Origins of a Dungeon Master: Nostalgia

[Elven Doritos]

Fantasy gaming had always been in blood, even as a child. I just didn't know it.

As a kid, I used to construct massive storylines filled with epic intrigue and plenty of "fighting", with my extensive action figure collection serving as my cast. Geordi LaForge (sans visor, though) and Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation were half-brother wizards bent on saving the Pink Ranger from the clutches of the mad warlord Dag (short for "Dagger", played by a Klingon in full battle armor). Occasioanlly, they would team up with another member of the TNG crew (specifically, their mentor as played by Picard or their muscle man as played by Mister Worf) in their attempts to stop the mad Dag and his plentiful supply of recurring monsters.



The Star Trek cast was soon joined by several Batmans, and they were joined by the entire Justice League of America. Finally, Geordi and Data had a supporting cast, and Green Lantern and the Flash joined alongside them and Worf to form my first "party". The five of them were my link to imagination in childhood, and it seems that even when I had tools from other genres (Science Fiction and comics, respectively), I always had strong ties to the fantastic.

The next major phase in my life came when I got my first video game system, the illustrious Nintendo 64. Geordi and Data were thrown aside to collect dust as I immersed myself in the lush scenery (at the time) and interactive game world of Diddy Kong Racing and Banjo-Kazooie. Soon, my attention turned to a game called Aidyn Chronicles, which for some reason or another was always missing from the rental store's shelves. I waited and waited until one day, the game was on the shelf. With a broad smile, I took the game home, and fired up my console.



It was like nothing I had ever seen. Great heroes wielded swords and axes, and some evil seemed to threaten the land. I never got very far, though, because I didn't understand the system of combat or the story very much. Determined to find out more, I returned the game and begged my parents to buy a copy.

I tried again and again to start the game, constantly failing in my futile attempts. In an attempt to help me better understand the game, my mother purchased three books from the local Waldenbooks, each about twice as large as anything I had read before. They were about a game called Dungeons & Dragons, something I had never heard before, and they involved using imagination, dice, and numbers to make a fictional world and the characters that lived within. The year was 2000, I was but a 6th grader, and I fell in love with those books.



I devoured those books, reading and re-reading the pages until I had them memorized. I treated them with the utmost reverence, and I waited for the day when I could play the game myself. I now walked the aisles of bookstores, looking for the D&D books, and marvelling at the adventures and the two or three supplements that were on sale for 3rd Edition. I picked up an old Kingdoms of Kalamar adventure called "The Root of All Evil", and, now quite determined, gathered two friends and my sister to play the game.

My very first actual experience with the game was a phenomonal success. The module's finer points were lost on myself and probably my players too, but the essence remained the same: three heroes strode through an old keep, slaying monsters and attempting to stop a dark villian who possesed a horrible artifact. It would become the foundation for my D&D experience, and I was more excited than ever about the game.

Unfortunately, my friends were not. The next adventure I ran, the Speaker in Dreams, was a disaster, and it was difficult to get them interested in it again. (As an aside, I've attempted to run Speaker in Dreams 5 seperate times now, each one being a failure. Go figure.) It wouldn't be for several more years that I would play D&D again, so I kept it in the back of my mind, played video game role-playing games, and kept an eye on new D&D products.

In 8th grade, during Science class, a monumental idea struck me. I envisioned an epic tale of three heroes-- a minotaur, a weapon master, and a mage-- who journeyed the countryside of a small kingdom, searching for the keys to an epic blade. Their villian, a shadowy and mysterious shapeshifter, used all the means at his disposal to stop these people. I described the intracacies of this story to a friend in a hushed and excited voice, and together we began to plan to produce a comic book documenting the tales of these heroes. I would write and my friend would draw these spectacular adventures.

Thus spawned the first creative work that was dubbed "Red Valor: The Saga of the Sword." After one and a half issues (the first being a 3 page teaser and the second being a "full" 8-pager), we decided it would be best to discontinue the comic, primarily due to long wait times (I was lucky to see a page a month) and the realization of high production costs (rather, my parents wouldn't pay the copying fees). Regardless, Red Valor remained in the back of my mind, and I continued to dream out the plots of these heroes.

High school began. I had a bit of trouble adjusting, and I didn't fit in very well. By now, Red Valor was almost a full-time passion for me. The world where the tales were told began to take shape, and places like the "Kingdom of Vestin" and the "Kettan Empire" became staples in the story arcs. The cast of villains expanded while the heroes became more three dimensional, with goals, motives, and histories. I worked on establishing a more solid concept for my world.

