Not really the post I was planning, nor the day I expected to write it on

I was going to write about how Shadowrun went on Saturday, but this came out instead. So here it is the history of how I became interested in roleplaying games.

Starting with Dungeons & Dragons, and then branching out to other systems I've been roleplaying since 1990. In no particular order I can thank my mother, Tom Hanks, and Joel Rosenberg for that fact. Actually I can thank a lot more people then that, but that list would be ridiculously long, so I'll stick to those three and add any honorable mention additions as I go along.

To be perfectly fair I should be thanking both of my parents, and not just my mother, because I can trace my love of roleplaying back to my love of reading, and both of my parents deserve some credit for that. I grew up surrounded by books, both my parents are avid readers, and I grew up watching them read, and having them read to me, and I and my younger brothers had an awful lot of children's books at our disposal so it is not surprising that it is a hobby I picked up. I should also add some props to the Miller School District because I remember also being surrounded by books in the 1^st grade, and in the 2^nd grade the teacher read to us everyday from the works of Laura Ingalls Wilder.

I would attempt to get back to the topic of my mother's role in all this, but the next point I'm going to make about her leads to another small tangent, so bear with me. The Hand County Public Library and their summer reading programs also deserve some credit. I bring this up because I need to thank my mother for getting me a library card at a young age, providing frequent transportation to the library (I grew up on a farm roughly 12 miles outside of the town of Miller, SD), and once I had started exhausting the possibilities of the children's section of the library she pointed out the science-fiction/fantasy section (if she had done nothing else I'd still thank her for that). All of this reading eventually lead to the likes of professor J. R. R. Tolkien and his hobbits, Ursula K. Le Guin and Earthsea, Lloyd Alexander and his tales of Taran the Assistant Pig-Keeper, C. S. Lewis and The Chronicles of Narnia, etc.

So how does all this reading translate into me being a roleplayer. Well first reading encourages an active imagination, and codified rules for a game of make-believe is one of the many things a roleplaying game really is (I guess I should add Mr. Rogers and public television to the honorable mention list). I'll get to the second and more direct link in a bit. I'll also be coming back to my mother, but next I need to thank Mr. Tom Hanks, CBS, Rona Jaffe, and James Dallas Egbert III.

In 1982 CBS aired a made-for-TV-movie staring Tom Hanks called Mazes and Monsters. The movie is about a guy who played a Dungeon & Dragons like fantasy roleplaying game that caused him to go insane, and try to kill himself. It was adapted from a novel by Rona Jaffe with the same name and is a fictionalized account of the disappearance of James Dallas Egbert III in 1979 and even as fictionalized accounts go this movie (and book) bears little relation to the actual facts of the case. However none of that is the important part. The only thing I took away from this movie was an awareness that there was such a thing as a roleplaying game. So thank you Mr. Hanks, and everybody else involved.

As the 1980's progressed I noticed Dungeons & Dragons in various places: there was of course the Saturday morning cartoon on CBS, there would be the odd newspaper and magazine articles, and I started seeing the actual D&D game in bookstores (the later meant a trip out of town since Miller is way to small for a bookstore). In the late 1980s probably 1989 I checked out a book at my local library by Joel Rosenberg entitled Guardians of the Flame: The Warriors. It was composed of three previously published novels by Joel Rosenberg: The Sleeping Dragon, The Sword and the Chain, and The Silver Crown. The basic plot is a bunch of college students get together to play a fantasy roleplaying game (much like D&D), but their Game Master transports their consciousnesses (or minds, souls, spirits, what-have-you) into the body of their characters in the game world they were playing in, and then chronicles what happens as they try to find away back home.

The book was all fine, well, and good, but what really caught my attention was at the beginning of The Sleeping Dragon before the characters are transported into the game world they sit around a talk about the mechanics of their roleplaying game. They have a new person joining their campaign and they explain character creation to her. That part planted a seed in my head (see what reading will do to you). I probably didn't even wait to finish the book, before I was off trying to create my own roleplaying game. I created characters like mad, I created a town for them to live in, an evil baron to oppress them, a dungeon for them to go find treasure in, and I drew maps of all these places. Creating the world was relatively easy, coming up with game mechanics, now that was hard. What is the difference between playing an elf and a human? How do you determine how good somebody is with a sword? Those were the types of questions I struggled with (I never did come up with a particularly satisfying answer).

