My Gaming History to 1990

We were talking the other day about when we started playing particular games, so I started pitting memory against releases, gauging duration and intensity.

Personal RPG History

Dramatis Personae

Me: Will (1962 - Present)

Ted: my younger brother (1964-2017)

Dad: my father, Alan (1931-1996)

Mom: my mother, Anita (1939- 1975)

All the players: James, Bear, Mike, Tim, Randy, John, Rick, Tina, Bob, Natalie, Sho, and all my students.

Chainmail Dad purchased and gave Ted and I the copy, probably in '72, and we immediately transformed our train table into a fantasy battlefield.

D&D original brown books '74 Again, Dad purchased the box set, I don't remember where, and gave it to us in Urbana, Illinois. I was in a combined 7-8 grade at my HS. 

We played intensely with each other and with friends, filling graph and hex paper with our worlds.

Metamorphosis Alpha '76 I bought this at a record store (?) in C-U. We played this extensively, as it slowly supplanted D&D. We moved to the farm that year when my Dad remarried.

Traveller 77 I bought the original black box set that summer or fall and definitely moved away from D&D and MA, with D&D returning briefly in the 90's and then in 2018.

Little Wars came as a Christmas gift in 1977 and we adapted it to fantasy, using spring loaded cannons and a growing collection of miniature Fantasy figures (mostly Ral Partha), with Ted more involved than I, a trend that continued throughout our lives!

I bought Gamma World in '78, and played briefly, but Traveller was already my main campaign/game, since you could always have abandoned colony starships and devastated worlds inside Traveller, so MA & GW just became subsumed.

During this time Ted bought a number of board games including Dragon Pass ('77 or 78), SPI's Wizards ('78? though it came out in '75), and Magic Realms ('79). The latter two saw heavier play than the first.

RuneQuest in either 78 or 79. Ted ran this extensively for several years until he switched to Call of Cthulhu. He gave RQ to me in '80 or '81, and I have run my world for 30+ years; It slowly eclipsed Traveler.

Call of Cthulhu became Ted's RPG of choice to run and collect when it came out in '81, but he was always drawn to miniatures and board games more than running RPG's. 

By this time we were both in college. I was running RQ, and less and less Traveller, weekly through the late 80's and playing in Call of Cthulhu and a Morrow Project homebrew with friends in Madison and Urbana. Ted and I played on vacations, summers, etc through the 80's.

Takeaways

My first is that for all of its veneration and iconization, especially recently, we really didn't play D&D for that long, hopping quickly to the next iteration, combining, and then settling in, in a way, to a couple different games.

My second takeaway is that we played worlds, not systems. Games and campaigns took place in worlds we built, designed, and evolved. Traveler was not the Third Empire; RuneQuest to me was never Glorantha. The game systems were always just starting points, rough frameworks or sets of possibilities with which to build worlds, and then flesh them out, test them, cement the possible into reality through the play at the table. Over time each game became a large collection of notes, maps, index cards, and character sheets, associated with a handful of xeroxed charts, cropped and assembled to serve our purpose.

To be continued!