I've been thinking some about my introduction to gaming in its early days,* and what were the formative influences that went into my young brain and told it, "This is D&D."
At the top of that list have to be two of the first modules** that I owned and poured over for many hours before I found friends who played:
- A1 Slave Pits of the Undercity by David Cook
- B4 The Lost City by Tom Moldvay
I can only wonder to what extent these determined my later assimilation, sharing, and creation of "D&D". I know that I loved the motif of the ancient city lost to the desert, and connected its former inhabitants with the Moorlocks of the Rod Taylor Time Machine movie. I also loved the Aspis as monsters - big insect men were monsters I could clearly imagine and understand next to the vague "beast man" orcs. Rereading the modules, I'm guessing that my much fuller and clearer memory of The Lost City indicates that of the two, it was the most influential. Certainly its cover illustration entranced me.
What formative memories do you have of those early days?
** No, Keep on the Borderlands didn't make much of an impression on me -- although I liked the picture of the owlbear.
They'd look funny in their fake grey beards, wouldn't they?
Basic D&D with the male human fighter and female human wizardress fighting a red dragon. Is that a fireball in her hand or is she just happy to see me?
How did that shape D&D in my mind? Classes and races that are better than humans. Why do Elves get to cast spells and wear armor?
I guess it is no surprise I jumped ship to a skill based system, James Bond, early on. From there, it was pretty obvious I was looking for a universal system (which did not exist yet) as I was using James Bond for Supers.
D&D is a genre unto itself in my mind. It is Fantasy, but not generic Fantasy. It is Classes, Vancian Magic, Monty Haulism and Keep on the Borderlands dungeon crawling at its best.
Is that a fireball in her hand or is she just happy to see me?
Whenever I looked at that illustration, I always felt like the answer to this question was, yes.
Why do Elves get to cast spells and wear armor?
Yeah, it took me a little while to adjust to AD&D too, where classes and races were separate.
D&D is a genre unto itself in my mind. It is Fantasy, but not generic Fantasy. It is Classes, Vancian Magic, Monty Haulism and Keep on the Borderlands dungeon crawling at its best.
This is a really fascinating observation to me (in spite of our differing tastes). Along with the extent to which D&D "became" generic fantasy through its influence. Seems like someone should write a cracking good read about that...but I guess the audience would be pretty small.
My first real hint of playing D&D was in first grade (1979) when my friends and I played the board game "Dungeon!".
Well, if we're going to step outside of the TSR products, Dark Tower was a game that came out right before I found my D&D group, and I played it like crazy...until I found my group. Then I would still play it with my family when I couldn't game with my group.
I don't remember Dungeon...
Adventure on Atari if we are really stepping away from D&D. I use to time myself on how long it would take to solve levels 1 & 2.
Curse you, bat!
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I miss my original orange folder, although I have another copy from a friend of mine. Zanzer's Dungeon was my main introduction to D&D. Looking back I can finally realize how important it was to introduce concepts like surprise, rough terrain, and illumination in a room-by-room walkthrough. Modifiers seemed so simple within those pull-out tabs that running or playing in other adventures became much more fluid.
Well, if we're going to step outside of the TSR products, Dark Tower was a game that came out right before I found my D&D group, and I played it like crazy...until I found my group. Then I would still play it with my family when I couldn't game with my group.
I don't remember Dungeon...
We still have ours! Nah nah nah nah nah!
Dungeon! or Dark Tower?
Drags a few more rocking chairs and knit afghans into the room. Turns up the space heater.
Dungeon! or Dark Tower?
Drags a few more rocking chairs and knit afghans into the room. Turns up the space heater.
Sorry, Dark Tower. We play it a couple times a year. Classic!
Dungeon! or Dark Tower?
Drags a few more rocking chairs and knit afghans into the room. Turns up the space heater.
Um, both? :)
My intro to D&D came about with a regular group of guy friends that I'd game with. We would play Risk, Diplomacy and Blitzkrieg (they always got annoyed with me when I would do something other than historical moves -- I always said "but that move was DUMB!" and kick their butts with my move <eg>) as well as other Avalon Hill Games.
Then one day one of them had this little white box with funny pink colored books and said something about it being like Lord of the Rings - we started at just after lunch, and my dad had to come fetch me for dinner we were having sooo much fun!
Of course, we didn't have any dice, other than those stolen from Monopoly and Yahtzee, so we used playing cards bundled in the right amounts, and drew for our rolls :)
Oy, this was all back in the summer of '78, and I received my first hardbacks for the Advanced version of the game after Christmas by spending some of my own money on 'em ... got my first dice, too :)
Drags a few more rocking chairs and knit afghans into the room.
