Admit it, you’ve been expecting a post about the Black Wizard. Haven’t you? Or is it just crazy old Mickey thinking he represents the other shoe that needs to drop? Well, I do get kinda goofy talking about Dungeons and Dragons, don’t I?
The Black Wizard had a name that the player characters eventually learned… but I have stupidly forgotten what it was. So, I merely refer to him by the name they knew him by for most of the game. He was a personal nemesis to two of the player character wizards. He is shown here kidnapping Balin, the young son of the wizard LeRoy, my brother’s fifteenth level wizard. He also faced off against Asduel, the Sorcerer played by young Fernie the flunkie who was in my eighth grade English class for two consecutive years. Neither one could defeat him by themselves, and they never played in the same game at the same time.
The Black Wizard lived in Fort Doom, a haunted military base from the frontier of Ancient Starnor. He had designs on the Castle Kingdoms of the north like Tol Arriseah, Gansdorf, and Selonica. It was thought that he was the evil twin of the powerful wizard Merlini, but was so twisted by black magic that even Merlini no longer recognized him for certain. He teamed up with the Red Dragon R’Drak to lay seige to Gansdorf and Selonica. But the armies led by Sir Hogan and Asduel drove them out of the city of Selonica, and R’Drak himself was slain in the Battle of Gansdorf. He fled to the Southern Kingdom that LeRoy the Great Wise Wizard had built around the city of Balindale. His haunted fortress at Fort Doom was near Balindale. The Black Wizard conspired with the vampire Count Marilinev to turn all of the Southern Kingdom’s people into vampire thralls, but he finally met his match when LeRoy recruited the Raven Wizard Shaumar to best him in magical combat two against one. He fell from the sky that day in a roaring red fireball and exploded against the mountainside. Asduel would later capture and imprison his right-hand witch, and LeRoy took over Fort Doom, converting it into a castle for good. The evil wizard’s young son Kath would be raised by LeRoy as a brother to Balin, and later was converted into a player character, adventuring for the causes of goodness and light. Kath’s batwing cloak was the only thing he inherited from his evil father.
So if you have become totally fed up with my Dungeons and Dragons memories, find some relief, please, in the fact that there is very little more to tell. Even goofy old Mickey can’t say too much more. We played a lot of Dungeons and Dragons in the early eighties, but it was doomed to ultimate limits by Baptists who thought the game was a tool of the devil for corrupting young minds. Who knows?Maybe they were correct. I did, however, always manage to have the good guys win in the end and evil be defeated. It takes a pretty crafty old Satan to turn that into corruption.
