I cut my teeth on D&D in early 1990 with the D&D Basic Set (the red box with the great Elmore cover art). After a brief foray into the Expert set I moved on to the then-young 2nd Edition of AD&D. In that system I was almost always the Dungeon Master. By the time I entered High School in 1992 the Golden Age of RPG Publishing had begun: I played Palladium’s Robotech, Heroes Unlimited and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles games, and ran some memorable Rifts campaigns…but my first love was AD&D. I was quick to move my amorphously-homebrew game into the Forgotten Realms, and incorporated trips to Ravenloft and Sigil (the nexus of the fantastic Plansecape setting). I also ran and played in some great Spelljammer campaigns.

From the release of White Wolf’s paperback first edition of Vampire: The Masquerade I was hooked into the World of Darkness, and those games competed with AD&D for my time at the table. Mage: The Ascension was a great game to read but a hard game for teenagers to run, and I spent more time writing rich backgrounds for my M:TA campaign than I spent running Mage. My AD&D games carried on, but we played with less frequency, and Magic: The Gathering took up more and more of my gaming time as I moved from High School to University.

That being said, I loved the AD&D games that I ran while I was in college. The campaign that my friends and I had started in Middle School lived on, tangentially, through the mini-campaigns we played in college. I’m particularly proud of my all-thief  Waterdeep campaign, and the release of Baldur’s Gate PC game inspired me to start a fine Dalelands campaign (which eventually disintegrated).

Post-college life was less kind to my gaming: my friends and I had careers to start and relationships to manage, so we started more campaigns than we finished. After my attempt to reboot and upgrade my adolescent Forgotten Realms campaign was foiled by relationship problems I hung up my dice bag….but my love of the game never died, and once my relationship status changed I came back to the game, this time as a player and occasional DM.

Unfortunately, career and commute conspired to take me out of the game for a time…until now. I’m back at the table, working on my homebrew campaign world and rolling the dice on a weekly basis. As you can see, I’m also thinking and writing about the game I love. This time I’m back at the table for good, and you shouldn’t be surprised if you find me behind the screen, where I belong, in the near future.