The first D&D campaign I properly ran was at university. I’d been playing and occasionally DMing for eight or so years before that, but it was there that I really started running my own campaign. The game was a Forgotten Realms one, based on the Ruins of Adventure supplement (which was the paper version of the first Gold Box SSI AD&D computer game, Pool of Radiance.

It wasn’t a great campaign, especially as I ended up with eight (8!!!) players for the early sessions, and many of the players were familiar with the computer game and I wasn’t, but eventually some of us persevered for two years before I ended the game, or all the players drifted off to other pursuits. In my last years of university, Amber became the main RPG of choice.

During the second year of that AD&D 2E campaign set in the Forgotten Realms, I became a lot more inventive as to what was going on: the characters branched out into the wilderness, delved into Undermountain, and otherwise had quite a number of inventive adventures. At least, I think they were inventive; it’s very hard to remember exactly what they did now. This was twenty years ago, so perhaps I can be excused.

Funnily enough, the main thing I remember about the campaign is something that we forgot about at the time! 

You see, I’d been reading Jennifer Roberson’s Chronicles of the Cheysuli, and I thought that including lir (animal companions) and making a couple of characters into shapechangers sounded really good. So, I worked it into one of the adventures, and there we had it: two PCs with really cool animal companions and the ability to shapeshift. They thought it was neat, I thought it was neat. We were all happy.

A few sessions later, we realised that we’d completely forgotten about this boon: the players had forgotten about the shape-shifting ability, or that they had animal companions that could talk to them. So had I! So, we quietly dropped the lir from the game, as if they’d never been there.

It’s odd that it’s something we forgot about at the time lingers in the memory, but that’s how things work sometime.