About this blog:

I've been a gamer all my life.

And Dungeons & Dragons was always my favorite game. Even when I wasn't playing it I was always thinking about it.

While I had been curious about the game for a long time, I didn't get a chance to play until a friend loaned me the old Basic D&D "Red Box" set (Mentzer).  My friends and I started playing, but I was always disappointed by the limited nature of the starter set, and I switched over to AD&D as soon as I found the books at the bookstore.

The 2nd edition had just been released and so I started accumulating all the necessary books (and a whole lot of unnecessary ones too!).  I was also keeping an eye out for any of the 1st edition books that might still be kicking around.

While I enjoyed the polish and depth of the second edition, I was pretty pissed about how the game had been censored by TSR in an effort to placate Christian fundamentalists that thought the game was a gateway to Satan worship and witchcraft.

Luckily, my 1st edition books still had all of the requisite demons, devils, harlot encounter tables, and bare-breasted monster chicks to fill in for the stuff that had been bowdlerised from the 2nd ed books.  Even from the beginning, I was kitbashing my own set of rules to play the game that I wanted to play.  All of this took place in jr high and high school.

After high school, I joined the army.  Right before I left, I had been introduced to this cool new card game, Magic The Gathering.  At the time, I just thought it was a really cool game, but I had no idea it would become such a smash hit.

During my time in the army, I rarely played D&D at all, but I ended up laying a lot of  MTG because you could carry a deck in your pocket.  A bunch of us would bring a deck when we went out of field training exercises, and we'd lay out a poncho liner and play a game out in the woods to keep ourselves entertained.

But even then, I'd noticed that MTG had pretty much replaced D&D for many people.  It didn't help that TSR seemed to lose their focus, and the final insult was when Wizards of the Coast bought them.

I had already begun to pull away from the game, but the introduction of 3rd edition D&D was just too much.  All of the things that I didn't like about the game suddenly seemed magnified.  So I stopped playing.

But I never stopped thinking about the game.  I'd always scribble notes down for future ideas and then squirrel them away for later.  A few months ago, one of my friends was talking about how she'd like to play a D&D game, and so I started dusting off my old notebooks, and organizing all the notes on my computer.

Somewhere along the line I discovered the Old-School Renaissance movement, and I realized that I'd been missing out on something major within the hobby.  It was exhilarating to see the energy and audacity of the old-school D&D.  Even better, all of this was happening outside of the official game... all of these people had just decided that they didn't need WotC's stamp of approval to play the game anymore!

Anyhow, all of this stuff encouraged me to make my own blog, where I could swap ideas with other folks as I continue working on my D&D campaign and my own set of house rules.  While this is mostly a D&D blog, I'll also be posting about board games, video games, miniatures games, and all of the other assorted geekery I dabble in.