The latest episode of the Wired’s Obsessed series profiles Robert Wardhaugh, Dungeon Master of a D&D campaign that has been running uninterrupted since 1982. Most campaigns are lucky to last more than a few months, so it’s quite an achievement to reach the 40 years. .
The focus of the video is on Wardhaugh’s setup, which fills the entire basement of a house he bought with this large play area in mind. It has room for his collection of about 30,000 miniatures, all of which he painstakingly hand-painted (which is why players are not allowed to touch them during the game). He also has a terrain to represent every conceivable part of his home-brewed surroundings based on an alternative fantasy version of the historic Earth – Wardhaugh is a history professor at Western University in London, Ontario, by day.
In addition to a home-brewed setting, he runs D&D with home-brewed rules that evolved from AD&D 1st edition. As Wardhaugh notes on the website for what he simply calls The Game, these rules have kept changing over the years and include new rules that players have asked to have downloaded from D & D’s 3rd, 4th and 5th editions.
The duration of the campaign has made it dynastic, with players – of whom there have been more than 50 – playing the children of their previous characters over generations. Permadeath is embraced, and Wardhaugh says, “When your character dies, if you have no other characters, you’re out of the game.” All in all, he says, “about 500 characters” have come and gone over the last 40 years.
Players have also come and gone, and his daughter has joined the group – and asked to play as a fairy when she was six or seven and remained on, still part of the group at the age of 20. Some players have moved away but still fly in for the occasional session. Having this regular reason to hang out has helped keep his group of friends together, and that seems to be the main reason Wardhaugh is still running D&D, four decades after he started. “As long as I can keep doing it,” he says, “hopefully I will not lose my friends my whole life.”