of us, anyway). Luckily, just as we all felt the madness bubbling
to the surface, fate intervened.
Fortunately for us all, Chuck Smith promptly forgot Chuck Fusner's name on the first session out (ironic, ain't it?) and during
our very first battle (the most hectic thing a gamemaster has to keep track of) found himself saying, "And what about you, er,
uhm, er... 'Cleric', what are you doing during all of this?" And so Cleric became associated with his character and was graced
with a nickname thereafter, even years after that particular character was mouldering in the earth somewhere. When his turn
came to game master, he similarly gifted Chuck (no, the other one... no, the first one, yeah, him) with a nickname, "Hawk"
(based on his first character's name). Then we both turned to third Charles, who just grinned, because, if the two of us already
had nicknames, that let him off the hook. And so ended the the TriCharliad.
For two years thereafter, Hawk and Cleric traded off as gamemasters, each building on the story that the other had left off
with, weaving them into a collective story that evolved over time. Hawk's original Lost City of Dane led us to our first
encounter with the Mystic Lord... an ominous enemy who just kept coming back to haunt us, while we persued the ancient
King of Magic's mystic armor, which in turn revealed the reincarnation of the king in the person of Charlie DiEdwardo's then
current character. A final showdown cast the Mystic Lord into a deep black seething void where he remained for seven (real
world) years, until Cleric would eventually bring him back as a god in his own right in a new world altogether.
June, 1985
The last game of the "Allen High School Dungeons and Dragons Club". The yearbook has hopelessly mangled our names, but at least our picture is there. It has been four years of intense gameplay, some stupid moves...
....The party emerged from the secret passage onto a high ledge. Before them and below stretched the broad mesa, split at their feet by the deep canyon. On the dim horizon could be seen a thin smoke arising from the trading village Turan, while six hundred feet down, almost directly below their feet, lay the remains of their last campsite before they had found the entrance to the Wizard's Lair, three weeks previously. In fact, peering cautiously over the edge, they could just make out... the bloated, half torn apart remains of their horses, which they had forgotten and left tied up for the desert predators.....
Four years of long daily sessions, hunched around the narrow tables in the caf. Countless bottles of Coke pirated from the teachers lounge. Dozens of characters lay dead in the settling imaginary dust of their adventures. And now it was over. Well, almost over. The daily sessions would never take place again (thank god, the gamemasters silently sighed), but the Dungeons & Dragons club would survive in the form of occasional twenty-four to thirty-six hour sessions, kind of a Zen, "play 'till you drop" thing. Some members had jobs lined up, some had college plans, but the club would continue, we all promised each other. The game would go on...
Part 1.5: In Denial...
"Everyone said I was daft to build a castle in a swamp, but I built it just the same. And it sank into the swamp..."
Monthy Python
And then something even more momentous happened: we graduated high school and went on with our lives. For a long time,
we kept getting together for increasingly impractical all night gaming sessions that made up for their irregularity with the fact that
the game started sometime around noon and ran until four in the morning, when the whole group would climb over the stacks of
discarded pizza boxes, and stagger blearily to the local Perkins restaraunt to order breakfast before wandering home to sleep
for two days thereafter. Insanity? You bet. Something had to give. And one weird campaign, it finally happened:
Gamemaster: You're in a large chamber. There's a passage to your left, a passage
to your right, and a wall straight ahead.
Player: (Blinks. Nods. Stares vacantly for a moment. Blinks again. Yawns. Realizes
the blinking thing kind of worked and tries it again, but has trouble
getting the eyelids back open. Finally responds:) Okay, we'll just
keep going straight.
Gamemaster: Thump. You hit a wall...
And we had. It was time to admit we were just too old for this nonsense. So we drifted apart, this time, for good. Or, so it
seemed...
Well, as you have guessed, the club crashed and burned. For various reasons the club members drifted apart and settled into the mundane. After a few nightmarishly long sessions, we lost touch with one another, at least for the most part. The Cleric and I managed to stay in touch with a steady jumble of letters, tapes, and shared decision point stories, all the while toying with reforming a new gaming group.
PART TWO
The Bird is the Word.... again!
