30 Days of D&D ~ 2015 Edition "How You Got Started..."

It was the early 80s, I was obsessed with the Lord of the Rings, Conan, the Dragon's Lair video game. Dungeons & Dragons was played by my friends' older brothers who listened to Iron Maiden and drove Chevettes. It seemed like a good path to take. The books were huge and filled with awesome art, monsters, and the occasional tit...

I played D&D and AD&D with my friends until my adolescent self-consciousness made me quit cold turkey. However, I still indulged myself in Michael Moorcock, HP Lovecraft, Fritz Leiber, those Thieves World anthologies, and the occasional terrible D&D tie-in book. As I left my teenage years behind, the scope of my reading expanded into William S. Burroughs, Robert Anton Wilson, and the like.

My friends got me hooked on those Magic The Gathering cards and a lot of my classmates in college were way into the White Wolf books. I actually got really into M:tG and actually did a lot of play testing for Fallen Empires and the Ice Age expansion, as well as that V:tM card game - Jihad, which, I'm convinced, no one really knew how to play. I even won a Jihad tournament at a local comic book store, however, I was doing lots of drugs back then. That's probably why I soon started playing Palladium Fantasy Role Playing and Changeling: The Dreaming with friends on and off the Internet.

I started preferring to buy cigarettes over booster packs of Magic cards, so I quit my brief addiction to the cardboard. A few years later, the much-maligned third edition of D&D came out. It was shiny and glossy and hey, it was fun to play. That CD Rom did all the work for you. Better still, since it was new, there was always a game happening somewhere. I drove all over the Bay Area, playing D&D with strangers in the back rooms of comic stores, in McMansion living rooms, in hotel ballrooms for the new Living Greyhawk series. I was hooked again. I was in my mid-twenties, in a band, working a useless job, and pretending to be an elf just made sense at the time.

As D&D III hobbled out of sight, and 3.5 (which suddenly made me think of RPGs as operating systems rather than an extremely involved parlor game) rolled in, I was no longer in a band, struggling to pay my bills, and pretending to be an elf no longer fit in...

...until my first mid-life crisis, when I suddenly drew in everything that I had loved when I was twelve - heavy metal, punk rock, comic books, Elric novels, Lovecraft, and D&D via the great Labyrinth Lord and OSRIC. I even started a blog about it. Holy shit.

Of course, this 30 day challenge thing is complete bollocks and I'll probably just post a few entries about the prompts that I actually find interest in writing about.