THE ROOTS OF MY OBSESSION

As I mentioned in my introductory post, I entered the hobby in 1994 with The Classic Dungeons and Dragons Game (which I shall write more about shortly), but the roots of my obsession were planted a bit earlier.

I would say the first thing that really got me into fantasy gaming would be Milton Bradley/Game Workshop’s HERO QUEST board game. While not truly a role-playing game, it was a game of unmitigated adventure that I played and played and played…usually by myself.

Also around this time, a cousin of mine who played Ad&d during the 80s was about to get married and was cleaning out a lot of his books and other paraphernalia. Since I showed interest in the hobby, he gave me a few boxes. Most of the material consisted of books from his stint in the Science-Fiction Book Club and other books he’d picked up along the way, but there were a few items that really sparked my interest. One was a book with the code DL16 at the top, a logo that said "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons," a really awesome logo that said “Dragonlance," and a really bad ass looking wizard shooting lightning out of his fingers. The other books were a handful of something called ENDLESS QUEST and they also featured the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons logo. Now of course, we all know that the first book was the sixteenth module in the original Dragonlance line published in 1988 and called “World of Krynn” and the other books were TSR’s version of the popular Choose Your Own Adventure books…but at that time, they were simply magical tomes that transported my mind into a world of fantasy.

Now don’t get me wrong, this wasn’t the first time I had heard of Dungeons & Dragons. I had heard of it off and on, knew that several of my cousins played and knew some of the “older” guys at school played, hell, I’d even seen a movie about a couple of kids who killed their parents just to get inheritance money to buy more DnD products (that’s true dedication!), but I didn’t really “know” all that much about it. So, doing what any kid would do at that age, I bugged the hell out of my mom until she went to the store and bought me “the DnD game.” Of course, “the game” ended up being the tan boxed set called THE CLASSIC DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS GAME (which the guy at the bookstore told my mom would be an excellent introduction to the hobby)…and, as they say, the rest is history.

Since then I have been a dedicated (more like obsessive) devotee to the game that is known as Dungeons & Dragons.