Introductions

[makofan]

I started DMing in 1979 with Homes Basic (I was in Grade 10), and then we all quickly moved into AD&D. My favourite RPG's are AD&D, Pendragon, Dragonquest and Traveller. I have been DMing pretty much continuously for 35 years.

BTW, bat's blog is extremely awesome.

I love setting up and running games, and my list of things to try is so long that I won't live long enough to do all of them! Some of you may know me from my Verbosh campaign on odd74.proboards.com

[tetramorph]

Welcome makofan!

[Admin Pete]

Feb 9, 2015 10:31:13 GMT -5 makofan said:

I started DMing in 1979 with Homes Basic (I was in Grade 10), and then we all quickly moved into AD&D. My favourite RPG's are AD&D, Pendragon, Dragonquest and Traveller. I have been DMing pretty much continuously for 35 years.

BTW, bat's blog is extremely awesome.

I love setting up and running games, and my list of things to try is so long that I won't live long enough to do all of them! Some of you may know me from my Verbosh campaign on odd74.proboards.com

Welcome makofan and yeah, bat's blog is fantastic!

[merias]

Howdy folks, good to be here, I see some familiar names from other forums! I'm merias pretty much everywhere. I started with Holmes Basic back in the late 70s, then moved to AD&D, then life happened and a long hiatus until a few years back, when I started playing S&W Whitebox with my kids. Since then I've played in or ran games of many different systems, including OD&D, which I have really come to enjoy.

-Merias (Doug)

[Vile Traveller]

Wait, I need to explain myself? Er, I was introduced to B/X back in '82 and that was D&D as far as I was concerned until my regular group started playing 3E - I completely bypassed BECMI, AD&D, and 2E (except I have always had an inclusivity policy as far as actual adventures were concerned). Then the internet happened and I found out about OD&D and Holmes, and I fell in love all over again.

[tetramorph]

Welcome, merias, and Vile Traveller!

[Admin Pete]

Welcome all! Come on in, we have plenty of room!

[merctime]

Hi, guys, it's a pleasure to join this forum! It's good to see so many familiar names here. For myself, I won't be able to post or engage in discussion very much for a short while, but I definitely had to join here! Looking forward to entering the discussions when I can. Have a great one, folks, and... Fight On!

-Merctime

[Admin Pete]

Feb 11, 2015 12:37:17 GMT -5 merctime said:

Hi, guys, it's a pleasure to join this forum! It's good to see so many familiar names here. For myself, I won't be able to post or engage in discussion very much for a short while, but I definitely had to join here! Looking forward to entering the discussions when I can. Have a great one, folks, and... Fight On!

-Merctime

Hey, merctime! Welcome!

[The Semi-Retired Gamer]

Welcome, merctime!

[Von]

Hi.

I'm crap at introducing myself.

Er.

Well, this is awkward.

[Necromancer]

Feb 11, 2015 12:37:17 GMT -5 merctime said:

Hi, guys, it's a pleasure to join this forum! It's good to see so many familiar names here. For myself, I won't be able to post or engage in discussion very much for a short while, but I definitely had to join here! Looking forward to entering the discussions when I can. Have a great one, folks, and... Fight On!

-Merctime

Welcome, merctime! I haven't seen you online for a while! Cool to see you here!

[cadfael]

Hi, I was introduced to D&D by my father around the time I became interested in wargaming during my mid-teens, though he just described the game we didn't actually play it. When I was 17 I was at college and on Wednesdays we had to fill a gap int he timetable with what they called enrichment, a couple of guys I knew wanted to give this Dungeons and Dragons thing ago so we played 3e during that time until the end of the year. I didn't really involve my self it soon after that year as I moved college.

in 2010 I somehow stumbled across a this article combatzonechronicles.net/cozoxb/orcsy.htm which led me to a near future game called Combat Zone, so that got me back into into wargaming again. In the following summer during my web wanderings I decided to look up old versions of and soon discovered OSRIC and Basic Fantasy, BFRPG took my fancy and I revived it in the post just before I went on holiday where my dad ran my brother and I though our first game for years. After BFRPG I moved away from home to work and during that time I did some 4e.

