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Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jeff Wilder" data-source="post: 2345953" data-attributes="member: 5122">The History of a D&D GeekA family friend was my school-bus driver in 1981 (7th grade).  He found a copy of the D&D Expert Set rulebook in his bus and read it before giving it to me.  I DMed my first game with mostly invented rules, because I only had that Expert Set rulebook.  (Giant scorpions were my favorite monster, and it never occurred to me to even wonder where the hell the dragons were.)  For my birthday that year I got the D&D Basic Set and a couple of modules.  (I still remember trying to figure out why Keep on the Borderlands didn't quite match the actual rules.  I also still remember absolutely loving Palace of the Silver Princess, which was my first experience with boxed text.)As a freshman in high school (1983), I had a paper route and most of the profits from it went toward buying AD&D books.  A (soon-to-be) friend saw me reading the Players Handbook in school and told me about a shop in town called Games Galore where at least 20 players met every Saturday from 10 AM to 5 PM (and many often adjourned to someone's house to continue playing).  Among the players there were Roger E. Moore, who later went on to (among other things) edit Dragon.  I only gamed with him briefly, though.The core of that group stuck together through the closing of Games Galore, finding new places to play, making many trips to GenCon (where we started out on an extreme budget in 1984, staying at a campsite in Racine), and eventually switching to 2E in 1989.  It was also during this period that I discovered other RPGs, as well as tactical games like Star Fleet Battles and table games like Empire Builder.  In 1990 or so, I changed cities and had to find a new group; I'd discovered Shadowrun, so that was my first group in my college town.  In 1993 or so, my disgust with 2E and its never-ending line of badly written, horrendously balanced Nosepicker Handbooks came to a head and I quit D&D.  I was a member of an organized university "RPG Society" and I had an extremely healthy Shadowrun game going (at that time, it was by far the best campaign I'd run), and I truly didn't miss the mess that D&D had become.In 1998 I moved to San Francisco to finish law school and practice.  For a couple of years, my only contact with the hobby was via the Internet.  In 2000 I missed GenCon (the only one I've missed since 1986), but I asked my friend who was attending to pick up a copy of Third Edition D&D.  The teasers, starting at GenCon 1999, actually had me intrigued.  He brought back the 3E Players Handbook, I inhaled it in about four hours of non-stop reading, and I loved it.  Still do.  I've had one campaign or another going strong since.</blockquote>

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