D&D & Me

Welcome to Dungeons & Dragons month!

 

With the release of the new movie (it's fun!) and having a few figures I wanted to post about, I figured why not post about D&D the whole month? To kick it off, I'll be sharing my memories (what's left of them) on getting into the whole D&D thing.

My intro to D&D goes all the way back to the 80s when you'd rarely hear it mentioned without some kind of reference to the devil, black magic, and/or animal sacrifices. The infamous Satanic Panic of the 80s that hit everything from D&D to comic books to metal/rock music. Ah, the good ol days.

This is what got me into the game, the boxed Basic Set, complete with a set of dice and a crayon that you used to color in the numbers. Before I go any further, I have to give a shout out to Erol Otus who did this cover and lots of other art for D&D. I absolutely love his style! Look him up, you won't be disappointed.

Packed away somewhere in my parents' basement is probably the binder I put the rule book in. It was already 3-hole punched and had perforated pages so it just made sense to put it in a binder. Things were much different in the Basic Set. Elf, Dwarf, and Halfling were classes just like Fighter or Cleric. You had cool Saving Throws vs. things like Death Ray, Turn to Stone, and Dragon Breath as if to say these would be common occurrences! And the dreaded THAC0 which always felt weird to me.

Like other nerds my age, I watched the D&D Saturday morning cartoon and loved it. This image is from a new limited series comic that was recently released. I honestly don't remember how I got into D&D initially but I distinctly remember having my Basic Set while I was in middle school and before the cartoon was on, so that would put it somewhere around 82/83. I also remember seeing ads like the one below in comic books and the TV Guide ad for Mazes and Monsters, both of which further fueled my curiosity. Check out this blog post for more comic ads.

After reading through the books a few times, I dragged one of my friends into making a character and tried to run him through the infamous Keep on the Borderlands adventure that came in the boxed set. I barely had a clue how to run a game and he was kind of bored with walking around town so we ended up making a random dungeon to get to some monster fighting action.

 

Once I got to high school, the stars aligned. One of my aunts happened to be the head librarian at my high school and she knew I liked fantasy stuff so she introduced me to some older kids that played in the library after school on a weekly basis. A few of these guys would become long time friends and the core of my future gaming groups. One of them had a denim vest with all sorts of band patches and the whole back was taken up by the airbrushed cover of Dio's Holy Diver album. 

 

 

This was a whole new world! They were playing Advanced Dungeons & Dragons! I remember sitting there with a couple of the guys and rolling up my first ever character that would be played. He was a 5th level ranger (probably chosen because of my love of the cartoon) that ended up with a magical Dancing Sword. I was also completely lost as AD&D was a lot more crunchy (ie: complicated). Not only was it more complicated but there were multiple books to expand the game even more. Oh so many books! One of the guys had made up bounded character sheet books and I still have mine to this day!

 

 

It's been through some stuff over the decades. I have no idea whose phone number is on the front. I leafed through it for a bit, reliving old characters and games.

Here is my first AD&D character, creatively named Dex.

 

 With the book binding, it was easier to take pics of the sheet than wrestle it on to my flatbed scanner. Also inside, I found this map from a different game where I was playing a Halfling-like Kender. I have no idea what happened to the paper so please excuse the spots.

Sadly, my freshman year was the last year the high school allowed the D&D club to meet...officially. We would sometimes find an out of the way spot in the school at the end of the day and play anyway.

During early high school, I also met my best bro who would become our DM in later years. Our adventures with him were always something he cooked up, he never used modules. I think my favorite thing we ever did was a campaign where we all played evil characters. One year at GenCon, I had an artist do a picture of my bounty hunter character known as the Gray Fox. Yes, he did have a pet fox.

I stopped keeping up with D&D after 3rd Edition but that hasn't kept me from picking up countless other RPG systems over the years. Something in my brain just enjoys reading rules and seeing how different systems work.

It's been quite awhile since I've played but over the past few years, I've been listening to The Adventure Zone and Glass Cannon Podcasts which is basically old timey radio shows. You're listening to people play RPGs. It's just like sitting down at a table...with people you don't know...and not actually playing. But seriously, the shows are both a lot of fun and some of the characters and stories are surprisingly moving.