I later moved back in with my family, due to at the time unemployment, later that year I got a few people from my church over to mine and I ran OSRIC, I did this couple of times over the next couple of months. After OSRIC I ran various incarnations of my own system, mainly d6 and d66 based as I'm particularity fond of those.

Back in August I ran into Seven Voyages of Zylarthen, which I had remembered downloading a number of months back but never gave it much though until then, after reading bits and bobs within the booklets it wasn't long until a print copy was ordered and that's where I am today. I can see Zylarthen and the latest incarnation of my own game being my regularly played systems for years to come.

[The Semi-Retired Gamer]

Welcome aboard, cadfael! Great introduction!

[Admin Pete]

Feb 12, 2015 2:50:26 GMT -5 Von said:

Hi.

I'm crap at introducing myself.

Er.

Well, this is awkward.

Now you're just toying with us!

[Admin Pete]

Welcome cadfael, looking forward to hearing about your game and how you use Zylarthen!

[Deleted]

Hi, everyone!

I've introduced myself on a few other boards, but each time I'd bore myself halfway through my biography and just say something quippy like, 'Hey, I used to play other games, then discovered an old set of the 1e core books and now I play 1e and OD&D heavily, although I'm still really interested in other old RPGs'. But, seeing as this crowd is smaller, and I've enjoyed reading the other introductions here and seeing how everyone else started out, I figure I might as well write up my own history in a few words. I've tried to keep everything from being too pedantic, so feel free to just read the headings and ignore the misty-eyed reminiscences at your leisure:


As kids we'd design & run each other through our own 'homemade text adventures', and also house-ruled HeroQuest adventures, but had no idea that we were role-playing or even what RPGs were:

My first RPG experiences weren't actually from playing RPGs, and in fact I don't think we even knew what an RPG was, really. My older brother had me hooked on Infocom text adventures like Zork as soon as I could read, and for some years my best friend and I would run each other through our own 'homemade text adventures'. We would draw up Zork-style maps on graph paper then test them out on each other. If we didn't have a map handy, we'd just improvise and make things up on the spot.

Eventually I also discovered the HeroQuest boardgame, also through my brother, and around age 8 or so I made my first house rules, and by 9 I had a campaign world I'd force my brother to play. I had a couple of dungeons spread out across a forest, a town and a castle (all mapped out to move seemlessly from one to the next on HeroQuest boards), and insisted that my brother roll for his movement from shop to shop as he bought things or talked to people between rolling for movement to walk his way back to the dungeon area. He was admirably patient with me, in hindsight.

My first actual RPG was Star Wars, followed closely by MeRP, then just about everything else:

One day my buddy came to church with a copy of WEG's Star Wars RPG. After a few weeks I had gotten my mom take me to Rusty's RPGs so I could buy my own copy (she had heard about RPGs and wanted to make sure there wasn't anything blasphemous or inappropriate for kids in it). Almost right away I set straight to house-ruling the game so we could play fantasy or modern games, even though we mostly stuck to the Star Wars universe.

That Christmas my brother got me MeRP, and those were my two staple game systems for a long time, even though I started a habit of collecting other games: by the end of high school I had a whole bookshelf just of RPG rulebooks, plus a moderately thorough collection of various supplements for GURPS and Legend of the Five Rings, as I played those most often by late in high school. With many of my games I've still only played fewer than 3 sessions, some I've yet to play at all, but I was really into analysing the mechanics and comparing them, and pulling rules from one game into another.

I was in school in the 1990s, and we all thought D&D was stupid:

I think I knew all of three people who openly admitted to playing AD&D (I don't even know if many of us were aware that there was such a thing as D&D that wasn't AD&D—it was always just 'AD&D' to us). The rest of us found it stale, and frankly silly. We all had our own little speeches we'd memorized about how we respected it for its historical position, but that it was riddled with unrealistic mechanics and irrational character restrictions, all of which had long since been fixed by tons of other games.

