Let’s set the dial back now, 30 years or more, back to the very early 1980’s.
I’m sitting in my room at age 10, reading Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, 2HD on the radio, probably chewing on a piece of lemon Bubble Yum (I kept a stash in a drawer). If I glanced up, the second of these shots would have likely been my view. I was a maniac for fantasy back then (as if I no longer am!), and it’s a fact that my love of games – both video and real – was simply a facet of my love of fantasy as a whole. Even bad games were playable if they had dragons and magic and castles in them.
And there was one game in particular that called to me: Dungeons and Dragons.
At that age I didn’t know anyone who owned the manuals or even played the game. In fact, I knew very little about the game at all! I would occasionally wander away from the Vectrex in the Store branch in Hilltop Plaza toward the game section and look at the D&D boxes or even peruse the AD&D manuals. Here was what I loved – swords and magic and monsters – but it all seemed so complicated and… for older people. So I stuck with my gamebooks and my Krull picturebooks and dreamt of what awaited when I got just a little bit older.
There are only a few items I can distinctly recall as being things that I bought (as opposed to my parents bought for me). Some of these, I have blogged about before. One of them is shown above. I was in 7th grade, which means it would have been 1984. I have no recollection how much I paid for the above tome, but it would have been a princely sum for me at that time and required weeks or possibly months of saving. The store was a dingy game shop that had occupied the location that was once Charlestown library. I can still recall the shopkeeper, scary and tattooed, sitting behind a dirty desk adjacent to a dirty window and seemingly scowling at me as I walked alone in the (always!) empty shop. There were many AD&D manuals available at that store, and why I settled on the Fiend Folio as my first purchase I have no idea. But I did, and after I bought it I treasured it. It had instantly become the pride of my fantasy collection. As you saw in the post linked above, I even copied the artwork 🙂
From reading this book I started to understand what AD&D was all about, and especially realized it was something I wanted to play. The floodgates had been opened by this purchase, and shortly thereafter I obtained the D&D red box and the three pillars of ‘proper’ AD&D: the DM Guide, the Players Manual and the Monster Manual. I doubt I cared that D&D and AD&D were actually different games, especially since at the time I wasn’t actually playing either. But I had fun reading and imagining, and eventually designing my own dungeons. I dreamt of the day I could actually play with a group!
This is an appropriate time for you to watch this video:
That shows Ben ‘I created The Young Ones’ Elton playing AD&D with the creators of Fighting Fantasy (and Games Workshop), Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone. The game is suitable cringe-inducing and yet at the same time it rocked my world for a very unusual reason: theses grown men who at the time represented the highest level of RPG afficionado looked just as nerdy and uncomfortable playing AD&D as I did with my teenage buddies!
What do I mean? Well, sometime during 8th grade – when I was about 13 – I started playing AD&D on-and-off with a group of players that included MMN, MT, MS and a few others I don’t remember. Strangely, I was never the DM, and I don’t remember this bothering me. I’d almost always play a chaotic-good fighter/magic-user, and you can bet I wish I remembered their name!
At any rate the games were big on dice rolling and low on role-playing. Dungeons were predictable, absolutely infested with monsters, and our parties would always be at the ready with Holy Avenger in one hand and 10-foot poles in the other. Death was rarely permanent (due to illogical godly interventions), loot was handed out at a rate that would have made Monty Hall himself blush, and I never met a sentient weapon (and I met many) that I couldn’t easily control. In short, the only rule was ‘rules be damned’ and our teenage selves had a great time damning them
But – and here’s the thing – I reckon it would have been awesomely uncomfortable to watch, and I think we all may have known this. There was a sort of unspoken code not to discuss our D&D activities in public (especially at school), and for me at least it was one of those things I was careful never to seem too enthusiastic about.
I remember playing a lot for a year or so, until we naturally stopped. I guess we got bored (although I doubt I did!), but it’s probably more likely that video games got better and we noticed girls. If we couldn’t discuss playing D&D with our mates, god help any of us that would ever mention it in front of a girl. I expect this was a common problem worldwide in those days.
For my compatriots, I daresay this may have been the end of their AD&D careers. I remained friends with them for years, but I don’t recall ever discussing D&D as we got older. Even the memories had been usurped by video games it seemed. Though the Gold Box games had scratched my itch, I still owned and read my old game manuals 🙂
It was several years later, in 1988 to be precise, that I would for the last time play an honest-to-goodness actual game of AD&D. Year 11 was when I first met AW, and we quickly realized we had many hobbies in common. Between the talk of computer games, gamebooks, fanzines (we almost put out a fanzine in 1988…) and Doctor Who we somehow arranged a Dungeons and Dragons session, to be held at Adam’s place in Nelson Bay.
Sadly I don’t recall the players that day, but I can remember being awed by Adam’s collection of comics, books and general otaku ephemera. I don’t remember the class I played, or much about the adventure at all, except for a unicorn and an Iron Golem that – surprise surprise – had a weakness on its ankle a la Talos. I wonder if Adam was irked by my too-quick discovery of said weakness?
I’ll leave him to share a similar anecdote he has about the downside of trying to DM a player that is a walking gaming encyclopedia 😉
So I haven’t actually played D&D in 25 years, back when the game was ‘only’ 2nd edition (some may say when it was best). But I never, ever stopped being a fan. In the intervening years I’ve played virtually every AD&D video game ever made, on every system. I’ve read oodles of books, magazines and comics. I’ve seen the movies, bought trading cards, game cards and even toys, and once even dabbled in dungeon design myself (Dead Swamp Destiny, a module for SSI’s Gold Box campaign creator software). In fact, I write this sitting in a room in which there stands a bookshelf containing twenty-nine different hardcover AD&D game manuals, from 1st through to 4th edition, including Fiend Folio, and I don’t doubt that when (if?) D&D Next is released I’ll add those books to my collection as well!
And when I read through them, I suspect it will be with the same enthusiasm I had when I first read through Fiend Folio almost 30 years ago 🙂
