Two months ago, I kicked off my #CuratedQuarantine series with the original white boxed set for Dungeons & Dragons. That was indeed my first RPG and my first hobby game as well. It was 1979 and I was 10 years old. I was excited by the idea of D&D and I could tell there was something cool in those three small books, but the white boxed set was in no way designed to introduce 10 years to gaming. It came out of the 60s wargaming scene and it was written for that audience. So my brother and I quickly got the Holmes Basic Set, which was a much better introduction (though we got the version that came with chits instead of dice!) and then jumped right into Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. That’s what I want to talk about today.
The classic three core rulebooks for AD&D were published between 1977 and 1979, so perfect timing for me. Surprisingly, it was the Monster Manual (1977) that came first, then the Player’s Handbook (1978), and finally the Dungeon Master’s Guide (1979). When I say that D&D changed my life, it’s really AD&D that I’m talking about. This was my favorite game and by far my most played RPG from 1979 to 1985 or so (by which point I was branching out much more). Many people slightly younger than me have this same nostalgia for the red box Basic Rules (1983) but I never picked them up back then because I (at the wise age of 14) considered them “kiddie stuff.” I was a veteran of Advanced D&D, what did I need dumbed down rules for? As an adult, I would gain a healthy respect for the BECMI rules and today I would take the Rules Cyclopedia as a desert island game, but I digress.
The reason AD&D was so important to me is that, in addition to the fun of playing, it was a gateway to so many other things. I was already a Tolkien fan, but AD&D led me to Michael Moorcock, Fritz Leiber, H.P. Lovecraft, Poul Anderson, and many other authors. It also got me reading things like Beowulf and the Song of Roland at a young age. And it only amplified my desire to read more ancient and medieval history. Naturally, I also became a Dragon Magazine subscriber (had to get the official word from Gary Gygax!), and that introduced me to the wider world of hobby games. Many of the games I have covered in my Curated Quarantine series I first learned about in the pages of Dragon. That’s how I was introduced to wargames like Squad Leader and Dawn Patrol.
AD&D also got me into my other lifelong obsession: miniatures. It started with minis to use with AD&D from Grenadier, Ral Partha, and Heritage. Then I got the AD&D Battleystem when it came out in 1985. I was going to say it was my first minis game but I that’s not quite true. I had Chainmail, the minis game that was D&D’s precursor, but never played it. We did use its jousting tables in our AD&D games though. Battlesystem is the first minis game I actually played, and that hobby has been its own long and rewarding journey.
When I was 12, I fantasized about one day writing an article for Dragon Magazine. Why, I might make a $100! This is the first time I remember thinking about game writing as a thing I might do. Many years later I would indeed write articles for Dragon. When I was hired into the TSR Product Group of Wizards of the Coast in 1998, I’d also get to write for AD&D itself. 10-year-old me surely couldn’t have imagined I’d one day get to contribute to the game I so loved. When my first book (the AD&D Guide to Hell) was published in 1999, it was pretty damn cool to see my name under the AD&D masthead. Getting to write (with Sean Reynolds) Slavers, a sequel to the Slavelords modules I had enjoyed so much as a youngster was also a highlight.
People have spilled an endless amount of ink on the warts and flaws of AD&D, the various misguided TSR policies, the way Dave Arneson was sidelined, and a host of other related topics. And I get it. I do. But AD&D is a portal I’ll always be glad I walked though.
