A Haven for Not So Retired Dungeon Masters

About Me

Hello, my name is David Overmyer.  I began playing Advanced Dungeons and Dragons back in 1988, and have been playing ever since. Over the years I’ve dabbled in Battle Tech, Marvel Superheroes, Tales From the Floating Vegabond, Magic the Gathering, and a few others that were presented to me to try, but never hit the market.  All of them have come and gone except Dungeons and Dragons.  It is the only one that I’ve actively pursued over the years. I have survived all of the editions from First edition to Fifth edition.  Each one had its good and bad points.  I really enjoyed the second edition Barbarians, and the Dragonlance module Kenders.  Yes, I know most people hate Kenders, but I have really enjoyed playing them over the years, and I had a knack for making the other players fall in love with them, to the point where I was getting requests to play them on new adventures.

I have dabbled on most of the different races:  Humans, Dwarves (my favorite), Elves, Kender (my second favorite). Gnomes, Halfings, Drow, even a Dwelf (half dwarf/half elf) once.  I’ve wanted to try them all.  Same thing with the classes: Fighter, Barbarian, Thief, Assassin, Cleric, Monk, Wizard, Sorceror, Illusionist, Ranger, and various multi class mixed in. I’ve even added other quirks just to make things more interesting.  I tried an Albino Swords-master once, he had the classic albino features: white skin, red eyes, white hair, etc…, then I added red dragon scale armor and had him master the use of dual weapons.  He carried no shield but used a longsword in one hand and a shortsword in the other.  Another character I played was a drunk Elven wizard.  He killed his master during the final examinations of his mastery from apprentice to Wizard. It was entirely the Masters fault, but he didn’t see it that way and turned to drinking as a way of running away from his shame.  He had to adventure to make ends meet, but he had a high percentage of spells backfire during his inebriation.  He was fun, but didn’t last long.  There were others, I may bring them up as this website progresses.

Growing up, my kids, three girls and now a son, have all played with us from time to time.  As they became adults, two of the girls felt there were other things more important than adventuring. The middle girl is now playing regularly in campaigns with her boyfriend, and my son is still young and plays with me from time to time, but he is still at an age where he gets bored easily.

I have been both player and Dungeon Master (DM).  One of the groups I played with, and we played together for over ten years, would cycle through DMs as we went.  Each of us got a turn at running an adventure, when we finished, the next DM would run the next adventure.  Each of us had our own realms.  One of us had Forgotten Realms, another had Greyhawk, another had Ravenloft, I had Dragonlance, and the last of our group had a realm he created based on Ireland, Scotland, and a little of Norway.  This way each of us not only had the general cache of monsters to dig into, but also a set that were unique to our particular realm.  This made for a very well rounded gaming experience.