Tidbits II: We Were Gamers Once, And Young ...

Spring 1979: While I’d been GMing solo sessions with my younger brother Mike since the previous year, my first actual campaign started later.  I didn’t start keeping my famously insanely detailed records until March of 1981.  But the timeline involved my high school classmate Laurey starting school at UMass-Amherst at the end of January 1979, and shortly thereafter I visited her out there, and we and our fellow high school classmate Marilyn got into a startup Empire of the Petal Throne game GMed by the guy across the hall from Laurey.  So ... I’m thinking this couldn’t be earlier than May 1979, the point where Laurey and Marilyn would be back home in Plymouth County for the summer.

I'd picked up City State of the Invincible Overlord and the Judges Guild core Wilderlands package; that's what I used to start.  Right from the beginning, though, I wasn't satisfied with the dungeon fantasy flavor of Random Stuff Randomly Strewn, or with the Wilderlands/JRRT standard of oases of high civilization in the middle of howling wildernesses, with orc hordes in bowshot of every town's walls.  The pen went flying fast.  (I still use the Wilderland maps as the underlying basis for my world, even heavily edited, but only out of decades of inertia; I'd create my own if starting from scratch.)

The dramatis personae, in no particular order.

My first players were high school classmates of mine: Laurey, Mal and Jackie were in my graduating class, Rick was in the next one, and we'd all been in the chorus together.  My younger brother Mike (an avid sword-and-planet reader who was a class behind Rick) made the fifth player.  Mike played Korak, a barbarian firmly in the Conan mode and with a Conanesque future; Rick played Valthor, a more Norse-style barbarian; Jackie played Alexandra the priestess; Laurey played Seka the courtesan-mage; and Marilyn played Linden the stick jock.  Classic Howard/Leiber style early RPG play, really, that was 70s gaming for you. (This also set a significant pattern for my whole gaming career; note that this was a majority-female group.  Save for a single semester at my first college's gaming club's sessions, I would never not have at least one woman at my table.  That was decidedly NOT 70s gaming standard, and it was a while before I realized that this was not merely unusual but highly so.)

I wish I remembered what the first adventure was.  (Likely it was pedestrian enough by my present-day standards that I'd cringe in retrospect.)  I do remember that I set the table with the weary party, walking on a dust-clouded road, heading for the great gate of one of the mightiest cities ever founded ...  I ran a couple of the JG published scenarios early on -- Dark Tower, Thieves of Badabaskor -- as well as a homebrew dungeon or two, and the CSO remained the home base of the party for a couple of years.

Early on, though, I got geopolitical, but that's a tale for another time ...

* * * * * * * * * *

The crew shook out fairly fast.  Mike, Rick and Laurey were in my campaigns for years, but Jackie was my first encounter with the Gamer Girlfriend stereotype; she played pretty much because the rest of us were, and she dropped the hobby like a hot potato when she and Rick split up soon after.  Marilyn was the root cause for my abandonment of random gen and journey to variant homebrew; she hated playing anything but wizards, went along only grudgingly with the STR 18 DEX 16 fighter-type she rolled up (unfortunately, I hadn't yet wrapped my head around RAW being a suggestion, not a mandate, and I cajoled her unwillingly into it), and ditched her for greener pastures soon enough.  She was only an intermittent player thereafter.  

That being said, our gang was heavily dominated by graduates from Silver Lake.  Of my first fifteen players only four weren’t high school classmates of mine: the aforementioned EPT GM and another UMass player of his (both of whom lived in the Boston area), and Rick’s martial arts teacher and his wife.  We wound up playing a lot of our games in the teacher’s home through to the end of 1981.

By 1982, Laurey and I fell out over my dating my future first wife, and Rick went career Navy  around the same time.  Mike was an occasional player for years to come, and was a regular as late as 1987; his final curtain call was in 1989, at a massive run that involved seventeen past and then-present players, and I needed two assistant GMs just to handle it.

It's odd how this underscores the longevity of my current group.  My wife and another player, Todd, have been gaming with me since 2003, and they're the youngsters of the bunch.  Andrew's been gaming with me with some breaks since 1990.  Dave's been gaming with me (with likewise some breaks) since 1987.

 But that, too, is a tale for another time ...