What was your 1st RPG and what was your favourite campaign about or best memory?

[Joerg Baumgartner]

My first RPG was Fighting Fantasy – not the gamebooks, the actual Introductory RPG book adapting the system to standard group play.

We really didn't know what we were doing at the time. The book came with 2 full premade dungeons, and we basically played those 2 dungeons repeatedly many times with different characters trying to come up with different routes, different outcomes, better rewards, etc. It was still super fun, though, even without ever leaving the dungeon.

My first non-solo tabletop rpg game I ever played (actually GMed for two other newbies) used the Fighting Fantasy 2D6 system plus the player magic from one of the subsequent books. The first game explored a dungeon that I improvised (featuring among others a major kitchen feeding the denizens of the dungeon, run by cobolds) followed by an overland adventure that we managed to run through about halfway before the night. That game was a success, and I looked around for other locally available games (in Kiel, Germany, 1985). The original Dark Eye (second edition) and D&D BECMI basic were two false starts, with the Dark Eye (DSA) played for a bit before I switched to Midgard (a German D20-using system loaning from Empire of the Petal Throne), where I stayed for half a decade (and which I still occasionally play). Later I translated GW's RuneQuest 3rd edition books for private use (which somewhat ironically gave me the fluency to use these books in English), which made me a D100 system user, with occasional forays into narrative game systems like HeroQuest/Questworlds, FATE, or really whatever games my friends invite me to join as a player (like Paranoia, Ars Magica, Mage, Vampire, D6 Star Wars, GURPS, Palladium, Rolemaster or Savage World). Also some bits of AD&D 1st and 2nd edition.

 

[coyote6]

My first RPG was AD&D (though it could have been OD&D, I guess). I was a kid, my mom and her boyfriend went out to dinner with neighbors, leaving their teenage son to babysit me. He had me roll up a fighter (IIRC, he had 4 hp), and then my guy headed out for this big city that he had this amazing map of (I think it was the City-State of the Invincible Overlord). My guy got beat up by a city guard and had his arm broken, and I was hooked. Once I found an AD&D book at a toy store, I pestered my mom until she bought it for me.

I think it was the Monster Manual, rather than the Player's Handbook, amusingly enough.

My all time favorite campaign is one I'm playing in now, a Mutants & Masterminds 2e game. At 10:20 am on October 12, 2015, the spacetime continuum ripped open near Reno, NV, and transdimensional Nazis start invading, with grav tanks, supers, sorcerers, bodyjumpers, and millions of enslaved soldiers poised to cross over. However, a band of guerilla fighters sets off a nuke in the middle of the portal, causing a cascade of energy to spread across the world, and suddenly some people started developing superpowers. Meanwhile, the recon squad of superpowered Nazis that made it through are trying to continue their mission of preparing for the inevitable invasion; there's a parallel nightmare dimension that's leaking across into the Earth, spreading darkness, despair, dread, and doom; and some people with powers decide they want to conquer the world or destroy it. Oh,, it also turns out that all this has happened thousands of times before, with each iteration ending in the death of everyone in the world, before the cycle starts over again. Only one (well, probably two; sometimes three) people remember what happened before, and try to figure out how to stop it all. Too bad the accumulated trauma of all the deaths they witnessed (and committed) seem to have broken them, and now their primary goal is "stop the Nazis from winning, by destroying the world before they can conquer it". The PCs job is to survive, stop the invaders, save the world, break the cycle, and maybe try to live.

 

[Celebrim]

My first RPG was Basic/Expert D&D in the red and light blue boxes. I GMed for about a year at age 9 before graduating to AD&D after an introduction by a friend's older cousin home from college. I continued that until I was 16, but with time for Gamma World, Chill, Star Wars, and one shots in Boot Hill and Call of Cthulhu

My best memories are probably from my college group where I got to be a player for 4 or 5 years. The campaign was a great Age of Sail based campaign of sprawling scope involving a lot of dynastic building play.

I'm not sure what my favorite campaign is: maybe the one I am running, "Tales of the Dogfish" a Star Wars bounty hunter campaign set in the early Rise of the Empire before it's obvious that the emperor is a total psychopath and the New Order isn't going to bring anyone peace and security.