Long ago, in a distant land, I turned ten years old.
All told, it was a pretty good birthday. One of the best. I had a small birthday party where I got to see Gremlins for the second time in a theatre (long story) and it came on the heels of my best friend’s birthday when we went to see Ghostbusters. (You can do the math from that but suffice to say it was nearly four decades ago.) For birthday presents, I can’t recall everything that I got but I certainly remember the gift my cousin in Toronto sent me. It was a red box; the text read Ages 10 and up, and it had a glorious painting of a warrior battling a red dragon on the cover that instantly cemented Larry Elmore as my favourite fantasy artist. Welcome to the world of Dungeons & Dragons, as my favourite Saturday morning cartoon would passive aggressively announce.
I’d done a little roleplaying by that point. My friend’s brother invited us to some of the big kid tables and we played Middle Earth Roleplaying. I still remember the awesome critical hit tables. But once I got the Dungeons & Dragons basic set, that meant I was the rules keeper, and by default the Dungeon Master.
There were a few game stores around and you could by modules and gamebooks in a lot of craft and hobby stores. Odyssey 2000 in Halifax was my go-to, but I only had so much money to spend. With the heavy responsibility of dungeon mastering thrust upon me, that meant I had to get creative.
Spoiler: it had an Owlbear.
If books like Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” and Weis and Hickman’s “Dragonlance” series were my fuel, then this became my earliest outlet. I had binders upon binders of written notes in which I hammered out quest structures and polished up descriptive paragraphs to set the stage for my friends’ inevitable left-turning plot twists and their spiteful demise at my imperious hand.
And since the 90s, it’s all been stuffed in big boxes, upstairs in the garage of my parents’s home in the Maritimes. Thankfully, with COVID in a temporary remission, I was able to voyage back home for a few days this past week. While I was there, I was curious about my old creations. Part of me mused at the idea that I might even be able to resurrect some ancient ideas from my own past and inject them into fresh writing projects now that I am a fantasy fiction writer.
No. Not really.
A lot of it was pretty cheesy. Even then I approached most things tongue-in-cheek.
For those who already find AD&D’s Oriental Adventures to be politically troublesome by modern standards, you might cringe even more if you saw some of my slapped together, linguistically challenged maps. Yes, one even had a place called the “Tofu River”. Honestly.
For what it’s worth, I was pretty happy to find as much as I did. My folks were already zealously downsizing “stuff” and my mom put that project into even higher gear after my dad passed. Some of my old game systems went to yard sales. I had a sizeable number of books to the old Victory Games’ James Bond RPG which are nowhere to be found.
If this is to be a bit of a flex though, I figure I’ll post some pics of what I did manage to recover.
My roleplaying days subsided as I got older and dragons became extinct. In college, we looked to the future and played a bit of R. Talsorian’s Cyberpunk, and FASA’s Star Trek, but that was only while we were in the dorms. By the time I’d moved out of my campus residence, I had grown apart from RPGs. Even Odyssey 2000 closed down and its storefront was taken over by a shop promoting women’s sexual health products. We all have to grow up, I guess.
Nonetheless, I can’t help but attribute RPGs to aiding in my writing and communicating skills from an early age. I’ve picked up the new 5e D&D books and have been trying to adjust to a world without THACO. Admittedly, it’s hard. I’m not as adaptable as I once was. But I’m hoping to convince my kids to pick up the hobby to enjoy the same developmental benefits it provided me. I’m also quite interested in adapting Caphedra into a playable setting for fantasy roleplaying. My worldbuilding notes run deep and I have oodles of spreadsheets and diagrams on slide decks which could be reborn for the purpose. Keep following this website and you might see some bonus content, just sayin’.
But if you’re looking for a rusty old troglodyte to crawl out of his cave and join your campaign, hit me up! I promise not to polymorph into an Owl Bear.