Living City / Death

[Ralf Toth]

Hi Shaun

nice win on Burntwire's Living City material. I was wondering, what kind of material this Living City stuff is. I always imagined it being an RPGA campaign, much like today's Living Greyhawk campaign. Is that correct? Also, what is the connection to the LC1-LC8 items released under the Forgotten Realms label?

Best regards,
Ralf.
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[Cernunnos]

Thanks! I'm going to try to write up a brief history of LC when I get around to doing their page... they were actually the very first "Living" campaign, and was purposefully put in a corner of the Forgotten Realms about which not alot was written. Polyhedron was used pretty extensively to built up the new city, and they released LC1 and LC2 originally as "RPGA exclusives," though I guess they were so popular that they ended up reprinting more for Forgotten Realms characters. In its heyday (early-mid 90's) they were releasing close to 100 modules a year for the campaign. The campaign also introduced an interesting idea in that whatever happened in the modules would be considered Forgotten Realms "canon."
However, standards grew pretty lax, and with so many modules, there were alot of complaints of munchkinism, uneven modules, etc., and membership dropped off quite a bit. They tried branching off into high-level play (with an Underdark setting and a Planar setting, both tied into Ravens Bluff). Eventually, with TSR's collapse, the RPGA more or less collapsed with it.
LC still continued, and even expanded: neighboring Forgotten Realms cities such as Procampur became their own Living City, and Sarbreenar was given to the RPGA UK and Tsurlagol was given to RPGA Germany in a move that would forshadow the Living Greyhawk system of different regions for different real-life play locales.
WotC in 2001 liscensed out LC to Organized Play, a company run by a former employee (I think president?) of WotC, which "destroyed" Ravens Bluff in a conflagration, then started a campaign set a few years later called "Ruins of Ravens Bluff." Organized Play charged rather exorbiant fees to play the modules right when RPGA membership became totally free, which pretty much doomed LC from the start. After inking a deal with WotC to produce a few hardcover LC adventures to be released publically, Organized Play choose not to renew their liscense, and nothing more was said of the matter (in fact, City of the Spider Queen was considered by some in WotC to be a more-or-less flop, and WotC has since said it will release no more FR adventures).
LC was finally put to rest at this last GenCon, where they had the last few LC adventures. I want to say the campaign lasted some 14 years with a few hundred modules to its name.
As for Living City products, the original run was LC1-4 (which all at some point were publically available, though some for a short time were RPGA member exclusive). LC5 - Player's Guide to the Living City was later released in 3 incarnations that I've been able to find (1.0, 1.1, and 2.0, which is the one you usually see in eBay. I'll now have 3 copies of LC5 2.0 in SW, one of which I'm opening now just to see wtf is in it).
LC6 - Procampur Player's Guide is really only about a dozen pages stapled together, and frankly is one of the most overpriced FR items (when you can find it). I bought mine for $40 and felt ripped off, until 2 years later when somebody sold a copy for around $250 on eBay. It is really a short guidebook to the 2nd Living City of Procampur, a neighbor of Raven's Bluff.
LC7 was never actually used as the designation for City of Ravens Bluff (since by the time of its release TSR has stopped using the codes), but most LC enthusiasts give it that code since it was the next official release. It is one of those really late generation TSR releases, was a considerable failure sales-wise, despite the fact that it incorporated a ton of data from Dragon, Dungeon, Poly, and previous LC items into one handy tome.
Again, LC8 was never the "official" code for Kidnapped!, but LC enthusiasts still call it that to this day. It was a true RPGA player exclusive, and released somewhere around when TSR was sold to WotC.
The stuff I got from Burnie is weird kind of hand out kind of stuff... nothing really special (hell, I think I may even have scans of some of it!), but I wanted to snag for research purposes. The Living Death and Jungle booklets were legit releases (I've confirmed through my sources) sold for a few dollars at only a few events.

[Ralf Toth]

Wow, that's pretty interesting information! Thanks a lot. Will you include this in the RPGA section of the Tome?

How was honeymoon? :)
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Tome of Treasures - #1 resource for collectible role-playing games.

[Cernunnos]

Oh, its definately going in there (in probably even more nauseating detail).
Honeymoon was great. Went to a resort in the Poconos Mountains of Pennsylvania that was straight out of Austin Powers (circular bed, mirrors everywhere, hot-tub shaped like a champagne glass). We then saw Sarah Brightman perform at the Meadowlands (just outside New York City).

[mkman]

Cernunnos don't forget some of the stuff used to be mine :-) I sold burnie a good majority of the stuff. Living Death, etc were all mine before.

How is your collecting going?
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[Cernunnos]

Pretty good... I've had to put the brakes on it in a major way because of the wedding, and still have some credit cards to pay off, but should be able to get back into the swing of things.