Tabletop role-playing games made me who I am.
I can say that as surely as I can say it about my family, our socio-economic bracket, and my DNA. Later on, my identity would be shaped strongly by what I read and what I watched. But from age 5 on, role-playing games were at the core of my cultural experience. They formed the bulk of my reading outside of schoolwork, and they dominated how I spent my free time.
Like a lot of folks, Dungeons and Dragons was the game where I got my start. My brother (four years older) got the D&D Basic Set at the tale end of the 1970s. I was occasionally allowed to play, and in a couple of years I was also allowed to look at the slim Advanced Dungeons and Dragons rulebooks that he collected. But the D&D books were never mine. I bought one or two supplements later on, but the core books and the vast majority of our adventure modules belonged to Kurt.
But it didn’t take me long to discover other games, always in different genres. I started to frequent the role-playing game section of toy stores just as much as the other sections and eventually more. And then sometime in the mid-1980s, I discovered Mind Games, at the time the only game store in Toledo, OH. During the early- to mid-80s I purchased all sorts of different games: Chill, Call of Cthulhu, Indiana Jones, James Bond, Tunnels and Trolls, Crime Fighter, Bureau 13: Stalking the Night Fantastic, Pendragon, GURPS, Top Secret, Car Wars, and near the end of high school, Star Wars and Space: 1889. About half of these games remained on my shelves (who am I kidding, strewn haphazardly around my bedroom), read but unplayed. I wanted to play them, but I was not good at convincing my friends to play them. But we did play hours and hours, years and years of Chill, Tunnels and Trolls, and Stalking. And, of course, D&D.
Just the other day, I was diving down an internet rabbit hole when I discovered a site dedicated to collecting scans of out-of-print tabletop RPGs. I’m ambivalent about these sorts of sites. Part of me respects the archival nature of the collections, and I obviously got a powerful jolt of nostalgia when I perused it. And part of me is shocked at all of the “free” content that is still protected by copyright. I won’t link to it here, but it’s out there.
One of the things that it made me confront and ponder is the way that I have been a completist about certain things and what that means for me. For instance, I have the complete line of material produced for the first edition of Chill put out by Pacesetter Limited in the early 1980s. I am fairly certain I have everything made for the James Bond RPG, as well. I remember this vividly. When I found Chill, I found something that brought together disparate interests. By that time, I already had a strong affinity for macabre tales, and I was an avid gamer. Here was a horror RPG that seemed completely different from TSR’s D&D. I owned Call of Cthulhu, but Chill flipped more switches for me than the Lovecraft-based game did. Who knows why? Maybe it was the graphic design. Maybe it was just the world the designers created. I usually made at least a weekly visit to the toy store and later to Mind Games. Whenever there was a new Chill supplement, I bought it, or it was the next thing I bought when I had enough money. I wanted everything they produced. Anyway, looking back now, it’s almost unbelievable that Pacesetter introduced Chill in 1984, and they ceased company operations by 1986. The ripples they created spread for years after that.
When I found this trove of online scans, of course I fantasized about finally getting to play some of them. Even before the current pandemic, I had found my way back to the early relationships, gaming online with some of my childhood friends, my partner, and some new friends. Roll20 has allowed us all to connect in a way that feels vital and necessary. It has also allowed me to tick off some boxes. I played through a full D&D5e campaign, I ran a full Delta Green campaign, and I’m trying out a brand new game. But even so, I felt this greed to try out old games in a new format. Maybe I could find people to play Space: 1889. Maybe someone would want to play through those old Chill scenarios, too. Maybe I could, and maybe they would. But that really is just pure nostalgia. The connection with others that comes while playing these games is sufficient (not really necessary), but it’s not at all necessary for me to go back and finally get to play these games. Would it be fun? Probably. But it also feels indulgent.
I’m ecstatic to have reconnected with old gaming buddies and added new people to that circle. We have already created new and exciting adventures together. I’m heartened to see so many of my friends online doing the same around the world. Maybe I will play some of those old games again some day, but I’m not worried about it anymore. It doesn’t feel like a missed opportunity. It feels more like the reason I have some of the opportunities I have today. I think it’s safe to say that I pursued fiction writing because of all the different games I found it difficult to play for one reason or another. My first feature-length screenplay was a straight adaptation of Space: 1889. If I couldn’t tell these stories with my friends, then maybe I could tell them to my friends. And now to people I don’t even know.