It wasn't until Sophomore year that I would play Dungeons & Dragons again, and it would be the first time I wasn't the Dungeon Master. A casual talk with one of my friends with whom I originally had played brought back the memories of the first adventure we had played, and I realized that I had several friends who either knew of the game or would be willing to play. We came together and played, and though I enjoyed the game somewhat, the DM (who knew only me out of the group, besides his obnoxious friend he had brought) constantly targeted my paladin. We sought out a new DM, determined to play, and things were good-- for a time.

That particular DM had several bad habits, and my frustration with how the game was going led me to another brilliant idea: Red Valor, of which I had been neglecting for some time, would be a perfect D&D world. I rounded up a few friends who hadn't "made the cut" before and roused their interest in fantasy and roleplaying games. Soon, they were more than eager to join the D&D game I would be running, and I embarked on my second shot at Dungeon Mastering, this time fleshing out a setting, plot, and cast of NPCs with which the players interacted with. I took the first steps to becoming the DM I am today, and I began furiously devoting my time to developing the newly-dubbed "Red Valor Campaign Setting".

I continued to DM my group even as the other group I played in fell apart, and we are now approaching our second year of gaming together. People have come and gone, and we've played in more small campaign arcs than I can count. I've even handed the DM seat over a few times, and we've had the occasional hiatus. Every time, though, I come back to the game, and every time, I enjoy it and love it even more. After countless schisms and new players, becoming more educated and changing to an updated gaming system, I still play the game and continue to develop my world.

Today, I was going through a box of old toys and games, trying to sort out a mess in the attic. I came across Geordi and Data, and I couldn't help but pause for a moment. I took them out of the box and stared in wonder as my thoughts turned back to childhood.

Now, sitting on a dusty shelf next to a worn-out 3rd Edition Player's Handbook and a relatively unplayed copy of Aidyn Chronicles are, in the most regal stature possible, two gold-clad officers from the U.S.S. Enterprise, testaments to a lifetime of love for fantasy and the spectacular.

Hope you enjoyed my little trip down memory lane.

-Elven Doritos

[Numinous]

You scare me with the similarities.  I never got anywhere with D&D until I figured out that that is where vidoegames came from.  i played with the Transformers toys obsessively through most of my childhood, and I clearly remember Aidyn Chronicles.  I think i'll wait a bit now and put up my version of your story up later, thanks for putting the nostalgia in the air again ElDo.

[Xeviat]

Heh.

I got started a while back as well, and my start wasn't through D&D itself. In fact, in middle school, I was one of those kids who knew nothing about D&D (except from seeing a few advertisements in comic books back during the TSR days) except for what I heard from adults: the game was played by devil worshipers who killed people and drank their blood.

So, I stayed away from the game until college. But I did start writing my own fantasy world shortly after reading "The Legacy" by Salvatore and "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings" by you know who. Looking back, I laugh because "The Legacy" was a D&D book; my copy didn't have the FR logo on it for one reason or another.

So my ideas slowly grew over the years. I then got into CRPGs through Baldur's Gate. When Baldur's Gate 2 came out, it was packaged with the character generator for 3rd Edition Dungeons and Dragons, and after fiddling around with it for a few months I decided to get the books and try out the game.

So I was chosen as DM as my little group of 4 started out. We had one player play 2 characters, who were kind of a leader/cohort pairing. That was 2001, and I've been playing ever since.

[Túrin]

Heh, the Baldur's Gate series is what really got me into fantasy as well. I remember that 3.0 character editor rom BG2. Tolkien and D&D came shortly after, with one or two year intervals each. I also gathered a group of people who had never played before, and was also chosen as the DM. The similarities are everywhere :D

[Hibou]

Beware, this will be long.

When I was young I was fascinated by dinosaurs and by the superhero Batman, and heavily interested in fictional movies like Jurassic Park and the like. I was an avid LEGO fan and frequently played with my various LEGO toys, particularily the wizards and medieval warriors, until I was 10 or 11.

My influences after that were mainly from Dragonball Z (yuck), Harry Potter (when it first came out), and (here's a big shocker) Spyro the Dragon. The Spyro game blew my mind with the way its environments broke the laws of physics, and though it was a very 'kiddie' game, I fell in love with it. Its level Wizard Peak inspired me to create Wizard Island, my first real fantasy world. It consisted of two massive mountains connected by an equally gargantuan bridge, which were called Wizard Peak and Majestic Peak. The island around them was a misty place of moors, plains, and forests. Everyone there was either wizardly or a warrior in heavy armor. The wizards went through power levels much like DBZ Saiyans did, and many other aspects of Harry Potter, Spyro, and DBZ were implemented to create a very naive (and cheesy) first attempt at fantasy.

