Pleading sickness, I stayed home from school to play this when it arrived. In 1974, I found out about Dungeons & Dragons, and started playing that, too. Eventually I developed my own roleplaying games, then continued to design games clear up to now, completing the process I guess I’d started when shooting “nazis” as a 6 year old kid.
But it turns out that the way that roleplaying games first evolved was in tabletop miniature wargames. Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson decided to label certain officers as themselves in their wargaming group. JUST LIKE BILL AND ME! They then started playing medieval wargames instead of napoleonics, then added fantasy creatures, then started letting their heroes upgrade between battles (again, we were doing this too). And in the end created fantasy roleplaying games with Dungeons & Dragons.
I owned two entire copies of this. Lost to mildew when mom stored them in a damp basement. I was on the exact same track, at least for a while. I wonder how many other people in the late 60s, early 70s were also orbiting Gygax & Arneson’s great idea. Now, I’m not saying that I would have eventually invented roleplaying on my own. Who knows? But I had at least embarked on the same road as Gygax/Arneson, without knowing it, Of course I was also just a feckless teenager, with zero ability to bring my ideas to the marketplace, or even an inkling how this could be done.
But now you know this tale, and I hope you find it interesting.
– Sandy P.
