Thunder Rift

My first D&D game was played in a setting called Thunder Rift. Released in 1992 It was part of the Black Box of Basic D&D. In reading about the product in later years, it was intended to take play beyond the “You stand outside the entrance to a dungeon”. Oddly, many of the module's produced for the series did just contrive to plop you at the entrance. However, we had a good dungeon master and those sort of seams were patch over with out our notice.

I have returned to Thunder Rift as a setting time and again. In no small part due to nostalgia, but also the fact that at its core it is a good setting. Yes the scale presented on the maps is laughably small, and the product itself has many mistakes. But with a few changes it is a great ready made setting for a starting game. I loved the setting so much that I painstakingly hand drew my own copy of them map from the original module, nonsensical rivers and all.

For my use, I settled on increasing the scale by a factor of 10. This fixes most of the issues with distance, but still keeps the realm small enough to be a manageable  starting wilderness.  It is also just small enough you can drop into a larger world if/when your game graduates.

Over the years I have also kept it a living world, incorporating (most) aspect of the original and subsequent campaigns into the history of the realm.  Old character's become well known NPCs', their strongholds locations for new explorations into the wild.   After all these years there are a number of new details, ruins, and locations that dot the map. I still update my hand drawn map with these. Many years later my partner got me a copy of the original which I scanned in and use to this day as a player map.

While our original group only played through some of the published modules, I have managed to pick up most of them over the years. During the 3e era, I went about updating them fleshing out plots and details. While I have moved back to a more basic game, I still used a lot of that work when presenting those modules to others.

I fully realize that this love of such a paper thin product is fueled  by nostalgia, it think it is the best kind of nostalgia.  Not just remembering a singular "good old days" but rather an ongoing growth of memories.