Adolescence

In late 1985, a teen meets a fellow nerd in the hall near the library during lunch at his new school, in a quite rural part of the Appalachians. The fellow nerd has played Advanced Dungeons & Dragons and they talk about the game a lot, but never get a game going (neither can drive yet). The fellow nerd is a social pariah and drops out of school soon thereafter, and the teen is mocked for associating with him, and eventually foolishly turns down a date with the pariah’s sister because of that association. (It’s not like he’s being asked out often.) The teen finds two other not-quite-pariahs, a pair of artists in his biology class. They sketch superheroes and fantasy monsters on their class papers and have played D&D, too, and this meeting does actually lead to games being played in the teen’s stuffy bedroom and one of the other boy’s stuffy lofts. These games range far and wide, including a series of Avalon Hill wargames, Top Secret/S.I. and Gamma World, and Battletech, but AD&D is the mainstay. The three begin to collect miniatures and paint them, using Testors model paints with their exceedingly glossy finishes. By not eating school lunch the teen “earns” five dollars a week for these expenses. Two-hour round-trips are made to get to and from the hobby store, in a different state over a mountain inside the nauseating back of a car, or worse, lying down in a camper-top pickup. It is agreed among the three that Ral Partha possesses the superior sculptors in its stable. Irredeemable Grenadier minis are turned to silvery blobs by the teens with the press of a hot poker, a dollar-fifteen spent for a brief thrill.

The teen has purchased Battlesystem and convinces his parents to allow him to build a sandbox (not table) in the attic for the “miniatures” (i.e., cardboard counters) game. The attic is either far too hot or cold to play in at any time of the year, and the sand is a coarse grade purchased from a nearby mine, painful on hands and knees. The adventures with the high school friends include a number of the classic main-line AD&D modules: The I series, the “Ghost Tower of Inverness,” and “White Plume Mountain.” The teen develops an Oriental Adventures campaign that gets played once. (The teen has no premonition that his father-in-law will eventually be a man who describes himself as an "Oriental.")

Many fun hours on maps, though!

The series that takes over play, however, is Dragonlance, using the Heroes of the Lance as characters. The teen appreciates that the PCs have depth (however shallow one might think the Dragonlance characters) and personalities, compared to how the kids used to play, with PCs that had been mostly treated just as murder-effective statblocks with no personality. In retrospect, the teen also appreciated the compactness of the index-sized character “sheets.” The three play into senior year of high school, reaching the beginning of D12 (the tenth playable module), when one of them becomes popular, just a year after he’d been devoted to almost endlessly replaying the Dragonlance strategy game (D11) and raving about Test of the Twins. The teen himself flirts with popularity that last year of high school. This Dragonlance campaign ends. 

The best friend’s visits are only occasional, but Dragonlance becomes the mainstay for their RPG activity, too, even though the best friend is controlling six or more PCs. The teen even arranges a joint Dragonlance session bringing together his new friends and the best friend. Still, the best friend version of the campaign stalls out after DL9. The best friend writes of his D&D he gets to play in his new world, and his nervousness about making blunders in front of the other nerds, some of whom are kind of cool, for nerds. The best friend keeps a pornographic magazine beneath the gameboard in Outdoor Survival’s box. The teen teases that they should play this game in the presence of the best friend’s mom and sister while he is visiting. 

The teen evangelizes D&D to his other three boy maternal cousins, and then eventually the fifth, youngest boy cousin, after the teen becomes an adult. They play once a year every year at the reunion, almost every day for a week. This is a tradition that almost didn't happen. The grandfather and two uncles are ministers, and the Satanic Panic is in the air. There is an adult-only meeting about whether to allow Dungeons & Dragons & Demons & Spells to be permitted at the vacation. Surprisingly, in retrospect, the RPG is allowed. (The male cousins grow up to be professor & teacher, lawyer, scientist, accountant x2, and preacher, so only 50% emerge as evil from the evangelical perspective.) The teen re-arranges furniture in the vacation cottages, finds odd, smelly rooms that barely fit the six boys, and runs games on the porch when there’s no other space. He writes some of his own adventures, but mostly just patches together materials from different sources, including “The Secret of Bone Hill,” but no others from Greyhawk, as the teen bought the gazetteer and found it tedious and ungameable. The cousins’ PCs have names like “Fire Ball,” “Ningle,” and “Duke Ironface.” Their party is constantly bailed out of trouble by a halfling DMPC called “Frow-Dough Nickens.” Eventually the teen becomes tired of this procedure, and literally pulls a “rocks fall, everyone dies” at the end of the last session one summer. Via this DM fiat, the cousins begin playing Dragonlance during the next family reunion.