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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pawsplay" data-source="post: 4622968" data-attributes="member: 15538">I was only eight when I encountered the Red Box set, and the image of a dragon rising above a huge pond of golden coins to battle that fighter has stayed with me. I found the picture of "demi-humans" alluring, especially the elf, and played a whole series of characters inspired by that one. By ten, I had read The Hobbit three times, and was well on the road to chewing into Edith Hamilton's Mythology, an adaptation of Mallory's King Arthur, and any book on Charlemagne I could find. Having been exposed to the film Flight of Dragons and a number of juvenile novels, I kind of liked the peculier mix of sci-fi and fantasy found in D&D, things such as infravision and real-world reptiles and dinosaurs. In my mind, D&D was a blend of chivalric romance and "dark ages" fairy tales like Dragonslayer with quirky, sci-fi and mythological flourishes akin to all those books that have been published about creatures, from The Book of the Gnomes to Dragonology. I came to AD&D later, and so I was already an older teenager when I delved into the Conan stories, Lankhmar, Thieves' World, and the rest of the classic swords-and-sorcery stories. I was probably too old when I read Elric... it felt a little flat to me, although I liked the world, and I was much more impressed by Moorcock's Corum stories. So the association of D&D with swords-and-socery is a later thing, but has very much shaped my view of it (and reading those stories went a long way toward explaining some things I had always found mysterious, like Zargon, the lack of overt deities in most D&D worlds, and "thieves guilds"). The Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance, and the rest have always been sidelines to me. To me, D&D means 12th century romance plus mythological super-heroes, living on the sunny side of a mysterious world. I once turned up my nose at Dark Sun, because of the blatant appeal to powergamers and gimmicks like "character trees," but I have since come to respect it as a very well developed classic swords-and-sorcery world.</blockquote>

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