I was always into the idea of playing D&D ever since I bought a copy of the 3.0 Monster Manual from a bookstore in the mall two towns over in middle school. I had no idea what 2d8 meant or how to use most of the information contained in the book but the pictures were cool and I liked reading the entries. Eventually I would blow my money I earned at my job washing out self-service car wash bays on the Player's Handbook and Dungeon Master's Guide, as well as the core rules to Aberrant of all things. I would head down to the comic book store and pick up oddball rules supplements for GURPS like Bio-Tech, Mecha, Cthulhupunk and Space. I owned things like Savage Species and Oriental Adventures, and I even paid a high school friend $10 for four copies of RIFTS and one random Robotech book.
Seriously, does anyone remember this book?
But all through this I never actually played any of these games. My friends were never that interested, I didn't own the correct kind of dice, and more than anything else I just couldn't get around to other people's houses in rural Georgia. Between school, work and taking care of the family farm I didn't have a lot of time for socializing. So those books wound up dog-eared and their bindings are suspect today but I never got the chance to use them.
In college, I made friends who got me into a variety of new stuff that we didn't have much of in my small town, including drugs. Starting out with weed, I eventually got into psychedelics and narcotics as well. While I enjoyed the numbing effect and distant euphoria of that last category, it never quite took hold of me like it did in others. So when I had to get my wisdom teeth out and left with a prescription for a bottle of pre-opioid epidemic hydrocodone, I thought they would be purely medicinal for me. Turned out the operation had a quick recovery time and I was left with a mostly-full bottle of pills. I took a few for fun, passed some out to friends, but eventually one of my buddies hooked me up with a guy at a party who wanted to buy them off of me for a very generous $15/pill.
This was 2008, before I had gotten a job on campus, so I spent most of my time strapped for cash. My college was paid for by the state through a program for the disabled (losing that foot paid off I guess) and so most of my money needs were for extraneous shit like movie tickets, video games and restaurant meals. This was a decent chunk of change for me, so I took him up on it.
We met in a dark employees-only parking lot behind a local gas station and made the exchange. With the money burning a hole in my pocket I looked for a way to spend it. At the time I was a fan of the webcomic Penny Arcade (how the mighty have fallen) and they had been putting out a podcast where they played D&D 4th Edition. The game sounded like a lot of fun, it was something I had always wanted to get into, and my nerdy friends were also into the idea, so I took my drug money and purchased the 4th Edition core books.
We had a blast. I cooked up a zany set of adventures about a crew of last-chancer convicts in a city ruled by cruel corporations sent out on suicide missions. In our first adventure the party investigated a spate of disappearances of autons (ersatz warforged) and eventually battled a shotgun-wielding goblin scientist in his scrapyard laboratory. We were all hooked and that campaign lasted for several years, going all the way to epic levels.
Later on we would transition into 13th Age, which we also loved. As so many campaigns do that game became weighed down by a bizarre binder of houserules and custom powers and creaked under the weight of itself. Eventually I graduated (5 years baby) and our campaigns came to an end as everyone moved away to get jobs and start families. I didn't do much in the hobby for a few years, but eventually I discovered online roleplaying, found a good community and got back into the swing of things. I found that 5th Edition held no appeal for me, as it abandoned the grid-based tactical combat that I loved and stripped out the fun powers that my players had enjoyed using (not to mention its development included the contributions of some shitty people and thus it will never get any money from me) and so I moved on to a variety of systems. FATE Atomic Robo was used for a play-by-post campaign of pulp action in 1920s Hong Kong, and I ran 2 years and 2 campaigns worth of stuff using the 4E descendant Strike! which I love quite dearly.
This header for my Atomic Robo game generously provided by one of my players, Fuego Fish.
I discovered the Powered by the Apocalypse engine and had a lot of fun playing Dungeon World and running Monster of the Week. Stars Without Number and Beyond the Wall got me started in OSR games and I soon supplemented that experience with some Black Hack 2E and a one-shot of Silent Legions. I became a big fan of the Forged in the Dark engine, and ran twin campaigns of Scum and Villainy and Blades in the Dark at the same time. I found great appeal in Shadow of the Demon Lord and am still running it to this day, while at the same time dabbling in the Resistance system through Spire. I had always been homebrewing, and somewhere in there I began to dabble in actual design work as well.
Today I'm interested in the OSR scene, picking and choosing what I like from the old-school principles, and I'm injecting those ideas into my own work. Currently I am building a mad synthesis of the OSR, FitD, PbtA and others and I hope to start playtesting this weird mess of a game soon.
So let my story serve as a warning: drugs are a gateway to weirder things, like pretending to be a goblin apostle stuck in a swamp full of vampires, or designing your own intricate factional conflict systems, or writing up dozens of random tables to determine the contents of a nameless bandit's pockets.
My advice: stick to drugs.
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