Although the main part of our original AD&D Greyhawk game was now over, there was one offshoot of it, and it all came down to my brother’s character, Brunak the Barbarian.

You see, Brunak was a Frost Barbarian. He was a long, long way from home. I have this sneaking suspicion that in the early stages we actually said he came from the Wild Coast (and the town of Fax), but by this stage – possibly influenced by Unearthed Arcana – his homeland was that of the Frost Barbarians.

And in 1991, after the campaign had finished, TSR released an adventure called Five Shall Be One by Carl Sargent. It detailed a group of Frost Barbarians seeking for five magical swords to bring back the Great God of the North.

Absolutely perfect for Brunak, right?

I thought so, and I persuaded some of my friends to play the adventure and its sequel, with my brother starring as the leader of the band. As I recall, the other players used the pregenerated characters from the adventure.

Five Shall Be One was fucking cool. And it was great fun to play. The barbarians laid waste to the various challenges as they recovered three of the swords. And because Howl from the North was released soon after, I picked that up and we reconvened to play through that one as well.

The only problem is Howl from the North was by a different designer – Dale “Slade” Henson – and didn’t really quite fit alongside the well-structured first adventure. Honestly, I thought Howl was a mess. But we slogged through it and, by the end, were in possession of the five Swords of Corusk.

Then came the finale of Howl of the North, where the barbarians performed the ritual to return their God to the land.

Except, as written, Iuz disrupts the ritual and scatters the sword. He then pretends to be the Great God of the North, and – soon enough – leads the barbarian hordes in an invasion of the Great Kingdom to the South, thus starting the Greyhawk Wars. (Which remains one of the stupidest in-universe names for a global war – the explanation is that because the peace treaty is signed in the Free City of Greyhawk, the entire war is known as the Greyhawk Wars. Really, really unbelievable).

I kept that ending, and Brunak was crowned King of the Barbarians.

A few years later, after we had moved to Ballarat from Melbourne – and neither of us were playing much D&D – we did a little one-on-one play, with Brunak realising the situation and escaping from the grasp of Iuz.

As I recall, Brunak escaped through the Dungeonland adventures by Gary Gygax. I’m not sure if we finished playing through them, but Brunak had a couple of henchmen, with my brother playing all three as he went through the challenges.

Brunak escaped, and – to this day – my brother has not revisited the character, though he has appeared in other campaigns as an NPC.

I’d revisit the Frost Barbarians again in a later campaign – in the three-year AD&D 1E campaign I ran in 2012-4! But for now, that was it.

These were my first real experiences running Greyhawk games. They would not be the last. I played a lot of Magic: the Gathering in Ballarat (about 1994-5), and eventually discovered new friends who were interested in Dungeons & Dragons. And that would begin my first original campaign set in the World of Greyhawk.