Malchor Buys Equipment

Malchor is the magic-user listed as an example in the 1977 Holmes edition of Dungeons & Dragons, and I decided to use him as the namesake for this blog. I was too young to play the Holmes edition; I started a few years later with Moldvay B/X and then the Mentzer boxed sets. In fact, I didn't even know that Holmes existed until I discovered the OSR and took a deep dive down memory lane. Retrospectively, Holmes has become a personal favorite, and the blue box has an honored place on my shelf of RPGs.

It seemed appropriate to use Malchor to name this blog. The Blue Book takes me back to my own origins, to the era of my birth and childhood. He also invokes an age when the hobby was new, production values were simple, and creativity outweighed gloss. Looking at the Holmes edition now, it's frankly little more than a 'zine. It looks like something a fan created, and I guess that's sort of what its origin story is.

Malchor is a fun character. His name is badass. Malchor. Sounds like he could summon some serious arcana. I love that he's got a loin cloth, robe, girdle and pointy hat. One of the prototypal wizards of our hobby wore a pointy hat! This guy has a couple of daggers and is ready to go wander around in a perilous dungeon.

Malchor is a kind of placeholder in a more innocent time in Dungeons & Dragons, and our hobby in general. Who could have known that in forty years people would watch others play D&D for fun, not because they were all buddies camped out in Josh's basement, but for the same reason people watched TV in the '70's? Heck, who could have known that we'd have so much access to endless fan-generated content from Youtube available to stream at our fingertips? The internet has taken our hobby, which we always knew was fun, and scattered its seeds far and wide. 

Guess what? Us nerds were right from the beginning. D&D was a damn good time, and it still is!

Malchor also stands as a proxy for me as a child: imaginative, creative, and obsessed with fantastic worlds. I was drawn into role-playing by the rules, the stories, the art, and the setting. Forty-five years later and I find that despite everything that's changed about me in the intervening years, I still share the same passions. I had college lined, hand written character sheets just like Malchor's. I remember studiously recording lists of equipment, most of which I never actually used in the game. (I've never had a bunch of wolvesbane on me when I needed it!).  

Malchor is the archetypal proxy of ego, and he represents the imagination that has inspired our hobby since the beginning. That's why I named this blog The Saga of Malchor: it's an homage to the origins of Dungeons & Dragons, and my own interest in playing at the world. 

I'm sure that I have nothing to say that someone else hasn't already said more eloquently or with greater insight, but I don't write with any intention of originality. This blog is a letter to myself from forty years ago, when my mom hid my D&D stuff thinking it was evil and I saved every penny to afford the D&D Expert Set. The boy I was would have been flabbergasted to see how the role-playing hobby has grown over the years. Yet despite all of that, I still find it hard to beat the peculiar rules of the original game and its early descendants.

 On, heroes, to glory!