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Message: <blockquote data-quote="thedungeondelver" data-source="post: 3265437" data-attributes="member: 34865">Sherman set the Wayback Machine to 1981...There's a sort of preamble to this, a "scenes played during the credits" that leads up to when I got in to D&D and it goes like this: when I was a young'un, I remember going to the Circus World toy store in the Gadsden Mall and seeing this... well, what was it exactly?  A game?  A comic book?  Something in between?  No idea.  Little metal men under the glass counter...nah.  Not my cuppa.  I wanted Star Wars figures!  (Or rather, I wanted to look at Star Wars figures - being the tender age of nine back in '79 I had no liquid assets with which to acquire Kenner's boon to kid-dom).Fast forward to a move to Florida.  One day at school, at lunch, I espied magazine-like booklet being viewed by my cohorts at the lunch table.  I asked if I could look at it and...Well folks, I was hooked.  I didn't (at the time) make the correlation with what I'd seen in the toy store a couple of years earlier, but damn this was a cool thing.  I know it was A2 SECRET OF THE SLAVER'S STOCKADE because I to this day remember reading about the hobgoblins and young hobgoblins in the stable, and how one would use his shovel to ring a gong and bring down the whole place on the adventurers.  But what was it?  CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE?  A monthly publication of some kind?  Aha, right there on the cover "ADVANCED DUNGEONS & DRAGONS".  Everything seemed like some magic power word that, if I could understand it, or become a part of it, it'd unlock something awesome.  "For character levels 4-7" - "characters", like in a movie?  Levels 4-7?  Like floors  of a building (close, at least in one usage)?The maps held my attention almost as much as the text.  And the preamble in the text - obviously this was part of some great, multi-part adventure of some kind!  And what did the numbers mean?  AC, HP, D1-8 - I had to know more.After a month or so of dutifully taking out the trash without being asked, cleaning up my room, helping keep the apartment squared away, I'd earned enough allowance and pestered my folks enough to get a trip down to a local toyshop to get my hands on my very own DUNGEONS & DRAGONS.I'd wanted that "A2" thing, but alas, they didn't have that one!  So where to start?  I was confronted by a wall of books I had no idea how to interpret.  Having only a few dollars, I couldn't afford the big box with the dragon and the lady with the magic spell and the guy with the spear...oh that hardback with the red giant, the wizard and the woman in the bikini (and the guy in armor) was neat but...a king's ransom!  Besides, that said ADVANCED DUNGEONS & DRAGONS in the corner - better to work up to that rather than jump right in.Then a magenta-colored module caught my eye.  B2 KEEP ON THE BORDERLANDS by GARY GYGAX an adventure for character levels 1-3.And even better, in one corner, "SPECIAL INTRODUCTORY MODULE"Aha!  Perfect!  Introductory, not the first in its series (it took a while for me to grok that not everything with a letter-number code involved it's precedessor or follower), but surely this was all I needed, right?  And besides, while they had a shrinkwrapped book that featured the art that was on the box (the guy with the spear, the woman casting the spell, the big dragon thing), if I got this "Keep on the Borderlands" thing, I could buy some dice as well!So I bought it, some of those crumbly blue dice (with a red marker crayon - still got the d10!), and away I went!Now was it providence that I grabbed that particular module?  It seemed to have nearly everything that I needed to play the game - spell charts (no descriptions of the spells - what was know alignment?  what was an alignment?), to-hit tables, saving throws, indications of when to use them, armor class tables, and indications of how to handle combat.With my sister Beth and my friend Tommy from down the street I headed up my first party of adventurers and away they went!  Of course, B2 wasn't the complete rules for D&D by any stretch of the imagination but I had that going for me - imagination.  Where I had no guidance, I filled in.  How did a character reach the next level?  Why by...uh...killing a certain number of monsters!  How much damage did weapons do?  No idea!  One whack took off one hit point for the character, one whack from the character killed the monster.  Easy as pie!  (Big monsters took five hits to take down).So for about a year or two, the totality of BASIC DUNGEONS & DRAGONS was, for me, one booklet and one set of dice.The rest, as they say, is history.</blockquote>

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