In February of 2022, long after we'd stopped playing this D&D campaign, I decided to embark on an experiment to design a new RPG system to adapt for use with my D&D campaign. Should I ever decide to resurrect my life-long D&D campaign, it would be my intent to transplant this rule system under the ongoing campaign that has spanned over 30 years. Why? The influences that drove me toward this idea are explored in in separate sections below.

I suppose this D&D campaign could be said to have started in 1981, when I was only 11 years old and my friends' father had introduced us kids to the game playing 1st edition with a run through one of the classic TSR adventures. I was hooked, and it wasn't long before I was sketching maps on graph paper, jotting down notes of the room contents, drawing pictures, and the like in my alone hours after school in preparation for running a game of my own with friends. Although, in reality, that wouldn't come until a few years later. Meanwhile, my friend, Mike Lean, ran the game among us middle-schoolers, he was the son of the father who'd introduced us to the game, and I'll never forget my first character, a paladin named Chanti. After a move from Olympia, Washington to Santa Monica, California, I found myself a bumpkin kid from the Pacific Northwest in the land of tinsel, glitter, in an alternative school with the sons and daughters of the entertainment business. I was a cultural fish out of water for sure with no friends, and so I spent my time after school in my own fantasy world imagining dungeons, adventures, reading lots of D&D books, and producing a fair bit of maps, and adventure notes that would eventually form the basis of my D&D campaign around about 1983 I'd say, when I found some friends willing to roll up characters and play the game: Paul Shoden, Atticus Rotoli, and Chris Kessler.

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