I
first started role-playing my first week at college, which was the middle of
August, 1979, at Washington U in St. Louis. My roommate ran a short D&D
adventure for us out of the white box. I remember casting a Magic Missile at
a doppelganger who looked like Chancellor Bill, and soon after was running down
the hall, telling the sophomore engineers all about our game (over their loud
protests that they didn't want to hear about it). I played a few games in college,
usually dying quickly, and didn't have a continuing character until getting
to play a homebrewed D&D variant run by Bard Bloom (co-author of World Tree),
with John Snead (who went on to work on Ars Magica) and Phil Barron. Didn't
really know much, but had fun anyway.
I came back to RPGs in graduate school at UT-Austin. My friend Jim ran the AD&D module White Plume Mountain for us, and I got my first taste of some neat group interactions. The players in that game would go on to be the core of our grad school gaming group for several years afterwards. I got the courage to finally run a game, which was Call of Cthulhu, and that became a campaign that grew into ten or so players every Friday night. I started running AD&D2E's Dark Sun, then Deborah ran Kaernice (an AD&D homebrew with close ties to Forgotten Realms), and my friend Leah came up with a homebrew world called Titan.
Titan was a game world invented for the specific purpose of game play. I know that sounds self-evident, or obvious, so I'll try to explain a little better. The kingdom in which the characters started maintained a set of boardwalks and shelters, so that low-level characters had a place to rest without being killed in their sleep on their first adventure. The society was loosely based on Bronze Age Greek raiders and Native American coup-counting, specifically so that one could play Thieves to the hilt without having to be villainous. Treasure was there for the taking, with ceremonies held that returned any irreplaceable heirlooms to their owners in exchange for official recognition of the Thief's prowess in stealing it. The politics were lifted from Greyhawk, giving us a chance to start interacting with Iuz's empire, and deal with a war that wasn't there to be won, but to be survived. We were also watching a lot of Babylon 5 at this point, and into the whole political thing.
In the mean time, I was also running a Vampire: The Masquerade for several friends, to keep together a great group I had played with while the original Storyteller and her spouse moved to Utah for a year. They were a great bunch to play with, and taught me tons about role-playing. After a while, specifically when my first marriage hit the breaking point and was definitely going to end, I stopped running Vampire, and we started to trade off campaigns and DM duties among the group.
By this time, Leah had moved away, having completed her doctorate and gone on to college teaching. Still, the delight of the Titan campaign stuck with me. When I got enthusiastic about running a game again, I decided to try running Titan for the Vampire group. I also invited a friend of mine, named Poney, to join us. Poney had been part of the group of friends I had dinner with on Friday nights, and I'd known her for a couple of years by then. She was pretty fun, and I figured she'd make a good addition to the group. She created an Elven Thief named Mae, who played in the first two or three adventures I ran, before the campaign closed. I'm guessing that a large part of the campaign closure was due to the unfortunate resemblance that a Dwarven Pirate PC bore (in appearance and temperament) to Eric Cartman of South Park. Probably, that player's rapid lobbying to play something else was not mere coincidence...
In the mean time, I'd also played Ravenloft under Poney as DM, and our friends Craig & Nathan. It was an interesting campaign in Paridon, owing much to Holmes and the Ripper, and gave me a chance to learn more from yet another good DM.
Years pass. Poney and I started dating, and playing lots of Warhammer minis battles. AD&D went the way of all flesh, and D&D3E appeared. We were eager to try it, and cajoled a friend of a friend into running a game, and this taught us a very important lesson. No Game is much, much better than Bad Game. It also taught me that I'm pretty darned picky about the quality of DM and players I'm willing to game with. After a few more experiences as a player of D&D3, in which I loved the system, but wasn't enjoying the games, I decided to run Titan again, this time using 3rd edition rules. I brought up the subject to Poney (by this time, my wife of 2 years) and invited our friend Mike, who had been a real joy to play with in 40K and Warhammer Fantasy Battles, to play as well. This first sessions got us off and running, and we've been gaming together ever since. We've now added several other players, and are running and playing in several campaigns, but that's the story of how I got into this group. Sorry if it's long, but hey-- it's a twenty year story, and it ain't over yet.
Gordon Vincent