Further adventures in...er...stuff...

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!

In the beginning...

Without a shadow of a doubt, if I'd never started playing RPGs the course of my life would be radically different. Well, by 'life' I mean 'what I ended up doing for a living in any important sense' - but, then again, it all tends to feed into other areas as well. This is something I realised awhile ago and is a view shared by my friend Paul 'Wiggy' Wade-Williams, who is the author of a large amount of RPG material and co-owns, Triple Ace Games.  

It all started 30 years ago...

*Cue 'wooooo' noise and shimmering camera effect à la Scooby Doo cartoons to denote going back in time...*

It's 1981. Picture the scene - two boys with bad hair and some sort of interest in heavy metal meet during their first week at secondary school. Fast-forward a bit to 1982. They now have a friend nicknamed 'Jaffa' (his second name was Gorringe - you can see how inventive kids were in coming up with monikers for people). He gets caught reading Warlock of Firetop Mountain in a maths class by his teacher, Miss Lupton. 

'Pay attention, Gorringe...'

I don't remember if he got detention for that, but that's by the by. Anyway, she asks him if he's ever heard of a game called Dungeons and Dragons, and if he and his friends would be interested in playing the game in an after-school group. This is the point at which pretty much everything starts.

At the time, D&D seemed to be something that was coming out of the woodwork. At least, that's how it seemed to us, living as we were in a somewhat isolated bit of south Somerset. D&D was in the film ET. You'd see adverts for it in magazines and comics. We also got our hands on a book called What Is Dungeons and Dragons?

That's a rather cool Citadel Miniatures Red Dragon, as far as I can remember...

This was a pretty good book, even if it was written by some posh schoolkids from Eton. It gave me a better insight into how the game worked. One amusing part has the 'script' of a game session, in which one of the players (when attacked by a giant locust) says 'I'll cream the locust'. Now, none of us really knew what was meant by that. We assumed he was talking about killing it. It's just that use of the word 'cream' wasn't something that sounded right. On the back of the book it says 'From students to solicitors, punks to professors, everyone is at it!'. This was patently untrue. Only a small group of us (around 8 spotty herberts at most) played it at school and we didn't tell anyone. Why? I'll tell you why. Because of the bloody awful Dungeons and Dragons cartoon that was on TV at the time, that's why. I'm not even going to add a pic of that. Look it up on Youtube. Actually, don't. It's still rubbish. Other kids at school didn't really get D&D because of that, so we didn't advertise our interest.

For a few hours once a week after all classes had finished we'd pile into Miss Lupton's classroom and slog our way through the dungeon she'd created for us (I found out years later that it was actually In Search Of The Unknown). We'd acquired some nice 35mm figures and so, using my imagination to the fullest, I decided to create a character based on one of these. It was a Dwarf fighter and I called him Mystichi Argonshire. Wiggy's character (also a Dwarf fighter) was my brother, and his name was Argos Argonshire. You read that right - his first name was Argos. For my American readers, Argos is a chainstore that sells various electrical, etc things. In that sense, a US-version of Argos Argonshire would be Walmart Argonshire. I think Mystichi was a name I nicked from a Michael Moorcock book I was reading at the time. Along with us was a Magic User and a Druid - my friend Urko was the former, and I think Jaffa was the latter. We spent a great deal of time exploring that dungeon, never really knowing what it was all about but having fun regardless. We started to find treasure, we'd fight monsters, we'd map the places we'd explored and at the end of each session try to make our way back out to the entrance. This was because there was an NPC mentor, the Venerable Bede (who lived in a nearby temple) who would try to explain some of our finds. We'd like to ask him things before the session was over, as waiting to find out on the following week was just too much to bear.

Anway, all of this was the seed from which many other things grew. I will get around to explaining how that developed tomorrow...

Back to scribbling...

I've spent far too long away from two things I like: namely, drawing and D&D. My artwork nowadays is created digitally, which tends to be about labour-saving, rather than working away at the coalface. Or the drawing board. So I decided to combine the two. I'm a little rusty on both subjects, but here goes...

What is it? Answers on a postcard please...

One of the things I've always liked about D&D (at least, the 1st Edition AD&D version I started on way back in 1982) is that it has some pretty odd stuff in it. The homage-to-Tolkien themes didn't really sink in at the time, and still don't. Let's face it, the Tolkien stuff isn't half as weird as the mind that invented something as odd as a Carrion Crawler...

Speaking of which, here's my take on a few bits of one:

 

Not that it's a final version of anything. If one sticks to the 'cephalopod meets cutworm' description from the (1980) version of the Monster Manual I have, I think it needs to be more like a nautilus. Still, early days...