Many people have asked me, “Just what makes Arduin so different from other long-running
campaigns?” My reply usually has several parts, and even then it is hard to cover everything that needs
to be said. It usually goes something like this:
Anyone who has played for any length of time in either of my two campaigns has found that Arduin
touched their own lives as wells as the lives of their characters. For example:
My friend Tony, who played a “household” of Samurai, soon discovered that whatever happened to
his characters was answered by alarming parallels among his real-life friends in Japan (where he taught
English). It seems he had patterned his main characters after his real Japanese friends. Thus when a
character suffered a bad leg wound in game play, it was followed by a broken
leg to that character’s real-life analogue (and so forth). Tony became
increasingly distraught. After all, some of his lesser characters (not based
on real people) had already been slain. What would happen if a main
character were to die in Arduin? As time passed and more parallels came up,
such as main characters being wounded and impoverished, followed by
comparable losses by his Japanese friends, all of this became too much for
him. As a result he moved many hundreds of miles away and severely
curtailed his role-playing, at least in Arduin.
Another friend and long-time campaigner named Peter had has his
real world musical interests intertwined with the fate of his primary character:
Jothar of the House of the Rising Sun. Throughout this Elf’s adventures from
penniless wanderer to King of the Elves in Arduin (over a 37 game-year), I
would literally feel compelled to buy a particular record album, almost always
one which featured a song relevant to Jothar’s adventures. These were often
albums by Uriah Heap, Blackmoore’s Rainbow, or similar group, but all would
sing of Jothar’s (and the House of the Rising Sun, by name!) exploits just
past or soon to come. I have had no control over my games with Jothar (and
very little over those of any other character for that matter), as Arduin (as it
often does) seemed to have a life all its own. Peter and I have marveled for
years as to the reasons for this, and have come to the only solution possible:
Somewhere, somewhen, Arduin is real and all I have been doing is
chronicling what goes on there.