I believe I hear some kids on your lawn.
Those are just the cats. Opens the door so CF can have fun chasing them. Now, don't hurt 'em.
Yeah, I would have gladly gone down the war game path, but the big kids didn't invite me. : ( I bought a game that had a black and tan box and was about panzers in N. Africa or something, but I was only eight.
Yap! Yap! Yappity yap!
I have a box of my old games in the garage. Gotta dig it out.
It should have my AD&D books and modules, Car Wars, Rolemaster, and some Avalon Hills games. Maybe it's two boxes...
I have a box of my old games in the garage. Gotta dig it out.
It should have my AD&D books and modules, Car Wars, Rolemaster, and some Avalon Hills games. Maybe it's two boxes...
Well, having married a gamer, and been married for a couple decades, our gaming library would fill more boxes than I could put into my Grand Caravan :)
One of these days I'm going to do an actual count of the books ... I'm sure it's a scary number
I started at age 6, back before adventure modules hit shelves. The adventures that my DMs created back when I played a fighter-man were simplistic in comparison to the color, challenges and story logic of the soon to arrive adventure modules. When the modules first appeared, anything Moldvay certainly enchanted me. I couldn't get enough published adventures. I played or ran each one that came out in Dragon magazine as well.
Did you know Matt Conklin (Great Great God) and Paizo brought Zargon from The Lost City back in a Dungeon adventure a few years ago?
Steve Greer brought back Acererak from Tomb of Horrors (I think that may have been the first PDF-only Dungeon issue).
Those 1st editions modules all speak to a forever young, admiring and deeply contented place within me.
<Nostalgic sigh>
It was all so formative in my understanding of shaping adventures, daydreams and the nature story itself that I can't seem to isolate individual examples. I'll think on it more.
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I guess I'm what you'd call a second-run grognard. I started playing right after the big 3e release, back when I was in the eighth grade or so. It was mostly homebrew 3e adventures at first, but I got into Dragon Magazine around the time that it converted to 3.5, and started reading Dungeon near the end of the Age of Worms game.
In other words, I'm the new guy, but now that 4e's been released, I'm gonna get old a lot faster.
Now get off my f*+$ing lawn! Or at the very least, get out of my dorm room!
Shiny, you've already gotten old as far as I'm concerned.
Jade, in which issue of Dungeon is the Zargon reprisal?
Shiny, you've already gotten old as far as I'm concerned.** spoiler omitted **
Jade, in which issue of Dungeon is the Zargon reprisal?
I think it was #142's Masque of Dreams.
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I started around 13-14 due to a science mag of my father's having a regular feature on wargaming.
Was pretty enticing. Then they had a special issue with a one shot RPG featuring spionic space spies vs aliens. Of course, at the time I did not have a group to play.
Then I met other guys at school playing something kinda the same ....
Jaw drops, drool pools.
In the summer of 1977 I was visiting relatives on the east coast. On a visit to a hobby store they had a display that absolutely mesmerized me: a colorful purple box with this awesome looking red dragon rising up from a horde of gold coins to confront a wand wielding wizard and an armored archer. There were a pile of strangely colored multisided dice; and perhaps even a few shiny metal miniature figurines. I got to flip the book briefly. I had no idea what the game entailed, but it had dwarves and dungeons and orcs and goblins. I was hooked. I had to have this game. I couldn’t afford to buy the game at the time. But that didn’t stop me.
Growing up in Montana, my little sister and I used to invent our own versions, modifications, or expansions to various board games like Monopoly and Clue. I had also attempted to play some Avalon Hill war games. I figured a dungeon game should probably follow the same sort of theme. I spent hours drawing out a castle and dungeon on one inch squares, gluing it to cardboard, and attempting to turn that into some sort of 3-D thing. It was entertaining and frustrating at the same time. I didn’t really know what sort of a game I was trying to recreate – but it was far cooler than anything else I had ever seen. But my efforts left something to be desired.
My dad tracked down a box of the dragon and dungeon game at another hobby store in town. It was $10 – that amount of money never stayed in my pocket. I wasn’t terribly good at saving money. I finally begged my little sister to loan me the money (I was always doing this) and walked through the sweltering July heat to the store to buy the Dungeons and Dragons Basic Set.