My parents took note of my interest (the fact I could blanket the living room with paper I'd used to create characters and what not may have aided in that). As luck would have it around this time my mother (told you I'd come back to her) went back to college. She was going to Northern State University, in Aberdeen, SD, and being in a larger town then Miller and a college town at that had easy access to bookstores. So for Easter in 1990 she got me three books by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman: Dragons of Autumn Twilight, Dragons of Winter Night, and Dragons of Spring Dawning. The books were very good, but she also included a copy of issue number 154 of Dragon Magazine. This was the jackpot tantalizing glimpses at actual rules for D&D. If there were any danger I'd loose interest in fantasy roleplaying it was gone now. A subscription to Dragon Magazine, and its sister publication Dungeon Magazine soon followed. But most importantly I took note of the bright shiny ads for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2^nd Edition Player's Handbook.

Let me pause for another aside. Also noted in these early copies of Dragon Magazine was an advertisement for a business in Albuquerque, NM called Wargames West. This business was a game distributer and they offered a free catalog. I ordered the catalog and my eyes were opened to the vast world of roleplaying games out there. Almost all of my first steps beyond D&D can be traced to those catalogs. They were often my primary source of information about a new and interesting game, and even when I learned of a new game from another source I could always count on Wargames West to carry it. Unfortunately Wargames West went out of business at the end of December 2001.

Anyway back to D&D and the 2^nd edition Player's Handbook. Naturally this brings me to another little digression. Probably in the 6^th grade I started to grow my hair out long. Now remember this was the late 1980s so I'm not talking about growing all of my hair out, no we are talking just the back. I'm rather embarrassed to admit, but I had a mullet. My parents never really expressed any dissatisfaction to me about this hair style (although I do know dad didn't like me wearing it in a ponytail), but out of the blue towards the end of my 8^th grade year they offered a trade. I get a hair cut, and they buy me the Player's Handbook. I wanted the book, and didn't have any particular attraction to having long hair so I agreed.

Once I had the Player's Handbook I was mostly set. I already had a pretty good handle on world creation. Now I had rules for actual game play, what I lacked was, rules for awarding experience points, statistics for magical items and monsters, and general advice about how to be a game master (or since we are talking D&D a dungeon master). But since I was reaching the age where I had access to my own money, and a car (in South Dakota you can start driving at age 14), the other D&D rulebooks I acquired mainly on my own.

As I alluded to above my first forays beyond D&D were games mainly from genres other than fantasy. The Star Wars RPG by West End Games remains a favorite of mine. The Marvel Super Hero RPG is another I got into pretty early on in my roleplaying career. It wasn't until about 1997 that I started growing a bit tired of some of the limitations of D&D and started looking elsewhere for a possible fantasy roleplaying replacement. Among the many other games I picked up during my search include GURPS and the Hero System (although this was 4^th edition Hero so it was still basically known as Champions). I guess it is worth pointing out neither GURPS nor Hero are strictly speaking fantasy roleplaying games both are universal systems meaning they are designed to be used for any genre, however since I could easily devote an entire other post to GURPS and the Hero System lets just stop while we are ahead. D&D 3e, the whole d20 system, and later D&D 3.5 did a pretty good job of addressing many of things I found wanting in D&D, but by this point the genie was out of the bottle. There was a whole world of RPGs out there and wasn't going to limit myself to just one.

Okay so there you go.

In brief:

Shadowrun on Saturday went extremely well. I had a blast, and I think everybody else did too. The gaming session was pretty typical for me and my current group. We ate first, we were easily distracted by each others company, and we started late, but that's okay. The game renewed my desire to get back to Shadowrun in the future, but for the present I really want to continue my BESM campaign.

I got even less sleep on Saturday night (well really Sunday morning) then I did the previous night, so I was super tired at work, fortunately Sundays are usually very slow (and this one mercifully was). This reminds me I really should do one post where I explain more or less what I do, but that isn't going to be this post.

City of Heroes continues to be fun, and a major time sink. Instead of going to sleep when I got home from work on Sunday, (or writing my how Shadowrun went post) I played City of Heroes for about five or six hours (or basically until I was ready to fall asleep at my computer). At least I went to bed at around 10pm Sunday night so I was nice an refreshed for work on Monday. After work yesterday I played for a good eight hours. I put in another five hours Tuesday afternoon. I am beginning to suspect I may have a problem with moderation in my life.

Still nothing new to report on the anime front. I'm going to make time away from City of Heroes to watch Tenjho Tenge either today or tomorrow. I also had the Saiyuki movie arrive in the mail, so I'll see about getting to that as well.