These volumes sit in a place of reverence on my living room bookshelf and remind me of my place in the RPG universe. My original, 3 volume D&D set and AD&D Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's guide and Monster Manual were lost on a rainy night in Santa Ana in 1980, but a friend provided me this set on long-term loan to what has become a single-shelf museum to the grandfather of pen and paper RPG. The fact that we now have to prefix "RPG" with "pen and paper" bring on a melancholy that is sometimes hard to shake.
A few years ago, a couple friends and I decided to run a couple of nostalgia games using first the original rules and then another game using the AD&D rules. How we managed to play with these in the 1970s and early 80s is beyond us. As we played, we tried to find rules we were sure existed, but were nowhere to be found. There was so much ambiguity that house rules accumulated like flowstone, obliterating the original core and becoming indistinguishable from the literal rule sets. It was an enjoyably frustrating few hours at the end of which we decided we would probably never try again. With D&D, as in life, you can never really go home.
1 comment:
As Barry Wood pointed out, and would have been worthy of mentioning in the original post, we played the OD&D attempt in memoriam to Gary Gygax the year he died.
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