I brought it home and was astounded. There was the cool blue toned booklet with awesome illustrations of creatures I had never imagined; a collection of dungeon geomorphs – also in blue; monster & treasure charts; and an assortment of multisided dice. I tried to read through the booklet a couple of times, but it seemed like it was beyond me. The word level was used everywhere. The big white die was only marked one through ten, but I needed some way to differentiate between less than 10 and greater than 10 – and it didn’t hold paint for crap. What was the difference between hit points and hit dice? And there were references to characters of higher than 3rd level but no real rules for such. It was confusing and disappointing. I knew I had something cool in my hand but I couldn’t figure out how to make it work. I also couldn’t find anyone else who was really interested in learning to play it so I shelved it for most of the summer.
At the end of the summer just before the flight back home I broke it out again. I knew that even if I couldn’t figure it all out myself, I had some really imaginative friends back home who could help me puzzle through it. I needed a dungeon though and set to work. Graph paper and a pencil were portable: the perfect thing for the long cross country flight. I spent many happy hours drawing out the dungeon, putting in secret doors and caves and bridges and streams and then populating it with dire denizens. A gelatinous cube went into a long corridor on the first level. Bugbears went in one room; orcs in another. Gnolls and gnomes in a large square chamber – they had similar names so I reasoned they might live together. A red dragon a bit further down. Hobgoblins in another room. A large pool containing nixies. This dungeon was really shaping up – heck this was fun and easy. I couldn’t wait for my friends and their characters to brave the twisting passages and winding halls in search of adventure and monsters to slay.
More later...
CJ
I was unable to figure out how to play with the book either, so I started out with two of my friends free forming at recess and lunch.
That explains a lot of my rejection of sacred cows.
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You know, no matter how many times this Thread gets reinvented I love it. I think this is my fourth.
I still remember playing through my eldest brother's version of Dark Tower, which terrified me the way only a Freddy or Jason movie could terrify, terrify, a six year old gamer. That's what that Judges Guild adventure was for me -- my favorite Terror Movie (scary just ain't sufficient).
Also, "Ghost Tower of Inverness"! My favorite from the old days. I remember my first ever PC vs DM argument -- at age 5 or 6 -- screaming that THE TREASURE ISN'T ALLOWED TO KILL THE PCs!!!!!
-W. E. Ray
Also, "Ghost Tower of Inverness"! My favorite from the old days. I remember my first ever PC vs DM argument -- at age 5 or 6 -- screaming that THE TREASURE ISN'T ALLOWED TO KILL THE PCs!!!!!
-W. E. Ray
<G> Fantastic. :) That module's cover is etched into my mind forever.
I got into a player/DM argument at age six with a 20 year old DM. That's not my style, but you're not allowed to kill my first character on my first day because you didn't get the rules right. ;)
I do not think I have ever gotten into an argument with a GM. Not a heated one, at any event. I presented my case and my appeal was denied. Move on.
I have been that GM that everyone was arguing with over a particular rule interpretation. After further review, everyone else was right.
I do not think I have ever gotten into an argument with a GM. Not a heated one, at any event. I presented my case and my appeal was denied. Move on.
I have been that GM that everyone was arguing with over a particular rule interpretation. After further review, everyone else was right.
I was 6. ;)
Oh, and the DM admitted he was wrong. This is back when there were like 20 pages of rules, man. Getting a rule wrong back then was like setting down Scrabble tiles upside-down.
10 years old, I'd just read The Hobbit for the first time, began reading The Dark is Rising and the rest of the series. I walked into Walden's bookstore one day and there was a cardboard display case with a bunch of big blue boxes. On the cover was a warrior and a wizard facing off against a dragon sitting on a huge pile of gold. I was hooked. I went back and stared at that display for three weeks before I could convince my dad to give me the money to buy it. It was another two years before I was able to find someone to play it with. By then I'd grabbed the AD&D books (PH, DMG, MM) and several modules, including Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, Keep on the Borderlands, The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan, and (my personal favorite) White Plume Mountain.
My first official game had no dice, just a bunch of laminated number chits drawn from an old Yahtzee cup. I ran a centaur NPC to round out the party, since I only had two players. Ah, good times...
Takes a seat in a rocking chair and begins rocking, mumbling something about Keraptis.
Heh-heh...yeah, thelesuit and Jade's stories really resonate. Molech, are you talking about the Milton Bradley Dark Tower, or a Judges Guild module with which I am unfamiliar? (Never went outside the world of TSR/Wizards until after I had gotten back into 3/3.5.)
Shadowborn, White Plume Mountain was the first module that I did when I found a(n experienced) group, so it has a special place in my heart. Because of our youth and free-uniformity, they thought nothing of adding a 1st level half-elf cleric to the group! :) (I think the module especially connected with the mythology I had been reading.) It forever imprinted on me the vital combination of both wits and combat, and the holy grail of THE magic weapon.
