My Early RPGs

         I started gaming with D&D around 3rd grade (in 1978). I played that for a few years mainly with my friends Marc and Jason. At some point, we switched to mainly Champions. I lost touch with my gaming friends when I went to a different high school, although we still did a few games together.

         It's hard to class my grade-school games into distinct campaigns, especially since I have no records from them. We tended to just have various characters generated and pick-up games. I did run four convention games with my old friends during high school and the summer after freshman year. These were:

"The Weird of Sathar" (Origins XI, June 1985)

A fairly straight AD&D dungeon-crawl, but with a rigorously worked out background. The dungeon was a ruined underground monastery which we mapped out first as a working institution.

"Murder on the Oriental Dragon Express" (Origins XI, June 1985)

A high-level AD&D spoof set on "Oerth's 800 ft. Organic Train System from Greyhawk to Gladsheim". It was a bit juvenile, but then so were we.

"A Tale of Two Cities" (Origins '87)

A peculiar AD&D tournament with two interesting features. It had two groups of PCs competing to share the same prize, and both groups consisted entirely of thieves (!).

"Bunnies and Burrows" (Origins '87)

A tactically-oriented B&B tournament, involving a push to rescue some fellow bunnies from a farmer's pen. It was pretty unsuccessful due to being scheduled early Sunday morning, and despite having three of us to run it, we were all falling asleep.