Okay, four straight days of Amazing Stories reviews...time for a break. I'm going to continue doing those reviews, because it's a great magazine, and there's some serious awesome coming up in those early issues. But there are other things going on in the world besides that.
I'm tempted to go on a COVID-rant, but I'd rather keep things more upbeat and positive. So, I'll talk about something more interesting and less ubiquitous in the news. So, I'll talk about one of my favorite subjects instead: Gaming.
I'm still looking for another opportunity to teach my son more of the finer points of skewering goblins and skeletons; it will happen eventually. But I'm looking back on when I first learned about RPGs, and D&D in particular.
I was twelve, and I was the stereotypical loner kid, comfortable with sitting in my room and doing my own thing, which usually involved reading. I had taken to reading some old kid's fantasy books at the local library, including the Oz series by L. Frank Baum. One week, as my dad was bringing me in to the library to get my week's supply of books (I'd usually take out six or seven), we saw an ad for the weekend D&D game that the library had started hosting. Yes, this was before the Satanic Panic, when gamers went underground until the dark times had passed. I wasn't all that interested, but my father decided that I needed to do some socializing, and since I had shown an interest in fantasy fiction, he took it upon himself to bring me back on the weekend to meet the local D&D group.
I had no rulebooks, I had no dice, and I had no clue what was going on. But the group graciously let me join in; they had an extra character 'sheet.' By 'sheet,' I mean they had a thin strip that they had cut out of a photocopy of the list of pregen characters in the back of the Giants series of modules. That's right, my first-ever experience with D&D was as Beek Gwenders, high-level half-elf ranger.
You know that passage in the 1st edition Dungeon Masters Guide where Gary Gygax recommends that new players be started off in a separate game, to give them the opportunity to experience first-level play? Yeah, these guys weren't having any of that. And they weren't going to cut away from the adventure they were currently playing in, either. It wasn't the Giants modules; that was just where they'd gotten the characters from, and they'd already finished those modules. No, they were exploring a strange 'cave' in the side of a mountain, a cave made of smooth metal with tons of crazy critters in there like vegepygmies and security robots.
That's right, old-timers; you know what I'm talking about. We were going through the Expedition to the Barrier Peaks. And I'd never even held a twenty-sider before. I didn't know what anything on that little strip of paper meant. But something inside me loved every second of it. I had no idea that this wasn't 'real' fantasy, with robots and spaceships and alien gardens. It was weird, it was fun, and I was hooked.
I still didn't have any rulebooks, but within a few weeks I was making up my own version of the game. I had tables of magic items for sale, a rudimentary list of spells for the wizards (I didn't even know there were other spellcasters, and I was playing a ranger), and vegepygmies were the main monster on my encounter tables. It was crazy, but I loved it.
A few weeks after that, I found out that the library actually had a copy of the Moldvay Basic rulebook. The guys I was playing with said that wasn't the real game, but I didn't care. I borrowed the book and read it cover-to-cover three times in a week. Now, I knew what I was doing. I bought a few dice (no twelve-sider yet, and we had lots of board games, so I didn't need another six-sider), rolled up a bunch of characters, and began a life-long obsession and love.
Now, I'm hoping to pass that on to my son. It's going to be a slow process as long as my wife continues to resist, but I'm confident that will change. But until it does, I'll just make sure he keeps reading the books that inspired the game, including the Barrier Peaks. Because if it's that weird, it's definitely fantasy.
Speaking of fantasy, allow me to point you to my first fantasy novel, The Chronicles of Meterra: Arrival, available in e-book or in paperback.
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