My RPG History (Part I)


It's hard for me to remember a time before I knew what a tabletop roleplaying game was. I was a young boy in the 1980s, growing up in a small town that was usually a few years behind whatever fad or fashion was sweeping the rest of the country. My older brother, who moved out when I was ten or so, was caught up in the tail-end of the D&D boom. I'm not sure exactly how I became aware of the game; I don't remember ever watching him play. I was aware of it in more of an indirect fashion. All I knew is that it was a game full of monsters and magic and that it was something my older brother liked to do. I think it was this latter fact that truly peaked my interest in tabletop RPGs.

My brother is about eight years older than me. He was into the normal things for a kid his age, which in the late 70s and early 80s logically included comic books and Dungeons and Dragons. I can remember tagging along with him and a few of his friends while they visiting the local comic/gaming store. I was particularly intrigued by the lead miniatures, which to me were like tiny action figures. The gaming shop was primarily a comicbook store, which I think intertwined the two worlds of RPGs and comicbook superheroes in my mind at a young age. That's probably why, years later, while I've only read a handful of comicbooks cover to cover, I have absorbed enough information about costumed heroes to hold my own in conversations with casual comics fans.

My earliest strong memory of an actual gaming book came when summer after a visit to the local carnival. I remember really wanting to go through a scary funhouse ride that my mom objected to because she thought it would spook me too badly. While funhouses are usually walk-through affairs, I seem to recall riding through this one. Just as mom predicted, the ride scared the heck out of me, and I came home buzzing about it.

As I gushed to my brother about all the strange “monsters” I saw inside the funhouse, he smiled and broke out a Dungeons and Dragons monster book.

“Maybe,” he said, “you can figure out what some of those monsters were called if you look through this book.” I couldn't, but the fantastic creatures I saw in that book stayed with me strongly enough that, even now, monster manuals are perhaps my favorite kind of RPG book. Sometime after the incident with the carnival fun house, I actually got to play in my first (completely unsuccessful) game of Dungeons and Dragons.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mutant Crawl Classics inspired patron for DCC: The Star Child

Image
The Mutant Crawl Classics Kickstarter is winding down to its final days. Using the free rules found here , I ran the Free RPG Day Funnel adventure Museum at the End of Time . Inspired by events that are very likely to occur within that adventure (and happened in my home game with the kids), I designed a new patron usable for DCC. Just a little something to tide you all over while you wait for the MCC game to release next year. Feel free to use, share, or whatever. I welcome feedback and would love to know if anyone actually makes use of this thing. PATRON: THE STAR CHILD Somewhere across the infinite realms of time, space, and possibility, there stands the greatest possible achievement of architectural design: a monolithic solid whose perfect and precise dimensions exist in a ratio utterly pleasing to the cosmos itself. Not only are the monolith’s height, width, and depth in perfect harmony with the divine ratio, but so too are its invisible dimensions, on into ...
Read more

Finally, Gen Con Event Luck (Torchbearer RPG)

Image
My oldest son and I are attending Gen Con together this year. It's pretty cool in that it will be the first time I've been in the United States during Gen Con in about 7 years. Without the Army to send me somewhere else during the big convention, I thought it might be neat to take my son. This will be my third Gen Con (I went in 2000 and 2002) and his first. The first year that I went, I barely did anything but wander around the dealer room, bleary-eyed and overwhelmed. My second Gen Con was a little more successful as my friends and I played in the D&D Open Tournament that year. Unfortunately, that event took up most of our available gaming time. This year, my goal was to sign up for a few different events that not only featured my favorite games, but also gave me a chance to game with some of the designers whose work I enjoy. I'm not a fan of gamer celebrities, but I do see the value in having the author of a module running his or her work for you right there at ...
Read more

Wednesday Dwimmermount: A Few Thoughts on Running the Game (Session 1)

A long time ago, I began to cobble together some GM aids that put all of the pertinent rules of ACKS into a 7 or so page document. Don’t get me wrong, ACKS uses OD&D as its base and is hardly a complicated game. The crunchy bits it introduces to that rules set are all things that I enjoy, such as clear mechanics for hiring henchmen and mercenaries. However, the book’s organization is a wee bit scattered, and I found myself flipping around more than I would have liked. Some of that will go away with experience, of course, but I’m now very motivated to finish said GM aid. As a further thought on organization, Dwimmermount has a few warts. Some of the important general information is set aside in its own chapter (doors, wandering monsters, etc.), which is very good for finding what you need during GM prep, but not so good when you’re trying to find something in the heat of the moment. For example, Zazik’s coughing fit was supposed to call for an encounter throw each round that ...
Read more