The next lot of entries cover a lot of the games I played during secondary school. And there are a lot of them. Some of them I owned for but a few weeks before swapping them for a different game, or selling them. Dungeons and Dragons was probably the beginning of that trend, with most the rulebooks for the system I had I bought off my friend JDG. In fact I didn’t realise that the “Expert” Rules were from an earlier edition and so there were actually number of character levels I didn’t have rules for.
Now Dungeons and Dragons is the prototypical RPG, and I’m probably an anomaly for starting with something else, particularly so for that something else being Paranoia. The game is what spawned the RPG subculture and craze, and it’s an interesting insight of the hobby’s roots. Which is hairy Tolkein loving hippies who played wargames and simulation boardgames.
The “non-advanced” version was apparantly made as a stop-gap for the more popular “Advanced Dungeons And Dragons” but became a game in it’s own right. While it has some stuff that is just plain odd, namely Elf, Dwarf and Halfling as very limited character classes, it holds it’s own as a game quite well. Particularly in the “Companion” and “Master” Rules sets that have the sort of campaign rules still sorely missing from most high level (A)DnD games.
I’m struggling to remember exactly what happened in the campaign I ran with this game. I remember it started in the DnD game world “Mystara” then went to countries that I had invented myself, and ended with the characters becoming gods. The Mystara world was strange in that it seemed to have been made up by TSR as they went along. There’s a tightly packed group of countries, with lots of detail and background all in the corner of one continent. Then as they expanded the world, the details got less and less, and countries bigger and bigger.
Obviously the presence of this game here goes to show that my parents had realised that pretending to be a dwarf wasn’t going to turn me into a satanist and that stuff like “Mazes and Monsters” was scare mongering guff. I’ll discuss the Eighties RPG witchhunt when I get to Dragon Magazine or AD&D second edition, as I want to go into it in a bit more detail and what I think TSR did that crippled the hobby.