Realmsbucklepedia -- Wherein I Elabomorate

I dunno, man, I think it was the other day when I read somewhere where a fellow blogger mentioned that the Rules Cyclopedia's character creation rules allow for pretty much any character you want, what with the skills and stuff. I hadn't quite thought about it that way, but I had to agree -- especially when I got to thinking about how I could take a basic off-the-rack fighter and, using skills and weapon masteries, I could build a charming, dashing swashbuckler-type dude. This is because every character I dream up has to smooth with the ladies.

Pictured: Inside Doc's brain.

Anyway, I kinda fixat-- no no no, the notion crystallized around the idea of a straight-up swashbuckler character built out of nothing more than what the RC has in inside it, and so I had flamboyant shenanigans on the brain.

Then came the turning point when, this past weekend, I had to go to the bathroom.

This is important to the story.

It's important to the story because the bathroom is where a lot of my ideas snap into place, since very little of what takes place in there requires concentration. This leaves the mind to wander off and find weird doorways in the backs of record shops and glue-spewing dragons and so on.

But what's key about going to the bathroom is that needed a magazine. (C'mon, you've done it too.) I grabbed Dragon #273, the one with Robin D. Laws' article "Swashbuckling Essentials", where he elegantly solves the AC-when-you-wear-no-armor dilemma by saying, basically: "Fighters' AC improves by 1 each level, clerics' every two, thieves' every three". And I just thought, "DUDE. That is simpler than what I'm doing right now."

Bingo-bango-bongo.

Of course my next thought was, "Setting"?, and my mind flew to Sembia, as one of the places in the Forgotten Realms that TSR totally turbo promised would not be goofed with and was just for DMs and blah blah blah. Since I like to pretend that it's 1987 (for a lot of reasons, actually) and that those words are still true, tonight (but not in the bathroom) I put pen to paper and wrote this:


So, what's next? Well, my wife and I have next Wednesday off together...