I was born in 1970 and grew up loving superheroes, fantasy, sci-fi, monsters, computers, video games, and Dungeons & Dragons. I’ve always gravitated to the nerd sub-culture.
In thinking about my past hobbies, I thought it would be fun to review my brief history of with TTRPGs that lasted 4-5 years during my teenage era and left a huge imprint on me.
It was 1982 and my cousin Russell brought over a blue box which mixed fantasy storytelling with stats, which was a combination that blew my mind. The box came with some books and dice I’d never seen before. The book looked like this:
Me and my buddy Jason were directed to rollup characters and we played X1: Isle of Dread. We didn’t play it very well as we really didn’t know what we were doing but boy did we have fun. We didn’t roleplay, we didn’t have a character story arc or campaign plot. It player like a 1980s Fantasy A-Team where we moved on from problem to problem and we solved the problems by killing everything. We were wandering murdering hobos.
The adventures we played in our first campaign was X1, B4, X2, and X4 and then we ended the campaign as my cousin wanted to move onto AD&D (1ed). We got to about level 6-7 for our characters. So we moved from the Basic to Expert sets. I loved the game so much I bought my own rules.
My cousin migrated us to 1st Ed AD&D where we played the U series (Saltmarsh) and we got to level 5-6 before it felt we did it all. I ran a campaign for a few sessions, played in a buddy’s game for a few sessions, experimented a bit with Top Secret, Boot Hill, Gama World, and Champions. I also played in a campaign with some school friends where the DM was a great artist and good story teller. I remember him hand drawing a map on a big parchment paper and then burned the edges of the map to make it look authentic. The epic nature of the campaign really centered around the DM’s younger’s brother character who was named Alfafa Farthorn (ha! ha!) and if you did not show up for a few sessions your character would get killed off. I think I lost three different characters in that campaign as I did not make it to the Friday night sessions consistently.
Then I graduated from school and I got serious about life. TSR was bought by Wizards of the Coast and I missed the whole CCG sensation. I was in my 20s by then, in university, and was too busy with getting married and buying a house, raising kids, and having a career. RPGs fell out of my life and I gave away all of my stuff and that a dum-dum decision.
D&D was a part of my life but fell out of it. 40 years later, I’m in my late 50s and I’ve gotten back into reading and watching videos about the latest happenings on TTPGs. It is very exciting to see the broader styles of TTRPGs. There is so much out there! I might consider finding a rule-light system so I can introduce my family to playing. But I am also starting to think of about Solo-Roleplaying. I’ll post another blog when I’ve made some decisions.
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