 I joined the Science Fiction Book Club a little later and received several books for a low price, including a huge hardcover edition of the Lord of the Rings (all 3 volumes in one book), The Hobbit, and The Dark Elf Trilogy. The Hobbit was my first read since my grade 3 teacher had read it to the class and I remembered it, and I ended up reading it through several times before I even touched the other books. Lord of the Rings was a smaller but present influence, as was The Dark Elf Trilogy (but not until later, because for some reason I thought it was about goblins, which I thought were totally uncool at the time). When I read through the Dark Elf Trilogy, I instantly became ensnared by the Forgotten Realms, and as luck would have it a friend gave me his Baldur's Gate 1 CDs around the same time. Soon I had picked up the 3 D&D core rulebooks and had begun to create my own campaign setting that at first was kind of a LotR/Forgotten Realms clone, but quickly became a world of its own.

My main influences now are The Hobbit (still), Stephen King, thriller/suspense films and novels (The Da Vinci Code being a recent one), unanswered questions about life and the mysteries of the universe, random Wiki searches of various things, questions of religion, some members of the WotC and CBG boards' campaign settings, and most importantly my own imagination. I have revitalized my first fantasy world, Wizard Island, into a part of Aath known as Nussur Ethara. My first D&D setting, Nahrul, is also still poking around, but it is barely recognizable as what is now Valerth Haas'en of Aath - The Dream. Most prominent of its original features are the legendary elven fighter/sorcerer Tormanthyr, still-surviving nations such as Mirast, Endrosun, and Nephis, and protagonists such as Lazzul, Lord of Devils.

As a world builder now, I feel as though D&D is leaving me a little bit restricted in my methods. I continue to write my worlds to fit into D&D 3.x or 2e (some places fit different editions), and while this is wonderful and gives me a good base to work off of, it seems as though if I were to let go of D&D and just build a fantasy world, it would reach further into the heavens than any of my previous ones. But for the time, I'll just leave it as is. :)

[fw190a8]

Strangely I don't remember the third edition character generator with Baldur's Gate II but I live in the UK so perhaps it was distributed differently or something. What I do remember is that I got Baldur's Gate II and Deus Ex (the original) around the same time and they were the last games I bought that came in proper boxes before they changed to those horrible DVD cases. I used to love the goodies you'd get with a game inside those huge boxes, like maps, concept art and other freebies and I wish that was still an option. :cry:

Slightly more off-topic, Black Isle Studios, who were behind BGII, sort of evolved into Obsidian, who are behind the upcoming Neverwinter Nights 2 which looks excellent.

Anyway, back on topic and...

The year was 2000, I was but a 6th grader, and I fell in love with those books.

If you've never tried Elite you can get hold of a copy pretty easily now and it's worth it for the sheer achievement it represented at the time and what it did for freeform gaming. David Braben (one half of the original Elite programming team) said his favourite version of the plethora was the one for the BBC Micro and I've even seen an emulation of the entire game run in a java applet on a web page.[/i]

[Túrin]

Strangely I don't remember the third edition character generator with Baldur's Gate II but I live in the UK so perhaps it was distributed differently or something.

That's weird. I live in the Netherlands and I did get it (though I remember I missed it at first and found out I had it maybe two years after I first got the game).

What I do remember is that I got Baldur's Gate II and Deus Ex (the original) around the same time and they were the last games I bought that came in proper boxes before they changed to those horrible DVD cases. I used to love the goodies you'd get with a game inside those huge boxes, like maps, concept art and other freebies and I wish that was still an option. :cry:

Yeah, I agree. Those goodies were great. As a special promotional stunt, I actually got a copy of the Baldur's Gate II novel for free with my copy of the game, not to mention the map, manual, quick reference card and whatnot. Too bad they don't do that anymore. :(

Túrin

[khyron1144]

I am probably not the old man around here, but definitely older than some.  I graduated high school in aught aught.  My first video game system was the old Nintendo Entertainment System.

My cousins and I used to LARP without knowing that's what we were doing when I was around five to eight years old.  The game was called Tunnels of Doom, after a computer game my cousin played on his dad's Texas Instruments computer.

Some of my earliest exposures to roleplaying were in the form of SSI's goldbox Dungeons & Dragons computer games played on my dad's Commodore 64.  That and Dragon Warrior for the NES, received free with a subscription to Nintendo Power, helped me formulate concepts of what an RPG is and does.

