Love these stories fellas, makes me all warm and fuzzy inside. Keep 'em coming.
Let's see...I was about 8 or 9 (believe it or not). I had devoured the ring trillogy, LeGUin's Earthsea books, and was focusing my sites on Elric, when my friend's older brother (13) suggested we come down to the basement to try something new and cool...
Now if I was David Fincher this story could get really dark, but happily the only thing he whipped out was a copy of the Players Handbook and the DM's guide. By the time the night was over, my Ranger (Eemayus) had journeyed all of 50' into B1 searched a couple of alcoves for secret doors, rifled through the clothing of some telltale corpse for a fistfull of GPs (heedless of the dire warning their state of deadnes implied), before my companion (a thief) was to reduced to 0 HP by a band of wandering orcs (no doubt trying to remember where they parked their wyvern) who I then picked up and promptly fled with back out into the blessed light of day.
As far as I was concerned I might as well have just gone to mount doom, found stormbringer, and defeated Voldemort. Henceforth, I was officially a gamer.
After much exuberant blabbing and assuredly a fair amount of juvenile emotional blackmail, I convinced my dad to take me to the only game store in Manhattan, the Compleat Strategist (at that time devoted largely to historical wargaming). There in the corner was the white box set...but even better the three wondrous books. It was as if someone had cast a wish spell because my dad let me buy to of the books (DMG & MM), which I buried myself in all through dinner, only seldomly glancing up to eat a morsel of Eggroll of Beef with Snowpeas. Then something miraculous happened, my Dad actually took me back to the store and got me the third book...needless to say, I plotzed.
From that point forward I was always scrambling to get someone to play. Middle school was a good time for working out my gaming kinks, even wrote my first modules like R1 river to beyond, and G4 The Castle of the Cloud Giants, but as we got older, players became increasingly scarce. My big bro was more into sports, my next door neighbor and buddy started to get into music.
Since I couldn't find gamers to game with, I started playing with myself....no, not like that (though admittedly I was 13....) A fellow 8th grader turned me on to a cool new magazine called ARES. Each issue had a complete fantasy/sci-fi game in it. GTFO! And all for like 3 bucks an issue. Ah the halcyon days of of pre-GW marketing.
The Ares Mag games were all chit based and covered everything from Delta V (a space fighter) to Stainless Steel Rat (think clue with robots and guns) to Albion (an awesome fantasy wargame set in faerie england which was one part rpg one part ttg). Long nights were spent out-strategizing myself, reading Fritz Leiber's Nehwon series, and NOT doing my algebra homework...which would cause me much trouble in H.S....but THAT is another story.
It wasn't until H.S. that I found some RPGers again and started branching out into games like VIllains & Vigilantes and Gamma World. Somewherein my Junior year I was cycling in England and wandered into a store and found a box set of 3 books called Warhammer Fantasy Battles. Well this, this was impossibly wondrous...a game that let me recreate LOTR and super awesome cool figs (mind you that were DIRT CHEAP!). I bought everything my lanky arms could reach. My bike crew was heading to france so I shipped all my booty back to the states...and got home weeks later to find...
...the package had been lost...I'm positive that, to this day, somewhere in Lausanne there's an evil postal bastard still using my figs!
Still it didn't matter. I knew they'd make more...and I'd be there to purchase them. Soon enough I had small dwarf facing off against orcs around the Ziguraut of Doom and, man, life was good.
College was the big explosion for me. I joined the University's game group, and much to my dismay that the weekly D&D game had about 14 players and was generally mayhem.
Also, I was already studying screenwriting and I knew I wanted more than just dice rolling out of my adventures.
Grabbing four newcomers like myself I casually suggested we try a new game WFRP. We started at 5 and finshed by breakfast (thank God NYC is a 24 hour town). WFRP was muddy, grimey, deadly, scary, and the way I ran it...much more about the roleplay and the unfolding story. Oh sure we had some fights, but I encouraged my players to really create characters, I used lots of accents and voices for the NPC's, I enacted a rule "what you say is what you say and what you do is what you do" Which kept the tone and taught mouthy players that sure they could call the Watch Captain a Squig-Hole but there were going to be consequences.
We played for five years more or less, and several of my players are now game designers and writers I'm proud to say.
I really didn't get into UWZ until right after college, by now I was a ridonkulous gamer, Rogue Trader, Champions, Twilight 2000, Blood Bowl, I either had read or sat least tried most everything coming out. WFB was my mainstay, I had an awesome Orc Army with over 50 Wolfriders and a dozen chariots (in those days armies felt like ARMIES, and you could afford them - a pack of 8 goblns cost about 5 bucks), and a bad ass, cannon laden, Empire force.
I was attracted to 1st Ed WZ by the great art and beautiful layout. The system seemed fresh (Alter. act.) and the world was enaging, so me and my friend Scott gave it a whirl and had a blast.
Life took over from there, gaming went bye-bye as I became uncomfortable being a geek (it was the 80's=90's and geeks weren't in vogue, he-men were), so I kinda stuffed everything in a closet and focused on my career and clubbing, dinners, girls, and work sucked up all my time. The fun thing was every now and then discovering a gamer hidden in the "hipster" scene.
I really didn't get back into gaming (and kinda missed the boat of a lot of WZ 2n Ed playing) until maybe 8 years ago.
Sometimes, it's kind of like a drug, it gives me a rush to play, bringing back all those wondrous flights of fantasy from my youth and the good times we had. These days I'm proud to be a geek. As a writer, gaming is a great imagination stimulator and I love the mental challenge of trying to outwit my opponent tactically.
I'm ever in search of the TTG ultimate system but UWZ comes very close. Lately I've also gotten into Rezolution which takes me back to the days of watching Blade Runner for the 100th time.
I'm honored to be counted among your ranks gentleman. Here's to many more tales of Dice rolls that almost were and Nepharites that got away.