REBIRTH!

There was a time, many moons ago, that Dungeons & Dragons was my only escape from a world I was hopelessly forced into, a place where I could make few choices for myself, a place where circumstance was a bleak reality.

I was a kid.

This could be misinterpreted as a sob story of sorts, but make no mistake, most of my basic survival needs were met, I had a place to live, food was provided on a regular basis, and I would occasionally have an opportunity to visit strange, sparkly places (the mall). 

A broken home at the age of seven was the catalyst that would shape my desperate battle to escape my surroundings. Displacement from the established norm has a tendency to warp a developing persons views of life. I was plunged head first into a world that was as uncomfortable as it was disheartening. 

I realize now I never really found a place in that world, living with relatives who were, by most standards, completely dysfunctional and wholly narcissistic. They reveled in their own soap opera lives, something I saw as a cycle to escape from as soon as the law would allow.

My saving grace, other than the strong hereditary passion of angling, was discovering the universe that had been created by a company called TSR. I was exposed to this wondrous creation by my older cousin Michael. I was forced to live with him and my two other cousins off and on for years, plagued by their incessant need to surround themselves in drama on a constant basis.

But, I must thank him on some level, because his devotion to gaming sparked my imagination. My earliest memories of fantasy were holding an original monochrome version of the popular AD&D module G3-Hall of the Fire Giant King. The cover of this well used booklet became etched in my mind, displaying all the imagery I would need to begin a journey into a land I could truly become another person in. Finally, a place that I could be something, a hero, a warrior, a wizard. It was a place where anything could happen, there was no school with it’s mind-numbing classrooms, instead there were piles of gold and magical items waiting to be discovered. 

I would eventually inherit that piece of history, saving it from lonely abandonment and eventual landfill destruction, placing it in storage more than twenty years ago. It fell into place in the boxes of my accumulated RPG materials, mainly First Edition AD&D products with a smattering of other oddball periodicals, rulebooks, and assorted many sided dice.

These boxes would get an occasional browse, usually when I would move, but no real desire hit me to rekindle my gaming days. 

This all changed a few years ago. A summer of circumstantial inactivity put me in a position of rediscovery. The stained and mangled boxes came out of the attic, and along with them came a renewed sense of excitement! Times were changing, and it was time I did too. Time to go back to a simpler world, where I think I really have wanted to be for a long time. 

Back to the dungeon...