Of course that's all rubbish, and shows how little we actually knew about the history of the game, or how much of the games we played were indebted to basic things taken from D&D. Still, I was pretty puritanical about the whole thing and would eventual refuse to play any game that was class or level-based (except for MeRP, because I was intimately familiar with it and because I thought the other rules were realistic enough that it balanced out).

Luckily, 10 or so years ago I picked up an old set of 1e books at a library out of historical interest. Now love 1e AD&D and OD&D in equal measure:

That about says it. I picked them up about ten years ago and before I had finished the first page of the PHB I was utterly converted. Over the next year I also picked up the 3 LBBs as well as Outdoor Survival, and wrote up my own OD&D campaign. Over the past decade I've always had difficulty getting people to play 1e AD&D with me, but I did get an OD&D game running without much trouble and have been able to keep that going off-and-on over the years.

Unfortunately, I don't get to play much these days, but I'm hopeful:

I moved away from California to do my PhD in the UK, and since then have had difficulty finding time and friends for playing. I'm still pretty actively involved in the local wargaming club (another long-standing hobby of mine), but the few role players I know are pretty strictly sci-fi and ultra-modern in their tastes.

I do officially have an OD&D game started at the college, but academic schedules and player availability have so far dictated that we've only had a couple of sporadic sessions over the year. I'm hoping that we'll be able to get into a more regular schedule after the end of term in a couple of months.

Well, that's it. Glad to be here, and looking forward to discussing our campaigns and play styles here on the board!

[ffilz]

I was introduced to D&D in the fall of 1977 when my best friend got the Holmes Basic D&D for his birthday. Since then, I have played (mostly as GM) quite a variety of games. These days, OD&D is one of my go-to games, I am running a Wilderlands PbP game odd74.proboards.com/board/96/franks-wilderlands-csio-od, and have done some face-to-face OD&D.

Frank

[The Semi-Retired Gamer]

Welcome, Starbeard and ffilz!

[Deleted]

I'm Chirine ba Kal; I've been around for a while. I have not played D&D, or any published RPG; I'm a model builder, not a gamer, really. Back in Ye Olden Dayes, I played something called "Blackmoor" with Dave; something called "Greyhawk" with Gary; and something called "Tekumel" with Phil. I pained up a lot of figures, and built a lot of models; I ran a few games, some of which are still muttered darkly about by some of the survivors; I still run games, and you can see the photos and videos - links on my blog (see my signature).

I'm looking forward to reading your posts, here; I'm always willing to learn new things to improve my ability to deliver the goods at the game table...

[Admin Pete]

Welcome aboard! Great to have you hear and indeed all the new members.

[Deleted]

Feb 15, 2015 13:02:56 GMT -5 @chirinebakal said:

I'm Chirine ba Kal; I've been around for a while. I have not played D&D, or any published RPG; I'm a model builder, not a gamer, really. Back in Ye Olden Dayes, I played something called "Blackmoor" with Dave; something called "Greyhawk" with Gary; and something called "Tekumel" with Phil. I pained up a lot of figures, and built a lot of models; I ran a few games, some of which are still muttered darkly about by some of the survivors; I still run games, and you can see the photos and videos - links on my blog (see my signature).

I'm looking forward to reading your posts, here; I'm always willing to learn new things to improve my ability to deliver the goods at the game table...

Hi @chirinebakal! Your website is fantastic, it's great to see stuff online by/about the classic modelling hobby.

To me it seems that amongst wargamers there's little interest in delving back into the history of our hobby, with everyone preferring new models and new rules; and amongst classic RPG players the modelling aspect isn't covered very much either.

[libertad]

I've been playing table-top games since 2001. My favorite game is 3rd Edition D&D/Pathfinder, but I am a fan of many other games such as OSR retroclones, Eclipse Phase, New World of Darkness, and much much more.

