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Way back in 2006, I was happily writing Free Software. At the time, a dude called Greywulf was using it, and I started reading his blog. He was playing role-playing games. I bought a PDF of the Dungeons & Dragons Rules Cyclopedia because he recommended it. I remembered playing AD&D as a teenager. Yeah, back then the PDFs were available for purchase. It was a terrible PDF, scanned, 80MB, with sloppy OCR, impossible to print – but it was official. Greywulf pointed me at EN World. I started reading. Greywulf wrote M20. I finally had enough and decided that I wanted to play! I’d make it happen. I’d find people. And I did. And we played. We moved the campaign to D&D 3.5.
Dungeons & Dragons Rules Cyclopedia
One of the first people I found was a half New Zealander called Marco. He played in many campaigns. Back then we had just started an Asian campaign. He created Kubo. Kubo was a ranger turned rogue with levels in shadow dancer. He fought with a *naginata* and used both ends of the weapon. He had a shit-ton of attacks. And he really loved kicking ass.
I still remember the party reaching an oasis, looking for a passage to the *City of Brass* (Necromancer Gamers) and being confronted with a half efreet that could cast high level spells. This guy quickly located the party after they had killed some of his retainers and decided to finish them off. He approached invisible and flying. When the fight began, my players knew they were at a severe disadvantage. They were hiding on a small ledge up on a cliff and most of the could not fly.
In fact, Kubo was *killed* in this fight. But the others remembered the promise of an evil book they had read and called out for a demon lord: *Pazuzu! Pazuzu! Pazuzu!* And so it was that the demon lord showed up, resurrected Kubo and killed the half efreet.
During all this fighting, Kubo had slain many foes. Marco loved to describe how he delivered killing blows. This time he went further than that, however: “Can I knock out their teeth? Can I roll a Reflex save to catch them in mid air? Can I?” And so it was done – in *bullet time*! We laughed. 😀
(The character page on the campaign wiki: Kubo San; the session report)
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