Trying to determine how the "As the Curtains Fall" campaign got started is difficult. I guess it started in Orono, fall of 1989. I was in a triple in Hancock Hall. As fate would have it, two of the three guys directly across the hall were gamers. They had an eclectic collection of RPGs -everything from Time Lord, to Clay Wars (the best game ever!), to Call of Cthulhu. I knew about Lovecraft's fiction, and was aware that a game existed, but I had never really seen any of Chaosium's products. Eagerly, I pawed through a copy of Curse of Cthulhu. It was an adventure spanning the globe, from New York to Transylvania, from Egypt to Chile. A germ of an idea infected my head. Why not a globe-spanning campaign against some monstrous horror, using the rules of AD&D? Instead of Cthulhu, perhaps Jubilex, the long-overlooked demon lord from the Monster Manual. I even had a preposterous name for the campaign, Minions of the Faceless God. I made some initial notes, but realized that it would never come together. My gaming friends were scattered to the far winds. It would never happen.

          Or maybe, I guess it started when I met Travis. Again, it was Orono, fall of 1989. I had tested into an advanced calculus class, quickly realized that I should have taken the placement exam a little less seriously, and retreated into a nice, middle of the road calculus offering. The class was taught by Professor Spirakotos. He spoke Greek. Literally. During one of the awful, excruciating, incomprehensible lectures, I happened to notice that the gentleman sitting next to me was wearing a class ring.
          With a black stone.
          That had a dragon carved in it.
          I knew immediately that we would be friends. He was the only other person from class who routinely skipped to wander through the campus bookstore like I did. Travis was also a gamer. When I introduced him to the Hancock Hall Clay Wars Club (that might be a bit of a stretch, there were only three of us), they all ganged up on me and forced me, forced me I tell you, to start a Dungeons & Dragons session. We rounded up six people, rolled up characters, and during my next trip home to visit my teenage girlfriend, I recovered my dice, rule books and my favorite series of all time, TSR's U1-U3. From that Wednesday on, we commandeered the third-floor lounge and generally annoyed the entire floor.

           Ah, the fun we had. Having a pirate from the Sea Ghost knock an armored cleric into the ocean! Watching the PCS flounder in the mud pit trap from Danger at Dunwater! Witnessing my first-ever player expulsion from a gaming group (Dale, the cowardly ranger who fought all his battles with his bow -preferably from a safe distance whilst his comrades engaged the enemy hand-to-hand. After the second "friendly fire" mortality, he was politely asked to leave). Travis hung in there. Even when the monster shark from The Final Enemy gobbled up Gilandril, the elven fighter, and bit Gilandril's brother Adric in thirds, Travis resolutely resisted having his character kick the bucket. Thus, Danzig Farplains survived the U series, and prospered.

          Unfortunately, my career in Orono did not. In late October, I discovered, to my sudden horror, that college costs money. Having been denied a student loan due to my father's income, none of which was coming my way, the university was very accommodating when it came to my tuition.
          I could pay by either cash or check.
          It was a sad day when I told my fellow gamers that I would be leaving. They mourned and openly wept for a full thirty seconds before rolling up characters for a new game. I can still hear them bemoaning my leave as they eagerly tore through Unearthed Arcana to get at the races and class combinations I wouldn't let them have. Sometime, in my most nostalgic moments, I can still hear their lamentations. "I want a drow cavalier/thief-acrobat! No wait, how about a svirfneblin paladin/monk?"
          Back at home, my friend Jim wasn't about to let me go game-free. He had a serious jones for RPGs at this point. We had already done a massive AD&D campaign, followed by a huge Gamma World Campaign before I left for college, to say nothing of the X-men-worthy Champions storyline I had written (Chris Claremont eat your heart out!). Rounding Jim and Travis up, we played a very brief AD&D session starring Danzig and a paladin, Aarioch Mordanus-Vangaard (what I was thinking with the excess "a"s, I will never know). It didn't catch on, largely because I hate playing NPCs while running the game, they never get enough stage time. Instead, we decided play a Gamma World campaign, until Jim and Travis got sick of my NPC, a mutant by the name of Maximum Thrash, hogging all the stage time.
          Around this time, I went out and bought the Call of Cthulhu product Masks of Nyarlathotep, only because I couldn't find Curse of Cthulhu. Ebay hadn't been invented yet. Again, the idea of a globe-spanning campaign against some monstrous horror welled up in my mind. Minions of the Faceless God took huge striding leaps forward. Or, at least it would have if I had set any one of my many thoughts down on paper. I do remember that I decided Jubilex just wasn't cthulhoid enough, I switched the main villain of my non-existent, unwritten campaign to Ssendam, a very lovecraftian slaad lord (ah, that's where the "a"s came from) from the Fiend Folio.

