I'm Gold (40), your Dungeon Master for this. Started playing D&D with "red box" Basic in the 1980's (elementary school age). Saw the red dragon cover art on the box in the book store and asked Mom to buy it for me. So I was self-taught on D&D without a group, at a time when it was not a popular game like it is now, and even simply imagined my own adventures for the first month or two. Shortly found 1 friend who had played D&D with his Dad before, and we started playing the most amazing epic one-on-one campaigns for a few magical years as youths. We got AD&D. He'd DM and I would play 4, 5, or 6 PC's. I'd make up the whole party. Then I'd start DM'ing and he would play a full party he'd thought of (from 1st level to around 20th level, hitting lots of Modules along the way... We'd try to hide the module booklet from the other person so they wouldn't sneak a peak at the maps and monster stats and treasure locations... The Player would write-out elaborate timelines of every event in the game & the backstories & even future generations... Also the Player would try to Map whatever the DM was describing as we went along, usually dungeon maps but occasionally wilderness). Each character had unique names, class, abilities, and personalities (although perhaps childish personalities and archetypes, we were just kids making up universes). I also found a group of friends and we played what's considered the normal way (with 1 DM and 4-5 Players) and that continued for a few years, but it was more wild and "Monty Haul" (tons of powerful magic treasure given out, and killing various deities and demi-gods). Those are the major RPG experiences of my youth. In college I fell out of the game. Later in the era of D&D 3.0 and 3.5, I tried it, and eventually sold it and reverted back to old-school AD&D 1st and 2nd edition. I've DM'd or Played in several memorable campaigns, in each decade, while also taking some years away from RPG's. Some up and down years, where I felt like I'd never find a good group again. Since Roll20 came out (2012) I've been continually playing and firmly situated in AD&D 2E with a large community, and other OSR games -- for example I'm DM'ing a simple game of Basic Fantasy RPG, and happily play Dungeon Crawl Classics, Labyrinth Lord, or other kinds of games on the side. My main focus is Roll20 gaming 2E system. The current campaign you're in --- Adventures in a Homebrew World --- this is my main priority, while other campaigns are "on the side burner" for me. This campaign takes more thinking & more communication, more time, to go a little more in depth and colorful. During some of those "down" years where I wasn't playing, before Roll20 -- I got into cartography and map-making, to fulfill the interest in creative arts and fantasy world subject. Figured I could make my own world map for D&D, and I wanted a computer-way to zoom in on certain areas like a continent or a town. That's when I started sketching out the current "Homebrew World" and initially imagined some of the cultures on the globe. First it was on paper circa 2008-2010. Then I got digital map-making software and compared several programs circa 2011. Learned about the deep subject of Map Projections and decided what kinds of projections I wanted to make (including a 3D globe, and some nice travel friendly flat maps, and regional scale zoom maps). Eventually settled on being able to make what I wanted using ProFantasy Fractal Terrains 3 software. It took me months of studying to learn how to control that slow and out-dated but powerful program, and weeks of working to tweak the resulting maps using another program (Wilbur, to give natural-looking erosion to the soil and cut nearly proper riverbeds) and Photoshop, made the custom color pallet. The initial purpose of the world maps was very-high-quality poster-size prints. I had the World Map and Regional Map professionally printed in 18" x 24" posters. They look stellar. I used them for some face-to-face gaming, covering the table. When Roll20 came out, around the time I was finishing up the map anyway (to a certain extent), I already had these super-high-resolution world maps that you could zoom almost infinitely in Photoshop, from the world scale to a single yard. Google Earth even let me put the entire Homebrew World map on a spinning globe that I can spin with my mouse, the only problem is you can't "Share" it with others in that format, it's local-only unless you're a corporate client of Google Earth. Someday I'll be able to show that, with a video or something. Roll20 gave the possibility of zooming the maps on a web-interface that could be simulcasted with other players. At that point, I playtested my world maps at many different resolutions within Roll20 to find out what worked best. Encountered lots of different issues. This was kind of the pioneer days of Roll20 anyway. The site has become more capable with large graphics files in the interim. About a year ago Roll20 introduced a new feature that automatically loads sections of your map, so gargantuan size maps are easier to load now. That's my profile for DM'ing this, for now. I like AD&D, good modules, world map making, long term creative character development, making friends and having fun sharing swords-and-sorcery narratives and high-fantasy roleplaying. I welcome you all to the campaign world.