Since last October I took up blogging, and tossed my hand in RPG self-publishing under the name Quasar Knight Enterprises in June of 2014. As of this post I wrote 5 Pathfinder products and 1 OSR one.

Currently I'm GMing a 1-on-1 Labyrinth Lord game in a dark fantasy homebrew world on Saturday, and a Pathfinder magic school/superhero game every Sunday. Although I'd be up for trying even more games, right now I have no more time to GM and would most likely be a player.  I'm gearing to try out Dungeon Crawl Classics one of these days.

[tetramorph]

Feb 15, 2015 15:05:59 GMT -5 libertad said:

Currently I'm GMing a 1-on-1 Labyrinth Lord game in a dark fantasy homebrew world on Saturday, and a Pathfinder magic school/superhero game every Sunday. Although I'd be up for trying even more games, right now I have no more time to GM and would most likely be a player.  I'm gearing to try out Dungeon Crawl Classics one of these days.

I do hope you will share your dark fantasy home-brew in a campaign thread!

[tetramorph]

Welcome merias, Vile Traveller, Von, cadfael, @starbeard, ffilz, @chirinebakal, libertad!

[monk]

Hi All,

Most of you have probably seen me around, but I suppose I've mostly lurked and never posted a self-introduction.

I grew up in the 80s and had a second hand copy of Moldvay's Basic as my first intro to D&D.  With little money, I got most of my inspiration from staring at the covers of old modules at the swap meet and adding elements of my favorite cartoons and comics (Thundarr, MASK, He-Man, Thundercats, etc.).  It ended up being a funny and weird mix that I enjoyed a lot until I became More Mature and Serious. 

Later I played a lot of homebrew AD&D 2e with my buddies, ultimately taking a long break after college. 

Around 2008 I returned to D&D on a whim, recruiting 2 buddies with no RPG experience to play a pick up game.  I no longer had any books at that point, so I went online and, finding the free Labyrinth Lord pdf, also discovered this great niche of folks online who were into all types of old school D&D.

Since then our pick up game has turned into 3 consecutive campaigns.  The first two lasted about 2 years each and the third, our current, is about 8 months old.  All have been played out in my Lost Continent setting, which is inspired in large part by the gonzo mix of my youth.  We play a high-action, sandboxy, unintentionally hilarious style that features lots of violence and NPCs with funny names/voices/speech impediments (2 of us are speech pathologists).  The Lost Continent is heavily inspired by Indiana Jones (for pacing and "caper" style), Lovecraft (for monsters), CAS/Wolfe/EPT (for setting, esp the mix of super-high lost tech in a generally low tech world), Howard (for the number of dudes getting stabbed in the face), as well as Thundarr, Star Wars, Leigh Brackett's EJStark stories. I'm probably forgetting something.  Past PC classes have included at least one: Cat Man, Jedi, Robo Wizard, Bounty Hunter, and Witch Doctor, in addition to the basic 4.

My interest, as far as online discussion, is mostly in learning how other DMs run their games.  My group is all about figuring out what style of play is most fun for us and modifying the rules to complement that style.  Over the years we've played "by the book" B-X, Labyrinth Lord, and 3 LBB OD&D, eventually settling into a house ruled version that is basically b-x and od&d with a couple things thrown in from Holmes and LL and a few novel bits we invented.  We're very happy to be able to play many sessions without having to reference any rulebooks at all.  That's been our goal in a lot of ways.

Anywhoo...if you've read all this, thank you!  You're a very kind person, haha!  I'm excited to be part of this forum and talk with like-minded folks who are freethinkers in regard to rules and setting.  That's one of my favorite things about OD&D.  

 

[Admin Pete]

Welcome Monk, we are glad you are here and we look forward to hearing my about your campaign!

[Necromancer]

Truly awesome stuff on your blog, @chirinebakal! I'm most impressed! I was a bit interested in model building and painting miniatures while growing up, roughly the same age I discovered RPG's, but I never delved too deep into it. Perhaps, one day...