          Then one day, out of the blue, we were talking, and someone, no one knows who, brought up the idea of starting a D&D session, from scratch, at first level. I casually passed the notion onto other old gaming buddies who had fallen victim to the inexplicable gravity well of Portland, Maine (more on that in a moment). Everyone said they were into it, but what was I to do? Virtually every module under the sun had been read, played, DM'd or physically ingested by Larry. If only I had a campaign in mind.
          Someone must have hit me in the head at that moment, probably my girlfriend playfully "tossing" me the remote during a "discussion," because Minions of the Faceless God spilled out of my brain full-formed and ready to roll. It was simple, I would play all of my favorite modules, alter the hell out of them, cram them all within the framework of any overarching campaign against the Slaad hordes of Pandemonium, and plan, in intricate detail, every aspect of the campaign, even down to the weather. No problem. Just because I was working fifty hours a week cleaning meat and meat-by-products off industrial cooking racks at Jordan's Meats to put myself through full-time college didn't mean I couldn't take a moment here and there to put it all together.

Ha! Right now, eleven years later, I'm still behind. Just for the record, I never did complete a building-by-building description of the City of Greyhawk, write down the stats for the Ship of Earth and Sea or even roll up Tormaq's stats. That's right, I never even rolled him up! All these years his sole existence has been the penciled words "Tormaq's Tower" on the map of Longspear, and there's nothing anyone can do about it! Heck, I've still got months of weather to account for.
          At any rate, in late summer of 1992, the campaign started. At this point, I had a rough idea of what was going to happen, what modules were going to be used and what the weather would be on any given day over the next three game years in the fictional world of Greyhawk. Little did my characters know that they were playing the Minions campaign. They thought they were going through Danger at Dunwater with bullywugs instead of lizard men. There were five of them then: Danzig, Aarioch, a female witch named Tanith Constantine, a ranger named Wolfmoon Treeman, and a halfling assassin named Randobas Took, better known as "Shadowplay;" widely thought to be chaotic neutral, but in fact, neutral evil. Funny how players never think to cast know alignment on each other. Other characters would come, players joined and left, then rejoined and left, and finally rejoined. It is a little known fact that one of the space-time anomalies that litter the Star Trek spacescape like cigarette butts actually exists in Portland, Maine. If I had a nickel for every player who announced he was moving away, and who then returned several months later, I'd almost have a quarter.
          Tanith slipped away to Sweden for a sex-change operation. Later, s/he decided the whole witch thing was too confining, and became a mage. For no good reason, upon his/her return, Tanith pushed Aarioch into an open sewer. Aarioch was then replaced with the duelist Tallin Alindell, whom no one pushed around. Unfortunately, a mountain giant didn't have to push Tallin to kill him, and thus the courageous dwarven fighter Mogrim Mimbalroth came to pick up Tallin's attack dice, and to ensure that the party maintained an appropriate level of overconfidence and bloodlust. Shadowplay died in a fireball, was replaced by an elven fighter/mage Talf Evergreen, who was then turned to stone, who was then replaced by Gilandril, who had been raised after the whole monster shark thing, but who then left the party in disgust when Tanith resurrected Shadowplay from a desiccated pinky finger he had been hanging onto. Honestly, clerics and their healing spells. A gnome fighter/thief/illusionist named Kelth Glitterhelm joined the party, was swallowed whole by a behir, and was then replaced with a kensai named Mordecai who fought with, I'm not kidding, a trident. A street kid named Tommy became a duelist, but then became persona non grata after leafing through too many of the DM's private pages. Danzig left the party on a solo adventure, then returned, then left to become high priest of the Church of Tritheron in the City of Greyhawk, then returned. He is currently on hiatus, but I'm not taking any bets. I'm keeping him in Saltmarsh just in case.

