Here are some highlights from the time I wasted.
1) I first got a copy of the original DnD rules on a family vacation to Minneapolis. It wasn't the boxed set, just the rule book. I filled in the rest. I remember calling my sister an Ogre, but getting the pronunciation wrong. Still, grandma's house was boring, and now I had an excuse to draw one dungeon after another. I still use their notation for doors, cliffs, windows, and trap doors.
2) The first time I fought a skeleton, it had something like six hit points. I had a mace. I was first level. I barely won. I don't think I got too much farther in the dungeon than that. It was in Walnut Creek, CA, and a friend's friend was Dungeon Mastering. He left with the module, whatever it was. I must have been in sixth grade at the time.
3) Keep on the fucking borderlands. Hell. I dunno how many times I burned this thing down and killed everybody in it. Sometimes I had the help of the hobgoblins in the caves of chaos, sometimes not. Sometimes, we killed everything in those caves too. This keep had a way of repeating itself in every fantasy world I constructed...it was they way fantasy empires project power, by replicating this same keep and dropping it all over the map.
4) Riding through a halfling village, on a warhorse, cutting the little fuckers down with a morningstar, or burning their houses down with spells like Flame Strike. I had a predilection for evil clerics, something I can directly attribute to Thulsa Doom's character from Conan the Barbarian. The ones that lived underground, we gassed with spells like Stinking Cloud. We led the women and children away as slaves, in chains, to build a ziggaraut to my mighty power.
5) As an evil, 29th level cleric, we fought the Indian Diety, Ushas, Goddess of Dawn, and defeated her on her own turf, thus destroying her. I still feel guilty about this. She was an awesome goddess. I now realize that we cheated (she should have used her divine command power to completely destroy us...I think we made ourselves deaf or some dumb shit). I don't know how I ended up using clerical spells against another god, but it made sense at the time, even in Elysium. Seems like evil magic should not work there. We had some sort of infernal army helping us. It was like 4:00 AM when we did this, and we were cracked out on Jolt and chocolate chip cookies. Funny, dawn came anyway, in the real world. In my goofy fantasy world, of course, eternal night....EEEVILLL. Everything everywhere must have perished. Dumb cleric, no followers. I was DM and playing with a friend simultaneously, this is something like playing chess against one's self...goofy. That explains it. Seriously, I never see a sunrise nowadays without apologizing to her, or thanking her for making us think we won. Tenth grade, probably.
7) I usually DM'd. I came up with so many fantasy worlds, I could never keep them straight. I remember one scenario where I was breeding armies of undead from caged ghouls and human hostages fed to the ghouls. I would then turn the undead. Another evil cleric. Animate dead was the basis of my power for a hell of a long time. Best third level spell ever, even better than fireball is for magic users, if used properly. One need never to fight opponents again, ZOMBIES do that for you now. Fuck having a thief around to check for traps, let ZOMBIES go first....and hundreds of zombies, led by some fuckwad on a warhorse, is a good time. Hell yeah.
8) I had this campaign with ultra powerful player characters. They were at about 24th level. I translated the book of Revalations into DnD format and ended the fucking world. It was awesome. Early on, they had to keep rolling on the random disease table (yes, there is one in the Dungeon Masters Guide, first edition) for the ailments they got from god, then trying to heal themselves. Somehow, the pagan gods they worshiped still had some modicum of power. There were armies of undead led by a badass antichrist....a big lion-headed beast that breathed sulfur. The PCs knocked those things down, no problem. More monsters though, and earthquakes....I think most of them got wasted before the end. A couple ended up in the lake of fire, tormented eternally. Good job.
9) My friend Rolf was a killer DM. Tomb of Horrors was the perfect module to fuck with me. I think we all died. I was a total pussy about it when my were-rat thief crawled into that fucking sphere of annihilation and disintegrated. I still think that cover is a shitty thing to do...you can clearly see them FIGHTING a lich. Instead, you get this crappy demilitch that is indestructible, and devours your souls forever...it was a total killer dungeon. At the time I was pissed, now KNOW why Gary Gygax wrote it, from the daughter of a woman that played with him all the time. HE DID write it to kill characters, he wrote it to kill her, specifically. This was the same woman who invented the rust monster, by the way. Figures, doesn't it? You DnD fans out there, your most memorable, miserable DnD experience resulted from a personal vendetta. Wouldn't have it any other way, now. Sometimes you are just fucked.
10) THANK YOU, ex wife, for the few times I got laid BECAUSE of DnD. Great times.
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