[cadriel]

Heya.

So I am a relative latecomer to old school gaming. In 1993 (sixth grade), I got into fantasy literature and found that AD&D was the way to play a game like those books. Some of it was dross like the original Dragonlance trilogy; but on the other hand there was the Elric of Melniboné series. I bought the book but didn't understand it! So I bought the "New, Easy to Master Dungeons & Dragons Game" - a big black set the size of a board game, with a red dragon bursting out at the viewer. I taught myself from that set and started running, initially that set, and then moving on to AD&D and the published settings.

I was unhappy with them, but in the mid 1990s - just before the company died - TSR had a robust presence on America Online. And I became a fan of Greyhawk through the community there, and of Gary Gygax, and got the first edition DMG and learned from it. (I did meet Gary, briefly and just long enough to say hello and thank him, at Gen Con in '99.) I read Leiber, Moorcock, Vance, Howard, Lovecraft and Anderson in this period. Then I stopped playing AD&D specifically for a while after my freshman year in college; this was just in time for D&D 3e to come out, and I was never into it.

I gamed a bit on and off in the ensuing years. In 2006 I got Castles & Crusades and ran a couple of games, but was unsatisfied by the system. Then in 2007, I bought the PDFs of OD&D and my wife (then my girlfriend) bought me the books for Christmas. That spring (2008) I got to actually run some OD&D, sticking mostly with the 3 little brown books. I also started a blog, Semper Initiativus Unum, that I still update periodically. Since then I've written for a couple of zines (Fight On! and Green Devil Face), put out one of my own called Dungeon Crawl, gotten married, became the father of a wonderful little girl, and am somehow still periodically gaming.

Aside from OD&D, my gaming loves include Metamorphosis Alpha, Call of Cthulhu, and Marvel Super Heroes (FASERIP).

[Admin Pete]

Feb 18, 2015 17:08:45 GMT -5 cadriel said:

Heya.

So I am a relative latecomer to old school gaming. In 1993 (sixth grade), I got into fantasy literature and found that AD&D was the way to play a game like those books. Some of it was dross like the original Dragonlance trilogy; but on the other hand there was the Elric of Melniboné series. I bought the book but didn't understand it! So I bought the "New, Easy to Master Dungeons & Dragons Game" - a big black set the size of a board game, with a red dragon bursting out at the viewer. I taught myself from that set and started running, initially that set, and then moving on to AD&D and the published settings.

I was unhappy with them, but in the mid 1990s - just before the company died - TSR had a robust presence on America Online. And I became a fan of Greyhawk through the community there, and of Gary Gygax, and got the first edition DMG and learned from it. (I did meet Gary, briefly and just long enough to say hello and thank him, at Gen Con in '99.) I read Leiber, Moorcock, Vance, Howard, Lovecraft and Anderson in this period. Then I stopped playing AD&D specifically for a while after my freshman year in college; this was just in time for D&D 3e to come out, and I was never into it.

I gamed a bit on and off in the ensuing years. In 2006 I got Castles & Crusades and ran a couple of games, but was unsatisfied by the system. Then in 2007, I bought the PDFs of OD&D and my wife (then my girlfriend) bought me the books for Christmas. That spring (2008) I got to actually run some OD&D, sticking mostly with the 3 little brown books. I also started a blog, Semper Initiativus Unum, that I still update periodically. Since then I've written for a couple of zines (Fight On! and Green Devil Face), put out one of my own called Dungeon Crawl, gotten married, became the father of a wonderful little girl, and am somehow still periodically gaming.

Aside from OD&D, my gaming loves include Metamorphosis Alpha, Call of Cthulhu, and Marvel Super Heroes (FASERIP).

Welcome cadriel, I love your blog by the way.  I see you are also looking at Chris Gonnerman's new clone Iron Falcon, as am I. Chris does good work, and it is great to see his efforts talked about.