D&D

My D&D journey began, oddly, enough, with the move E.T The Extraterrestrial, which I saw in the theater in 1982. Being a bit of a reading geek, I bought the novelization (y'know, back when people read things printed on dead trees...). There's a scene in the novel where the characters are playing Dungeons and Dragons. Maybe that was in the movie too - I don't recall - but if so it didn't catch my attention. The few paragraphs in the novel, though, described just a tiny snippet of a goblin encounter and, without ever having seen a D'D rulebook, I was already hooked.

I picked up whichever D&D Basic Set my local bookstore carried and talked some friends into playing with me. Our first attempt was terrible. My friends couldn't be bothered to learn the rules, and in fairness to them I was pretty much berating them into trying this silly game that didn't even have a board or pieces, so why should them? I tried to be Dungeon Master without any idea what I was doing. We gave up without ever getting to an encounter.

Undeterred, I reread the guides from cover to cover, figured out what I had messed up, and tried again. Thus began a campaign that took us from - I dunno, probably 6th or 7th grade - into around the time we all got drivers licenses and found other things to do with our time.

I've joined a campaign or two as an adult and, while none of them lasted very long, we had a great time. I've also played a few of the various video games, and read a number of related novels.

I captured some of my D&D experience digitally: a few pieces of fan fiction, some character builds, etc., all scattered around on old backups from various computers I've owned. And I still have a lot of the pen-and-paper character sheets in a box on the top shelf in the closet. I'm starting this page as somewhere to group as much of that as I bother to get online. We'll see how much ever makes it here.