Paradiso: Behind the Wyatt I

Since this is a pretty loose RPG Blog carnival, I decided to go with a few posts about all the esoterica that makes its way into my D&D games, and the history behind it. To try to talk about what really defines my games and unifies the Wyatt Experience™, as it cannot be unified in any other way. Note that until fairly recently most of my games I have run haven’t been Eden games, so this does not apply to that. For those I may have to write another post in the future when I’ve actually ran more long games of it.

We begin with a timeline thing. It’s really hard for me to get my thoughts straight about this as you’ll soon find out.

Maybe this will help me remember it all.

Wyatt The RPG Gamer (Early 200?-Late 2006)

The Campaigns

I, uh, don’t recall very well which year I began playing D&D. For various reasons the time period between 2004 to 2007 in which I theoretically began gaming is pretty much a fog to me. A lot of bad juju happened during those years and I did not have the stability of life and mind that I possess now. However, I did manage to play D&D and in fact I do remember everything that happened there. D&D was sort of my escape and part coping mechanism and thus my most vivid memories of these times are with D&D. I just don’t recall the concerns around which my D&D time was structured. Not even the year.

I do remember that my online buddy Master Epyon was my first Dungeon Master and we played online via instant messaging. I was playing a very excitable half-elf Wizard named Wyatt Salazar in D&D 3.5 and I recall being powerful enough that my relatively crappy race-class combination didn’t really bother me. I hit up Cleric as well for some healing spells, which at first was pretty bad but got better. Back in those days I always inserting likely unwanted story elements into the DM’s game that he ran with perhaps because he liked them, perhaps because he didn’t have anything else. I used to write like 10 page backstories.

The campaign first involved defeating Zeno, an elf enchanter who wanted to open an artifact which would summon 1 of each type of devil to his service. The retroactive continuity of the rest of the campaign in light of this event confuses me a bit to this day. The events of the campaign culminated in a massive war between good and evil dragons and some demons and evils if I remember correctly, in which Wyatt used Miracle to revive all the good dragons and troll the evil dragons REALLY BAD. If I had known of the meme at the time, I would’ve said “U MAD?” to the Red Dragons after killing one of their leaders and then reviving every good dragon killed and turning the tide.

That was pretty awesome.

Now where the continuity confounds me is that demons and devils seemed a little trivial by that point, but a big deal had been made about the book that could summon and bind 1 of each devil type. Maybe I misunderstood it, and those were not intended to be the only devils in the setting, since I recall mentions of Baator later. Ah, what a mess. Regardless, Wyatt rocked people’s socks off and basically became the Elminster of the setting, except he mostly used his combination of Resurrection and Ignore Material Components (or even just a random Miracle) to troll the universe pretty badly.

I would join some other games during this time, but they were short-lived. Master Epyon’s campaign though, just didn’t want to die. We went into epic levels and the story became almost impossible to parse through. More ridiculous people kept showing up with more ridiculous stats. The final battle, I don’t even remember what I did in it except Gate in Solars in the hopes that their inherent ridiculousness could help me the defeat the ridiculousness of the enemy I was facing.

And guess what, it did, because I totally punked that guy. Whoever he was. I don’t remember. But I punked his ass good.

The Characters

My online identity as Wyatt Salazar was created during this time along with the Half-Elf Wizard/Cleric Mystic Theurge whom I played in my first D&D game. I thought it was fitting to adopt that nickname as people in the game were already calling me Wyatt and I didn’t have a set moniker (I was random things all over the internet, like Squirrel In My Pants, Meek, Tamaki). I’m glad that back then I chose to unify all that under a single identity. It would become much helpful later on.

Oddly enough, I always thought of Wyatt as a Cleric even though he began as a Wizard. Probably because most of his memorable moments involved divine magic. His refusing to heal the party Rogue when he became an Assassin worshiper of Vecna (which Wyatt felt was a betrayal of his beliefs by somebody he trusted); the Miracle that revived all the good dragons that had died in the climactic battle, instantly turning the tide of the war (at the cost of pretty much not earning any XP for all the kills that day); his undersea adventure with water breathing; the final battle in which he mass healed to flip off the enemy.

Though Wyatt worked because his arsenal was arcane (and because he used most, if not all, of the really broken spells in D&D to the best of their effectiveness; he owned the party fighter in a friendly tournament match by ray of enfeebling him so much he suffered severe encumbrance and then flying circles around him). He could shoot out polar rays and heal. He never took to using Harm spells, mostly because I never liked any of them much.

So I guess thinking of him as just as Cleric is erroneous, but I know in D&D 4th I’d play him as a Cleric, though maybe with a Wizard multiclass for a few big shooties. Cleric defined his personality more than Wizard, even if most of his victories came from blasting someone in the face until they fell down.

My most iconic characters were created during this period. Wyatt Salazar is a given, but there were others:

•Sicily Blanche, the “goddess” of mercantilism, was the beginning of a vivid trend of satirizing D&D which would come to define me. She has since appeared in every campaign of mine as the shopkeep. In D&D 3.5, she was an epic wizard/archmage and epic spellcaster, which is the reason for her current status.

•Karin Apuleius, the archivist and writer of a thousand books. Karin became a fixture in my satirical campaign world “Paradiso” and also pretty much shows up in every campaign of mine, typically as an impotent quest giver.  In D&D 3.5 she was an Archivist, which was a divine class with a spell book that could learn spells of any divine class via scrolls.

The Influences

I’ve always been a fan of cartoons, mostly anime and manga. Most of my inspirations for things in D&D didn’t come from literature or pulp fiction and to this very day not that many do. I think the two most influential books on my D&D career were the Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy (one of my favorite books) and The Lord of the Rings. The Lord of the Rings was my “what not to do” book. It drove me pretty crazy reading that massive thing (I got the collection version which was all three books in one enormous volume). I did not like it and so I tried not to imitate it.

Anime and manga overall were my biggest influences. Wyatt was sort of the earnest, honorable but ridiculously powerful shonen hero, but also combined with the selfish, kind of jerk fantasy hero, though a more cheerful sort of that. But in my mind, everything was playing out in black and white manga pages, with the truly epic moments being the the 2 page spreads commonly found in climactic portions of Weekly Jump mangas. Me and my friends would even talk about what a cool page spread a certain moment would make, and which artist would illustrate it. We never got a consensus on that last part…

Overall, I loved the group I was playing with. Even if by the end of the period, the game (3.5) was starting to grate on my nerves.

So for some bizarre reason, I began DMing. Tune in to the next installment, where things get weird fast.