Thursday In Paradise.
Mar. 6th, 2008 06:38 am.....Things are going to be interesting today, I can already tell this from the fact that the computers are all extra slow this morning here at work. My back and knees hurt for some reason this morning as well. I'm getting OLD!!! :-) Whine! Whine! Whine! Enough of that!
.....I was just as shocked as everyone else when I read of Gary Gygax's death the other day. For some reason I always thought of him as part of my generation. Hmmm, maybe I AM getting older. :-) But Dungeons and Dragon's was such a HUGE part of my life in my late teens and twenties. It's what got me into the SCA for sure. It certainly gave me my name of Arontius (for which I'm eternally grateful :-)). Gave me important distractions from home life. Continued my love affair with Fantasy after I had digested every Tolkien connected writing onto which I could latch my grubby big hands.
.....I discovered The Hobbit when I was in the fourth grade. I had just figured out how much fun reading was and had exhausted my mother's collection of Tom Corbett - Space Cadet (which is actually a pretty good pulp SciFi read from the '50's). I was going to start picking up on Conan, so Mom shoved The Hobbit into my hands before I could do that. :-) I gobbled it up and immediately fell in love with The Lord of the Rings.
.....But for some reason I did not pick up on role-playing games until later. I was just about to hit 9th Grade. I'd seen the D&D books with various people and had been curious. But I finally got a full scale introduction to it on a Boy Scout hiking trip of all places. We were on a 50-mile hike in the Olympics, in Seven Lakes Basin, when a couple of the guys talked about maybe starting up a game. I said I'd like to join in on the game. They talked me through rolling up a character, and we played our first game around the communal camp fire. Boy, I was hooked solid!!!
.....Played continuously for years and years there for a while. I loved the fantasy escapism of it all. Loved my Paladins greatly. I play some absolutely obnoxious Paladins too. Your average Jesuit would be proud! :-)
.....Still have most of my books. Have over twenty years worth of Dragon magazines sitting in bins. Even have a number of them when Gary Gygax was still part of TSR and wrote regular features and columns for Dragon. I may give up my Playboy collection, but the Dragon Magazine collection stays. :-) But I don't think that TBT will mind that so much (I think that she has more of a heartburn with my almost 40-years worth of Mother Earth News, which takes up at least four bins worth of tote space :-)).
.....I'm sure that there will be some kind of tribute to Mr. Gygax at NORWESCON. Maybe it would be a cool thing to play a game of D&D in his memory. :-)
.....Aaron / Arontius.
.....I was just as shocked as everyone else when I read of Gary Gygax's death the other day. For some reason I always thought of him as part of my generation. Hmmm, maybe I AM getting older. :-) But Dungeons and Dragon's was such a HUGE part of my life in my late teens and twenties. It's what got me into the SCA for sure. It certainly gave me my name of Arontius (for which I'm eternally grateful :-)). Gave me important distractions from home life. Continued my love affair with Fantasy after I had digested every Tolkien connected writing onto which I could latch my grubby big hands.
.....I discovered The Hobbit when I was in the fourth grade. I had just figured out how much fun reading was and had exhausted my mother's collection of Tom Corbett - Space Cadet (which is actually a pretty good pulp SciFi read from the '50's). I was going to start picking up on Conan, so Mom shoved The Hobbit into my hands before I could do that. :-) I gobbled it up and immediately fell in love with The Lord of the Rings.
.....But for some reason I did not pick up on role-playing games until later. I was just about to hit 9th Grade. I'd seen the D&D books with various people and had been curious. But I finally got a full scale introduction to it on a Boy Scout hiking trip of all places. We were on a 50-mile hike in the Olympics, in Seven Lakes Basin, when a couple of the guys talked about maybe starting up a game. I said I'd like to join in on the game. They talked me through rolling up a character, and we played our first game around the communal camp fire. Boy, I was hooked solid!!!
.....Played continuously for years and years there for a while. I loved the fantasy escapism of it all. Loved my Paladins greatly. I play some absolutely obnoxious Paladins too. Your average Jesuit would be proud! :-)
.....Still have most of my books. Have over twenty years worth of Dragon magazines sitting in bins. Even have a number of them when Gary Gygax was still part of TSR and wrote regular features and columns for Dragon. I may give up my Playboy collection, but the Dragon Magazine collection stays. :-) But I don't think that TBT will mind that so much (I think that she has more of a heartburn with my almost 40-years worth of Mother Earth News, which takes up at least four bins worth of tote space :-)).
.....I'm sure that there will be some kind of tribute to Mr. Gygax at NORWESCON. Maybe it would be a cool thing to play a game of D&D in his memory. :-)
.....Aaron / Arontius.