Gary Gygax, the co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons died this week at the age of 69. I’ve read a few obits and tributes, and I thought I would reminisce a bit about my D&D experiences. Probably won’t be very interesting to anyone, but whatever… you’ve been warned.
Probably around 6th grade, my friend C’s mom got the D&D Basic game, and we all played at their house one afternoon. I believe the module was “Keep on the Borderlands”. It was pretty awesome. The whole experience was new. The cool dice, the character sheets, the little figurines. And of course C’s mom was a great DM (Dungeon Master). I think I had a magic-user back then. I remember I only had 4 HP, which was just crazy! Magic-users were such wimps! But magic missile and sleep were such great spells. There was something else, something like a floating torch. A spell like that can only be fun when playing a real table-top game. I can’t imagine how it would be fun on a computer screen. One thing I remember about that adventure was that our group was exploring some caves, and there was an ogre living in one part of it and he had a big hunk of cheese. I found that peculiar.
Later on, my friends and I really got into D&D. We had most of the books, and started playing on weekends. Our regular group included P, D, my bro, BL and I think TB. We’d go over to one of our houses on Friday nights and sit around the table drinking sodas and eating popcorn, and have a blast playing! P was the DM for most all of the sessions, and he was great. I really liked the games at BL’s house, because we would ride bikes across the neighborhood which was fun, and the popcorn at BL’s house was so tasty. It was the first time I had popcorn that was NOT Jiffy-pop, and it tasted so much better!
Besides playing the game, I was into the books. Not novels or anything, but the actual rule books. I’d pore over the Players Handbook and study all the races, classes, spells, alignments, etc. The Monster Manual was excellent as well. So many neat creatures in there. Most of them were really cool, like ochre jelly, gelatinous cube, rust monster, mind flayer, etc. But there were some lame ones too. Like dinosaurs. There should not be dinos in D&D. The Demon section was particularly interesting because of the boss monsters Orcus and Demogorgon. Those looked so bad-ass, and they had massive amounts of HP. And I have to mention that the drawing of the succubus was so hot, especially for adolescent boys like us. Speaking of that, when Deities & Demigods came out, it was like a Playboy magazine! Wowza.
One aspect which was fun was collecting the little lead figures. I had so many of them, and they were really fun to play with and paint. We didn’t really use them so much in-game, but they were still fun to collect. I remember going to the Paul Freiler’s Hobby Shop in Old Towne Mall (Torrance) and looking at all the D&D loot, and then later to the new Paul Freiler’s location farther down on Hawthorne Blvd. to read some Dragon magazine. The adventure modules were also a lot of fun, not only to play thru, but read on your own. My favorite module to play through was White Plume Mountain. That was so cool because it had a frictionless floor at one point, then the “Inverted ziggurat” and a vampire at the end. There were also some manticores and phat lewt as well! I believe it was a trident of some sort. Anyways, that was a great module to play through. The next module in the series was kind of futuristic: “Expedition to the Barrier Peaks”, in which you find a spaceship in the mountains and explore. My bro and I had a couple modules that we would just read thru: he had something about Hill Giants, and I had the other one, “Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl” or something like that. They had fun maps and traps etc etc.
Speaking of maps, one of the coolest things about playing the game was mapping out the dungeon on graph paper. It was neat to go back and look at the map and recount the adventure. I also used to make my own dungeons using graph paper. I was crazy about putting pits everywhere, for some reason. I also enjoyed taking it a bit further, and drawing out world maps. I used to have this huge world imagined, with capital cities, rivers, mountains, deserts. All that kind of thing!
Eventually, we lost interest in D&D. High School and other activities (girls!) were at the top of the list, and we stopped playing. But my interest in the Fantasy genre never died, and I continued to read Fantasy books, like the Thieves’ World series and Elric series. To this day, I still enjoy playing RPG’s on the computer and will occasionally pick up a Fantasy novel.
It’s sad that Gary Gygax is gone, but he leaves us with a huge legacy in the gaming and Fantasy world. RIP, Gary Gygax.