And yeah some of my early worldbuilding was in the form of long sagas played out by my action figures.  My figures were generally in their proper character roles, but gneres mixed haphazardly with modern military figures showing up in a fantasy medieval context and such-like.  

The first pencil and paper RPG I played was D&D based on the rules from a boxed set that looked kind of boardgame-like with a paper map and paperboard standup figures.  The only paleyr I had relaible and regular access to was my dad.

[Acrimone]

Lord... I think I might just be the "old man" around here.  I hope not.  But I am beginning to suspect.

The following replicates some information available else-thread, but I include it here for completeness.

The year is 1984.  I am in fourth grade.  I like Lord of the Rings, drawing, Godzilla movies, Star Wars, ninjas, Shogun Warriors, and the Sunday comics.  I am really into He-Man figures and plastic green army men.  I am in a Crown Books in Huntington Beach, California.  I am wandering about, having tired of looking at the comic books (I am, at that time, just starting my collection) and my father, rest his soul, is picking up some reading material.  Then, rounding a corner, I see this:
br]
I don't know what it is, but it has a cool dragon on the front and it's bright red.  I must have it.  My father being the indulgent sort from time to time, I quickly bring it home.  That night, I am brought into a world that includes Aleena the cleric and Bargle the evil magic-user.  The next day, after I get home from school, I tell my friends about what I've discovered, and I show them something that they've never seen before but which my Dad, being a computer operations guy, had plenty of.  GRAPH PAPER.

I convince them to make characters, and we spend the next several weeks gloriously slaying rust monsters and goblins and carrion crawlers.  We dutifully color our dice in with different color crayons, and have the time of our lives.

Somewhere amidst my comic books, over the next few weeks, I see an advertisement.  Four words: "Star Frontiers: Alpha Dawn."  Several weeks later, my friends and I have a giant fold-out map of a large futuristic city spread on the sidewalk outside our apartments, and are moving dozens of little cardboard counters around and roling percentile dice like there is no tomorrow.  It gets better when we get the Knight Hawks expansion and start having space wars.

I can't say that my roleplaying at this stage was anything deep: it was wargaming more than roleplaying.  Yes, I created characters.  But as with most young people starting out in D&D, my characters were based on stats, not on story.

A year later, D&D was forgotten.  There was something else to see.  The greatest computer game the world has ever seen:


So there went a year of my life.  But the things I learned and the places I visited!

I returned to roleplaying games in the summer of 1986, between elementary and junior high school.  New D&D worlds with things like moongates and shrines and reagents began to form in my head.  It looked suspiciously like Britannia... but who's keeping score?  It's summer, and I manage to get a group of friends together to play at least once a week, usually three or four times.    Then I start junior high and the RPG frenzy really begins.  It starts one day in 7th grade when I'm reading the rulebook for Marvel Super Heroes in Language Arts class.  No, this isn't the part where I get in trouble.  This is the part where a bunch of 8th grade boys I've never met suddenly want to start hanging out with me, because they play, too.  So we play Marvel Super Heroes at lunchtime in the back of the ballroom.  (The ballroom is where the balls and hoola hoops and so forth are kept, and two of my new friends were the ball monitors.)

Well, now your noble protagonist was hanging out with 8th graders and playing games.  SO his seventh grade friends wanted to play, too.  But, you see, my seventh grade friends were always much, much more imaginative than my 8th grade friends.  Not content with playing Marvel Super Heroes or D&D, they invented their own games.  Lots of them.  New gaming systems, new genres and worlds.  It never got boring because we never played the same game more than two or three times.  We were always inventing something new.

But while this frenzy of game theory was underway, I was also getting into actual roleplaying with my older friends.  Then the 8th graders were gone, and we were the 8th graders.  And we continued to play.  And I continued to play on the side with my older friends.  Then high school came, and distractions and activities and girls and all the rest.  Gaming time was reduced, but we never really stopped entirely.  We added new players, and some of our adventures started to get a little silly.  I remember to this day when Sir Hubbabubbaslubbadubba and I killed Tiamat.  I was easy... I just fired off every single gem in my Helm of Brilliance all at once.

We also discovered something else in high school: Warhammer 40K.  Weeks and weeks were spent painting miniatures.  Hours were spent setting up battles that never finished.  

And then came RAVENLOFT.  We set up the candles, turned down the lights, and for the first time we started trying to build "mood" into our games.  Mood goes really well with pizza and diet coke.

