How old were you your first time?
I'm one of those older guys lucky enough to have started gaming using what's now called OD&D. It was the Moldvay purple boxed set and contained a red rule book and a slender purple module called B2: The Keep on the Borderlands. It was a magical time... it was 1982 and I was 9.
Role playing games were something of an oddity then and not very many people had heard of one (let alone owned one). Having no other players readily at hand (and no internet to locate any) I used the only people I had as first players; my parents. They were reasonably good sports about it, but since fantasy was not their bag they quickly tired of it after a session or two (where I stumbled through rules which seemed complex and alien at the time). And those curious plastic molded light blue coloured dice...
Anyway, by the summer following I had convinced a few other kids I knew to try D&D and for the most part it was eagerly accepted. Some kids didn't quite get it, and other kids had parents who didn't want their kids hanging out with a little weirdo like me with geeky books and ideas of high fantasy.
After a couple of years (and a transition to the incredible "ADVANCED" D&D) a small group of core friends and I had solidified into a pretty consistent group of gamers and my first real epic campaign was born from small pieces of H3: The Bloodstone Wars that did not make use of the Battlesystem (which we did not own, and could not easily get).
From the narrative described on the module's back, the DM notes inside the module, and the limited amount of material in the dungeon crawl, I created an entire campaign that we played for almost 2 straight years of gaming. We played almost every weekend and many week nights when we could get away with it. We were 13 (and eventually 14 of course as time marched on).
We wove a tale of a great Knight: Lysander Garwin and his struggle against a terrible invasion. It was ostensibly set in the Forgotten Realms, but we didn't yet have that original grey box (we couldn't afford it), so it was instead set in our version of a shared world where Orcus, Bloodstone Pass and the evil witch-king of Vaasa were the central themes of the entire world.
Many of those themes from this first deep campaign were so strong for me that to this day they still make appearances. In my most recent Iron Heroes (+homebrew) game, set in the sprawling world on Anthemios, one of the antagonists is a Witch King named Zhengyi who hails from a land separated from the Kingdom of Gerwyngan by a lonely dangerous high mountain pass called, you guessed it, Bloodstone. More about that game in a later post...
Anyway, by the summer following I had convinced a few other kids I knew to try D&D and for the most part it was eagerly accepted. Some kids didn't quite get it, and other kids had parents who didn't want their kids hanging out with a little weirdo like me with geeky books and ideas of high fantasy.
After a couple of years (and a transition to the incredible "ADVANCED" D&D) a small group of core friends and I had solidified into a pretty consistent group of gamers and my first real epic campaign was born from small pieces of H3: The Bloodstone Wars that did not make use of the Battlesystem (which we did not own, and could not easily get).
We wove a tale of a great Knight: Lysander Garwin and his struggle against a terrible invasion. It was ostensibly set in the Forgotten Realms, but we didn't yet have that original grey box (we couldn't afford it), so it was instead set in our version of a shared world where Orcus, Bloodstone Pass and the evil witch-king of Vaasa were the central themes of the entire world.
Many of those themes from this first deep campaign were so strong for me that to this day they still make appearances. In my most recent Iron Heroes (+homebrew) game, set in the sprawling world on Anthemios, one of the antagonists is a Witch King named Zhengyi who hails from a land separated from the Kingdom of Gerwyngan by a lonely dangerous high mountain pass called, you guessed it, Bloodstone. More about that game in a later post...
Not roleplaying, but I thank The Hobbit, which I read in grade 3 ('80/81). Reading it over an over for a year and a half primed me for RPGs. In '82 I was 10 years old. I wasn't old enough or sophisticated enough to have tried playing on my own, but Vin being a couple of years older, was more than able to wade into the role of DM. I was always more interested in the physical aspects of play. There was no LARP community in PA or I'm sure I would have experimented with it. Fortunately, I was only in Grade 4/5 so, though I would never call it LARPing, acting out my sword-wielding fantasies on the playground was perfectly fine for at least a couple of years. It was also enabled by the fantastic D&D cartoon that would so quickly follow my first forays into the Keep on the Borderlands.
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