So, to continue what I was rabbiting on about yesterday. Well, once we were infected with the bug of RPGness, we then infected other people we knew with it. It went to a few other people we knew in our age-range. I passed it on to my brother and my cousin. It then spread to my brother's friends. None of this took very long, and so our afterschool RPG group grew in size and in a short space of time.
As this was going on, another thing was also starting to come out of the woodwork - 'home computing'. Mr Barrett, my form teacher at the time (1982) actually built a small Texas Instruments computer, with a kit he'd ordered through Maplins. This was in the days when Maplins weren't an overpriced, 'Not as good as Tandy' electronics retail chain. Their catalogues also used to have cool sci-fi spaceship art on the cover. I don't know why. Anyway, this TI thing had a 'game' on it called Biorhythms - although it wasn't really a game. You put in the day's date, your birthday, and it'd tell you what sort of day you were going to have. As I was at school putting in this vital information, I already knew what sort of day I was going to have - a crap one. At the same time, the ZX80 and ZX81 were on the market, and not long after came the BBC. Not that my family could afford any of them. So (in a pattern that repeated itself for many years) I had to get my fix of computer games via school or by going to the houses of mates whose parents could afford a home computer. Jaffa's dad bought a BBC. Mr Barrett had a ZX81 at school that he encouraged us to investigate. I'd already played on an Atari console, but these new bits of kit were much better. I found myself getting completely engrossed by computer graphics - a seminal moment being when I first saw:
and...
However, I didn't know how such things were made. My spirits were very much dampened when Mr Barrett told me that they were done with code, and you had to be good at maths to do code. I'm bloody awful at maths, and I still am, so that nipped one dream in the bud. Temporarily...
Getting back to D&D, our group eventually split into two smaller groups. Wiggy decided that he wanted to try being a Dungeon Master, so he ran one small group. Urko and myself were eventually the only ones who decided to stick with Miss Lupton and to carry on slogging through In Search of the Unknown. This paid off, as we gradually rose to third level and amassed some pretty cool stuff (i.e. I had a +2 sword and some Mithril chain mail). However, real life stopped our school D&D sessions. We'd noticed that Miss Lupton was getting 'fatter'. Then she told us that she was leaving school because she was having a baby. It was 1984. We were now on our own...
As a bit of a post-script, Wiggy and I have always wondered what happened to Miss Lupton (she may actually have been Mrs Lupton, but all women teachers at my school were called Miss). It's been very difficult to find her, even in the age of this internet thingy. The simple fact of the matter is that we owe her a great deal. As I said yesterday, if it wasn't for D&D the course of my life would've been much different. If it wasn't for her encouraging us to play and making the game seem like a little nugget of wonder - during what was otherwise a pretty rubbish school experience - I think we'd be very much the lesser for it. So, Miss Lupton, wherever your are: thanks!
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