But then it was over.  I was going off to college.  But I imagined that people would play RPGs in college, too.  Right?  Of course right.

It started with a small D&D group... just me, two guys I had met during pre-frosh weekend, and someone's roommate.  We played on Friday nights.  The names of the players will be kept secret to protect the innocent, but the names of the characters... well, some of them were downright embarassing.  I was the DM, and my party consisted of: Regis the halfling thief (at this point I'd never read Salvatore, so I thought this was quite original), Khyron the Ranger (named after the Robotech character), Humphrey of Dyam (a paladin named Humphrey), Andor the elven mage, and Flynn Lionheart the swashbuckling fighter.  It was all cool for a few weeks.  And then in Philosophy class one day, while we were discussing brains in vats and the possibility of being deceived into living in a virtual world (people did discuss these things before The Matrix) I looked over and saw that someone had written in their notes "Shadowrun -- Deckers?  Virtual world."

Naturally I considered that an invitation to pester the guy to join our gaming group.  And he did.

The college gaming group grew and grew.  At the height, I had 12 players playing in two 6-man groups.  One group was the "Friday night" group -- a more serious, story-driven group.  The other was the "Saturday night" group -- morelightheated, and more character focused.  But they were in the same world, so we had to have a crossover.

I strongly recommend never playing with 12 players.  It can be done.  But it's so much work it's almost not worth it.

Anyway, this didn't last very long because, among other things, my girlfriend started wanted to spend time with me on Friday and Saturday nights.  But the gaming continued, and we started playing Vampire.  Then Werewolf.  Then Mage.  Then the light shone forth from the heavens and a fellow named Blair brought out his Rolemaster books.  And we started MUSHing.  

We all eventually graduated, but the gaming has continued.  I loved vampire for a very long time, and created at least a dozen city/scenarios.  Law School saw more drinking and sex than gaming, but I never stopped.  When I became an attorney I needed my role playing jones, but there was no one around to play with.  So I did something I never thought I'd do.

I made a MUSH.  At one time it was one of the most popular Vampire MUSHes on the net -- Los Angeles: A House Divided.  MUSHes are a dying breed, though, and Los Angeles is no exception.  I don't go there much anymore.  The website is still up -- here -- but I don't know how long that will last.  But while I was there I poured my heart and soul into creating the place.  I get a little misty-eyed thinking about it.  It was the most intense and dynamic role playing/GMing experience I ever had. And SO.  MUCH.  WORK.

Eventually I got some game groups going again... mostly my old friends from junior high and high school.  Smaller groups -- 1 or 2 people at a time.  It's hard getting a big group together, though the idea of a virtual tabletop makes it seem more promising now.

But the fact is, as you get older you have to prioritize.  Putting Role Playing Games up at the top of my priorities has carried a lot of costs -- other things get neglected.  It's a choice that one has to make: visit family, or play D&D?  Fix the house or play D&D?  Go to the professional networking event or play D&D?  Go to the ABA meeting, or play D&D?  Write a letter to a friend, or play D&D?  Watch TV with the wife, or play D&D?  Read a book, or play D&D?

And soon enough it will be "Spend time with the kids or play D&D?"

You can devote less and less time to something and still get enjoyment out of it.  But at some point, if you don't devote enough time to it, you can't call it a hobby anymore.  It's just something you visit from time to time.

That's how I feel about my MUSH, sometimes, and that's how I think I'm going to feel about role-playing and world-building eventually.  The world simply catches up with you, your friends move away.

Sorry.  Didn't mean for this to be so depressing.

[LordVreeg]

Acrimone--Not depressing.  Not at all.
You just found a thread to describe in what we go through in this life, all of us, in certain degrees.

And Fear not.  You are not the Old Man here.  You mentioned 6th grade in 1984.  Unless you are the first Law School Grad to repeat that grade for 7 years, I'm a little longer in the tooth, and I think Snakefing has me beat, and Grandpappy (his term) Snargash, Lord of the Monkey House, Caster of the Wall of Text Spell and Absconder of the Diner WiFi is the most advanced into his dotage, if I read the signs aright.

You've half tempted me to contribute a proper entry to this thread.  Bravo.

And about those priorities, I totally understand.  The gang on the IRC chat here are all used to my sodden, slow-ass typing due to the baby in one arm. :-p  

[Acrimone]

4th grade in 1984... but close enough. I still get to be a spring chicken.

