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I was introduced to Dungeons and
Dragons by my cousin Doug at the ripe old age of twelve. Most of my teenage
years was spent playing AD&D and reading fantasy literature. When I was
sixteen my friends and I got bored of AD&D and started talking about
creating our own game. I was probably the most enthusiastic of the group and
hence ended up doing most (almost all) of the work. Our project was finished a
few months later (at about twenty hand-written pages) and was called Supra (I
didn't know there was a car named that at the time). It was vastly overpowered
and very loosely based but it had some basic races (mostly non-standard), and
creatures. A year later I decided to revise the game to make it more workable
and reasonable. My brother Monte and I were the only ones interested. The
revision contained three times the material and only basic concepts (the races
and professions) remained. However, they too contained mostly new material. Most
of the original material was scrapped. This revision was called Supra II. A year
of test playing yielded yet another revision with a new combat system and the
beginning of a magic system (up to this point we were still using the AD&D
magic's). This revision yielded a new name for the game - "Beyond".
Not long after another revision with further enhancements was proposed. By then
I was more mature and had a better grasp of what a more professional
approach entailed. Now I am doing as much in my spare time as I can to get this finished.
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Even some of my formal education
has been towards advancing this game. While I pursued my education in computer
science, I also pursued writing, anthropology and native languages. This current
(fourth) revision of the game has ended up being named Lycadican. Lycadican has
its roots in Latin for an ancient Asian empire that mysteriously disappeared; it
was destroyed or sunk into the sea. This last revision has yielded a fully
complete and unique magike (Greek spelling) system incorporating all of the
different types of spell casting that I could identify. I went so far as to
create what I observed as laws of magike. You can imagine my surprise when a
year later my anthropology teacher taught me the same anthropological-magical
laws with the same names (also based in Latin). Lycadican also has a description
of a game world "Khardan," and full racial descriptions on 13
different races. With this last revision, I have started adding social, cultural
and history data. The sections: equipment, money systems, combats, game world
construction and realm mastering techniques are still under construction but the
game has come far.
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