By now, many of you've heard the announcement regarding the new Living Forgotten Realms campaign, starting next year at Gen Con Indy. It will be an evolution of a system that's been around for 20 years. But how did we get to where we are today?

Back in the 1980s, the RPGA was all about tournament play. You would show up at a big convention like Gen Con, get a pregenerated character, and attempt to advance through the multi-round event to win the big prize. Several now-classic 1st Edition adventures began as tournament adventures played through the RPGA, and the legacy of the tournament adventure remains alive today in the D&D Open Championship. However, the times, they were a-changin'!

At Gen Con in 1987, the RPGA first presented a bring-your-own character adventure, On the Road to the Living City. The "Living City" was Raven's Bluff, a city in the fan-favorite world of Ed Greenwood's creation that had just been given its very own boxed set: the Forgotten Realms. For the first time, you could bring your own character to the table, play the adventure, receive goodies at the end, and keep your character for the next time. The campaign was called Living City.

Living City was a breakthrough for the RPGA—it was the first time you could take your character from one game set in the world and bring it to another. Now, in those early days, games were few and far between; in fact, it was a whole year before the second adventure came out! Slowly, the Living City games expanded beyond just Gen Con; before long, they were also showing up at Winter Fantasy, followed by other big shows.

In the early days, characters could advance only up to 5th level, which took years since adventures were sparse. A lot of players played human characters, since they could take advantage of the old dual-classing rules to keep playing after they'd hit 5th level. You were simply trusted to write down the gold and magic items you received on your character sheet; since there were so few adventures, it was easy to call shenanigans if a player wrote down some piece of magic gear that hadn't been earned honestly. In fact, many of the judges knew exactly what items had been given out and in which adventures, without even referencing them!

Those days eventually gave way to a more organized system. Second Edition had come around, and the Forgotten Realms received an update through The Avatar Trilogy and the Forgotten Realms Adventures hardcover rulebook. By the early 1990s, Living City had grown to parity with tournament games (otherwise known as "Classic" adventures). More and more players were joining in to be a part of the Raven's Bluff community, and as a result, more and more adventures were being written. The campaign moved its level ceiling first to 7th level. As time went on, it would creep higher and higher. As the number of adventures increased, it became increasingly harder to keep track of what magic items had been given out in which adventures, so a certificate system was developed.

At the end of each session of play, any magic items found in that adventure would have corresponding certificates laid out on the table. The group would then decide which character received each item. Sometimes, especially with regular play groups, this was easy: the fighter got the magic sword and the cleric got the staff that only he could use. Other times, it was more difficult to decide, as two or more players wanted the same magic item for their character. Usually, players would roll off to determine who received what, or "buy off" other interested characters with other magic items or gold. Certificates were a big deal back then; having those little slips of paper represented accomplishments in the game, a measure of your character's success as an adventurer, and were a commodity traded almost as furiously as stocks on Wall Street.

Living City was becoming a large part of the RPGA; by the end of 1993, it had surpassed tournament adventures in total play. The success of Living City would result in several "spinoffs" that used variations on the first Living campaign's model to provide alternative settings for bring-your-own-character adventures. By now, it was definite that shared-world campaigns would become the future of the RPGA. But that's a story for another column. Next month, we'll talk about Living City's halcyon days, as well as its conclusion.