And you know what?  I was just thinking, just this very second, about what the words in that picture say:

This game requires no gameboard because the action takes place in the player's imagination with dungeon adventures that include monsters, treasure, and magic.

I remember now: that's what sold me.  I didn't know what the hell it was that I was buying, but I remember those words.  And those words, more than anything else, describe what I love about gaming.

[LordVreeg]

well, not to hijack this thread in any way (which, obviously, I am now going to do momentarily), but Acrimone is touching on a chronological dynamic that we all face.

(Cue Old Blue Eyes, 'It Was a Very Good Year')

Big-picture, the older you get, the more that crowds our plate.  Ishy just bought a house.  He has a band.  He has this site, and his own gaming.  Snakefing has his two boys, and has to babysit people professionally, in between sharing wine reviews with me online.

Your excursion into Lord British made me smile, as one of my main players and I spent a lot of time working those damn moon-gates out as well.  But I think I am most responding to this little blip...

[blockquote=Acrimone]Eventually I got some game groups going again... mostly my old friends from junior high and high school. Smaller groups -- 1 or 2 people at a time. It's hard getting a big group together, though the idea of a virtual tabletop makes it seem more promising now.

But the fact is, as you get older you have to prioritize. Putting Role Playing Games up at the top of my priorities has carried a lot of costs -- other things get neglected. It's a choice that one has to make: visit family, or play D&D? Fix the house or play D&D? Go to the professional networking event or play D&D? Go to the ABA meeting, or play D&D? Write a letter to a friend, or play D&D? Watch TV with the wife, or play D&D? Read a book, or play D&D?

And soon enough it will be "Spend time with the kids or play D&D?"

You can devote less and less time to something and still get enjoyment out of it. But at some point, if you don't devote enough time to it, you can't call it a hobby anymore. It's just something you visit from time to time.[/blockquote]

A couple notes here.  First off, gaming changes, as you notated, as you get older.  I spend a lot more time prepping for my games ansd working on setting notes than I ever did before.  So when you compare other priorities to 'playing D&D' (a bit game specific, but OK...), One of the problems you will find is that since it is not just you with all these priorites, that actually play time will shrink.  And you have to plan way in advance.  But I spend a lot more time working on the setting itself, as I like to work on itr, and it makes the sessions I do have a lot more rewarding (sometimes).  I'm still running 2 groups live, Igbar (now 7 players) once every three weeks, and Miston (once every month).

And the online thing is something I also really enjoy.  It is a very different pace and dynamic.  But it takes the story-creation component of Gaming to a whole new level.
(SOme of the players and myself are slowly sorting thee and changing some to store form...a mess right now, but... look here.
We try to do this every monday, but a new baby (ask Nomadic about the PVC diapers) is making that about every other week.  But it is very rewarding.

I guess the best advice/observation I want to make on this is to tell you that the expectations about the prep time to gaming time might need a shift, but that find the ratio that you need to have and make it an absolute priority.  This is my main creative output.  I've given up almost all other recreation, but I refuse to lose this.

(Was there a point to that?  Perhaps.)

[Acrimone]

I don't even really play D&D anymore.  I was just using it as shorthand for the hobby.

Thanks for your insights.  I don't intend to stop either.

[Elven Doritos]

Holy crap guys this is some serious thread necromancy

EDIT: And that wide-eyed love of the game and sense of optimism about my continued love of it seems a bit misplaced nowadays. I think I'm turning into a grouch.

[Wensleydale]

I was obsessed with lego as a child, as well as having the occasional flirt with other building systems. I used to make up stories, and built everything from an ancient monument in the jungle to a manor house (secret passage and ghost included). I also wrote a lot of fantasy-type stories and read hundreds of books from the genre, as well as Sci-Fi.

Eventually, a game called Neverwinter Nights caught my eye. The description was interesting, the screenshots were promising, and hell, it came with an expansion pack - all for just ten pounds or so. Hurrah! The best part of all is that it came with a toolset, through which you could make your OWN game similar to that which they'd already given you (which was lucky, cause in the end the main storyline sucked). NWN still had its restrictions of course. It was at this time that the DnD Fiend Folio - which I vaguely associated with both fantasy and NWN - appeared in a local bookshop. I snapped it up because the things inside looked interesting, and then, within a short amount of time, I was wondering what on earth the statistics meant. So I moved on - first the monster manual, then the players' handbook, then the DMG, in quick succession. This led to the wizards' forums, where I started on Kalara, and then to here, where I went through a succession of awful or hardly-begun ideas before I settled on certain not-so-awful (at least to my mind) ideas which I continue to the present day.