A Lot on My Mind

 As the title suggests, I have a lot on my mind lately. Some of which I don't want to talk about here at the moment.

I enjoy a good game. I have lots of board games and lots of role-playing games, and I even partake in the occasional Xbox One and PS4 game, though I consider myself first and foremost a tabletop gamer more than anything else.

I have nothing against video games - I love them, in fact. I love them for the stories they tell. I'm one of those guys who sets a game to the easiest possible setting so I can get the story front and center. Being a lover of movies and growing up on comics and sci-fi/fantasy novels, this shouldn't really surprise anyone who knows me even a little bit.

Like I said previously, the "Curated Quarantine" got me thinking and reminiscing about days gone by. Call it a mid-life crisis, but, as far as I'm concerned, if this is the way I deal with mid-life is going back and re-buying old RPGs and board games from my youth, then I'm sure no one will fault me for doing that instead of something more destructive and stupid.

I mentioned the "Satanic Panic" last time. My parents aren't idiots, so they understood that all that crap was ... well ... crap. As far as they were concerned, I was smart enough to not run around in steam tunnels and stay in my room with my friends and run games for hours on end. They didn't have to worry about me being somewhere they thought may be unsafe, or somewhere where I'd make a bad choice and do something regrettable. Instead, I was safe and sound in my house, or my friends' houses, rolling dice and creating. Granted the first few years were essentially comic-book slugfests, but who cares - we had a lot of fun.

So as you can see, I'm not the typical tabletop gamer of my generation. I didn't start with a "Red Box" Dungeons & Dragons set. In fact, I didn't even play D&D until the second gaming convention I ever went to - Kulcon 3 held at a Radisson Hotel in Topeka, Kansas in the early or mid-90's. It was an RPGA game, I played a Paladin, had a good time, and then didn't touch D&D again until the third edition came out in 2000.

No, my descent into the belly of El Diablo was at the instigation of my own brother. Now, he'd played D&D amongst other things. He's about seven years older than me, and, to his credit, he never was one to shy away from spending time with his younger siblings - he never once complained about his annoying brother and sister (at least out loud where I could hear it). He was the one who introduced me into gaming in general, both tabletop and video games.

I remember we had an Atari 2600 growing up, and then a Texas Instruments home computer. I think it was a TI-99/4A, but I don't remember specifically. I recall playing things like the E.T. game on Atari and Space Invaders on the Texas Instruments, but very little else. Probably the biggest thing I remember, at least about the Texas Instruments computer, was the smell it had. I know that's weird, but it had a distinct smell - or at least the room we had it in did. I can't really explain exactly what the smell was, but if I were to sniff it again, it'd take me right back to tapping away at the loud keyboard in our playroom. We didn't graduate to a Nintendo until much later.

My brother got a Commodore 128D for Christmas one year, and that became the thing we played. We had tons of games for it - Ultimate Wizard, Mail Order Monsters, Save New York, Rampage, Gauntlet, and so many others. It was a blast. We had to run games in BASIC (load "*",8,1 will be ingrained in my brain until I die, and even then ...) and it was the most awesome thing ever.

Now, my recollection of these actual events are likely clouded by retelling and over-dramatizing it over the years, but I remember when I was about nine or ten years old, my brother called me into his room to discuss something with me. I went in and he handed me two boxed sets - one yellow and the other blue. It may have just been one set, I really don't remember exactly, but I remember it as him handing me copies of the Marvel Super Heroes Role-Playing Game Basic Set (yellow box) and the Advanced Set (blue box). He then placed his hand on my shoulder and pointed at some bookshelves that he had mounted on the wall next to his room door on those old metal brackets.

The shelf was full of a variety of books - most of which I don't remember at all, except that he pointed at some books that said, "Rifts" on the side, and said, in quite possibly the most important brotherly advice he ever gave me, "Never play that game."

So two things were born that day - my fervent love of the Marvel Super Heroes Role-Playing Game and my unfailing dismissal of the Rifts universe at large (and, really, the whole Palladium system in general).

I had two real friends at the time (Sam and Anthony), and both were interested in playing when I showed them what I had been bequeathed. Despite their interest, however, neither was interested in actually running a game, so the duty of "Judge," as the MSH RPG called the role, fell to me. Therefore, out the gate, I was the designated game-master for our little group, and thus began several years of running games for my friends.

I didn't get to play in anything for a few years as my brother was too busy with other things to run games for me - and besides had a bad outing trying to run my sister through a game and killed her character off or some such. To this day, my sister still blames him for it and hasn't ever been one to roll dice with us on really any occasion.

On a side note, I think it's been at least a decade since my sister sat down to play so much as a board game with me. She embraced art and theater on her own, and is quite happy with her lack of gaming street-cred.

The Marvel game still holds a place in my heart to this day, and has always been there in the back of my head as something I remember quite fondly.

Anyway, it was the "Curated Quarantine" that made me think of all those memories, and many more thereafter, that has spurned me into writing the very words you see before you now.

So it is with this that I will set out to write about things - probably mostly gaming things, that are on my shelf. I will likely wander off the beaten path from time-to-time, and write about other things, but as of right now, I want to write about my love and passion for games - especially the games that have stuck with me, influenced me, and to this day make me smile.

I look forward to continuing down this road and I hope that someone, somewhere, who might read this, will smile in return, for that will make it all worth it.