I have recently been reminiscing about the good old days. You know: “things were so much better when… ”
So I thought I would take stock of where I have been.
It all started when I walked into a shop called ‘Games People Play’. It was a mall game store. The clerk at the time was painting a lead griffon. I spotted the latest RPG on the shelf and asked my dad, please?
It wasn’t until Christmas later that year that I got the Player’s guide and DMG: AD&D 2nd ed. (the 10th printing from 1993). The monster manual came later. At the time I loved pouring over the books and making dungeon encounter tables, complete with maps and flavour text. I killed many of my friend’s characters with relish. We all had a great time.
I loved looking at the inner front cover at all the campaign worlds available at the time. I had no cash for these things, but I loved the idea of Al-Qadim, Dark Sun, and Greyhawk. My parents bought the group pizza while we explored our own versions of these worlds. I’m sure they were happy to have us explore these imaginary worlds rather than some parts of this real world…
Some time in high school my gaming lapsed until I later met some friends in university that started my obsession up again. D&D 3.0 was the thing. We would play until 5:30am and I would walk home with the shining rays of the sun rising in the east. These friends had been at this much longer than I. They had a book shelf full of 1st ed books, Rollmaster, Westend games stuff, GURPS, Rifts, etc.
The GM in the group had a home brew campaign going. It lasted 5 years. Epic stuff. 1st level into the mid 20s. We eventually soured on 3.5 after years of play. We had some issues with how the system was organized, but mainly I think there was some nostalgia for that time when RPGs were new and anything you tried was awesome. So we converted the campaign to Rollmaster. The system this group had cut their teeth on. It was great for a while. We eventually tired of fantasy Rollmaster then moved on to Cyberspace.
Here we had the single greatest session I can remember. Sometimes you just get to that magic place. Everything was right. It ended in a TPK, but it was great. We still talk about that session.
The next campaign was set using the Saga edition Star wars rules. It got the group back into D20 and actually had us thinking good things about our 3.5 days.
So here I am, with all these games in our history, turning to Pathfinder for our groups next phase in our collective story. I have started a new campaign. Seriously running for the first time since grade school, I still feel compelled to create dungeon encounter tables and the like.
Who knows where things will lead from here.
warming to read this, thanks for sharing :)