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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6251894" data-attributes="member: 82106">I was 12 in the fall of 1975 and already an avid wargamer when I started to hear rumors of this "ultimate game" that was like nothing that ever came before, you could do almost anything in Dungeons & Dragons. The idea of an RPG was like a bolt of lightning, but none of my friends had rules. Finally we pestered the 'big kids' in Boy Scout Troop 71 to let us play with them. So there we were, out in the woods on a campout, at a picnic table in the dark with a couple of Coleman Lanterns. The atmosphere was rich with the scent of the unknown. We knew nothing about the rules, had no idea what we would encounter. We were indeed just exactly like a batch of neophyte adventurers about to embark on our first adventure! Honestly I don't recall what happened next. I think my character was the cleric (I wasn't cool enough to be in the favor of the big kids, so they gave me the 'crappiest' character no doubt). Did we live or die? I don't even recall. All I remember is our characters descended into the dark dungeon by torchlight while we sat around the table in our own pool of lantern light, with trees close all around. I don't know if the DM was good or bad or anything else, just the feel of playing.Needless to say one session was NOT enough, a LIFETIME was not enough. We couldn't buy the rules, they were hard to find and $10 was a fair amount of money back then. So my sister and I actually wrote our own rendition of the rules based on what we knew, plus whatever we could steal from various fantasy authors. I think we only played a few times before Holme's Basic showed up, and soon we inherited the full rules from some older kids that weren't interested, etc. I still have the Holme's Basic book, or the remains of it, complete with our own homebrewed rules written on lines paper and stapled to the back of the book! There have been some periods in my life when D&D wasn't part of my everyday activities, but the books have always sat on my shelf, and the campaign notes I scribbled out at age 14 are still in the back of one of the binders I have kept, along with tattered maps of 1970's dungeons. Somehow I'll never get the thing out of my head, nor do I want to.</blockquote>

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