           And then there was Chet. Never has so little been rolled so often. Under his gentle guidance, Aarioch was first petrified and then, adding insult to injury, shattered. Faramir one-upped the cowardly ranger Dale from Orono by becoming the first-even PC murdered in cold blood by the other party members. Sharp-eyed Sharshelle paralytically rolled off into the heaving waters surrounding Highport at the dramatic conclusion of In the Dungeons of the Slave Lords, in a death so absolutely horrific even I, possibly the cruelest DM to have ever lived, to this day cannot believe I let slide (even as I write this, I cannot believe I turned to Chet and said, with conviction, "Sharshelle rolls off the raft, sorry Chet." The fact that statement did not result with the card table being overturned and a profuse beating about my head and shoulders can only be attributed to the fact that my morbidly obese cat was, at that time, sitting in Chet's lap. Thanks, Sherbet.). Luckily, Sharshelle was replaced by the barbarian Tezzeral Ali, who obstinately refuses to die, despite my best efforts.
           How Tanith was not murdered by the other party members remains a great mystery. The gender-bending mage cheated, lied to, and stole from the party repeatedly. And was caught doing it! Here's a character who was buying yellow musk creeper powder from derro and selling it on the street, who joined the neutral evil assassin Shadowplay in breaking into a homes in Longspear, who "accidentally" caught Mog in the blast radias of not one, but two fireballs, and who cast hold person on his own party members to prevent them from interfering in his sacrifice of a helpless verbeeg victim because, no joke here, his demonic tutor told him to. Yet Faramir, a half-elf for Pete's sake, gets the axe. Literally. Luckily, Tanith was killed in every episode long before Kenny made it fashionable.

          Minions of the Faceless God was already in full swing when an event occurred that changed everything. Brian at Moonshadow Comics, at its phonebooth sized Maine Mall location, asked me if I had ever read Slaine, a 2000 AD comic. Once I read Slaine, everything fell into place. In one fell swoop, Minions was overhauled. Ssendam got his walking papers, while the villain Slough Feg moved into the role of Head Bad Guy. Taking the name Gnarley Bones from an unwritten Chill adventure fermenting in my mind, I had my villain. Instead of the Cosmic Maggot (I'm not making that up, read the comic), I would use Ralishaz, a rather underused diety from the Greyhawk boxed set. Good enough for Gary Gygax, good enough for me. It all fit. The Horned King. The Holy Weapons. The End of the World, well, actually, I threw that in for free. Minions became As the Curtain Falls just in time for me to throw in some hastily-arranged foreshadowing ("Hey, why was Danzig's reflection in the mirror of opposition a giant muscle-bound celtic warrior?"). I, at last, had my giant campaign. After accepting compliments on the massive planning the campaign must have taken, I could laugh and laugh in private. Until now, no one knew that there were two campaigns; the one the players actually started that would have ended with a AD&Dized version of Masks of Nyarlathotep, and a campaign ending with a pitched battle between dueling Horned Kings.
          I told everyone that the campaign was going to end badly, that I was going to gleefully kill all their characters off. That actually was the plan for years. But then damn Doom Patrol beat me to the punch, and Mike said, "You're going to do the same thing, aren't you?" Instead of being accused of plagiarizing Grant Morrison, I relented and instead let Shadowplay viciously backstab Wolf at the very last session. The outrageous assassination of Wolf, the kindest, gentlest and, gosh darn it, most congenial of all the players, soothed my savage DM's heart somewhat. Take that Grant, you upstaging bastard! I don't see you bumping off Martian Manhunter, and if I do, I think its pretty clear where you got the idea! Don't even think about it, I'm an attorney now.

          The game moved from my parents home in Windham, to Chris Garrety's unheated garage down the street, to my cushy apartment on Munjoy Hill in -remember "gravity well"- Portland. The game officially ran from August 1990 to May 1995 when I graduated from the University of Southern Maine. I'd like to think that I graduated with a degree in gaming as well. I remember more late nights spent poring over the next session's miniature war maps, visual aids and (dammit) weather than nights spent agonizing over Milton's symbolism. Other games came around. Cthulhu, the game that started it all, finally made the rounds. That bastard child of TSR, Star Frontiers, even made occasional public appearances. Of course, we couldn't let sleeping dogs lie, so in 1996, we dug out the players again for a heavily plagiarized version of Lloyd Alexander's The Black Cauldron, that introduced Artemoff, the satyr bard to the party. Now, in 2001, we've unearthed them again for a run at the legendary "GDQ" series. I can't help but wonder if, many years from now, I still won't be chasing after Tanith to develop one character sheet.
          And sometimes, when things are getting good, and the players are anxiously holding their lucky dice, hanging on my every word, sometimes I can almost see that decrepit, dilapidated bedroom at my parent's house from 1990, stuffed full with a cardtable, six chairs, piled high with books and papers, with the sound of far-off lawnmowers rolling in through the open windows, and remember when it really started for me.

May 2, 2001, Biddeford, Maine