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Hello! I thought it would be helpful if you know something of my background in role-playing, so I have prepared this summary of my gaming history:
My Gaming Resume
I started with the Holmes edition basic set (the "blue book" edition), which my parents bought for me for Christmas. This set was one of the ones with Module B1 in it, and it obviously influenced my thinking in my early days (and still does, thus the name of this blog). I was partial to clerics in those days, which is strange given my lack of spiritual beliefs. My first AD&D games were in high school with my friend Tim. Other than the very first "brown books", I have played every edition of D&D that has been published.
I played most of the other TSR games in the early 80's and was an early member of the RPGA. I was particularly fond of Top Secret, and ran a decent campaign of it in high school.
When I first went to college, the Residential Assistant did this thing where we write down our interests, and matched people up with similar ones. Even though I was hesitant (these were the days of the Satanic Panic, remember), I still wrote down my interest in role-playing games. It is in this way that I met my lifelong friend Richard. By the end of that week, we were playing AD&D, and I have continued to play in his games ever since. His imagination knows no bounds, and he is an absolute master of D&D. In fact, later on he would go on to win First Place in the TSR Triviathalon contest.
I played many other games in college, too, including Traveller and Fantasy Hero. I never got into Vampire, but was more fond of Werewolf (being a bad-ass beast-man defender of nature was more appealing than being a tormented blood-sucker with a fatal sunlight allergy).
One year in college, I was living in a house with several fellow students and gamers (including Richard). We designed a set of rules, and played an epic, multi-dimensional game with them, which we called The Blip Game. The basic idea was that we were dimensionally unstable troubleshooters, who could be from and go to any possible world. Because we were dimensionally unstable, we had a tendency to "blip" out of where we were with little or no warning. This was deliberate, and solved the problem of players not always being able to make it to game sessions. Also, it enables the GMs to use any adventure for any game. It was also desgined to support multiple GMs.
The game system was detailed and complex, with things like percentile skills, hit locations (and different armor for such), action points you allocate each combat round to do different actions,and different levels of success depending on how well you rolled on skills (a very uncommon mechanic in those days). Nowadays, I look at it with something of a sense of horror, but it was great at the time.
We played this game extensively during that year, and went on to play it for decades afterward (more and more intermittently as time went on). The characters (Basmic Bonecrusher of the Blue Bear clan, Dr. Terrance Sheldon, Edoard Mulrune, Jennifer Alice Liddel, and James Anthony Anderson, among many others) are still remembered with fondness to this day.
My friend Ernie introduced me to Tyrone, who was an absolute master of the Mekton amime role-playing game. Even though I am not a big fan of anime, I nonetheless played in several of Tyrone's campaigns. Mekton still has one of the better vehicle design systems I have ever seen, and I highly recommend it if you are into giant-robot anime like Gundam or Robotech.
Nowadays, I am more partial to simpler systems. I am quite fond of FUDGE as a system, and ran a couple of Dresden Files campaigns with it. I have poked at other modern games like the Gumshoe game Ashen Stars.
Of course, at the moment it is difficult to get together in person to play, and I am also very busy with "real life" (ugh!). Until that changes, this blog will have to suffice.
I hope you have enjoyed this trip down memory lane, and hope you understand a little better my background.
