Games Made Me, I Made Games

Dungeons and Dragons was not my first RPG. Where I grew up D&D was the abomination that brings desolation, and while I desperately longed to play what I assumed was the best game ever, I was out of luck till much later in life. The Satanic Panic ruined my childhood. My first commercial game was West End Games' Star Wars RPG, in the heady days when the Star Wars card game was huge and the Special Editions were distant and unimaginable. But before that I ran games without rules, cribbing themes from console games and books, developing sprawling menagerie of characters who traveled through time fighting monsters and righting wrongs. It was collaborative storytelling as only children can, and reigned unchallenged until we picked up the Star Wars RPG.

Traditional fantasy games never seemed to crop up, my friends played Marvel Super Heroes Adventure Game, Legend of the Five Rings, GURPS, and a million home-brew systems I cobbled together. I didn't actually play D&D until college, starting with third edition, but it was joined a plenty of other systems: Deadlands, Paranoia, the Burning Wheel, a short sojourn in 4E, and Dark Heresy.

Life happened, peopled moved, and I found myself sans group for a few years. I started hearing rumblings about the OSR from blogs and started looking for older edition stuff in local bookshops. I got a taste of old school awesomeness, and in the last 6 months I've started running an OSR campaign using the beta Dungeon Crawl Classics rules (with a pile of Labyrinth Lord and the D&D Cyclopedia to shore up the holes)

I intend to share some of the work I've done on my campaign setting, the Plains of Ig and surrounding lands, as well as whatever cool game-related thing I've stumbled onto recently.