Day 1 – How did you get started with this game?
Christmas morning in 1978, my sister Lorna gave me a gift of the Monster Manual for 1st Edition AD&D. I remember being very confused about it – not understanding what it was for and what I was supposed to do with it. But she explained that it was a part of a game called Dungeons and Dragons that some of her fellow dancers in the Queensland Ballet were playing. Her explanation of it sounded amazing, and with that knowledge, I started exploring the different monsters in this book and I could feel my imagination being set afire. My sister knew that I would enjoy this game, but I’m sure she had no inkling that her gift would bring me such immense joy throughout my whole life.
Games were a major part of my childhood. My fondest memories of Christmas mornings were those that involved unwrapping the large, flat rectangular boxes under the tree – usually from Waddingtons, but it really didn’t matter – titles like Risk, Buccaneer, Spy Ring, Stock Market, Stratego, and even “Park and Shop” (oh, so much fun). We were a bit disdainful of games like Kerplunk and Mouse Trap because they had no skill or strategy to them (or so I thought) and many afternoons were spent rolling dice and pushing pieces of plastic around. The halcyon days of my youth. My parents were both keen game players (my mother told me she saw a version of Monopoly in a shop window as a young girl in the 1930s, but because she couldn’t afford to buy a copy, she hand-made her own version of it – R.E.S.P.E.C.T!) and they passed their love on to me and my brother and sisters.
Shortly after Christmas, I managed to acquire a second-hand copy of the Basic edition of D&D and I was set, ready to go.
As a school kid with no income, I couldn’t afford to buy a commercial adventure module for this new game so I had to build my own. Looking back on it now, I am glad for the experience – while my first dungeons were pretty dreadful and little more than dungeon crawls, even then I had a desire to make them seem logical and set in a world that might possibly exist somewhere (assuming floating eyeballs with teeth actually exist somewhere). The memories are fuzzy, but I do still remember our first session. I was the Dungeon Master (and have been pretty much ever since) and my players were, naturally (and I am so thankful to them for it) … my family. My mother and father, brother, sister, and my sister-in-law sat down one evening to explore an underground wizard’s lair, filled with goblins, hobgoblins, and orcs – plus some giant rats for good measure. Nothing fancy, but a solid night of (as my father dubbed it) “monster-bashing”.
It was that night too that my father’s character “Regnar” was created. Regnar is a Dwarven ranger (yes, it’s “Ranger” spelled backwards) and was my father’s character throughout every game he ever played. My father passed away 4 years ago but his character comes along as an NPC with every session we play now (more on that in a later post).
Fast forward 40 years.
New Year’s Eve 2018 at my mother’s house – we got the band back together! My mother, brother, sister and sister-in-law, together with my son, niece and nephew set off to rescue Regnar from a band of goblins and hobgoblins. Again, I’ll explore this session in a future challenge post, but I’ll say now it was the most fun I’ve had with this game since I started playing.
Thank you Lorna, and Merry Christmas.