Roleplaying
I’ve been playing Dungeons & Dragons since I was 5 1/2 years old. My cousin Mark Glewwe introduced my brother Greg and me to the hobby when we were visiting our paternal grandparents in St Paul, MN in the summer of 1974. We went home with visions of trolls, ogres and orcs dancing in our heads (with us as the vanquishing heroes). We begged our mom for books, and by Christmas we had worn her down. We had continued to “play” without rulebooks using what we could remember from our week with Mark in his parents basement (complete with a cinderblock dark hallway that went back to the old bomb shelter/darkroom). That hallway is forever blazed into my memory as forbidding and frightening. Thanks Mark! I played regularly with Greg and some friends (mostly his - Mike D’Angelo, Mike Sisson, …) until high school when sports pushed it aside. I took a hiatus, but I resumed play one summer in college after my sophmore year. I was at Vanderbilt in summer school and found an English PhD who was looking for players. I met one of my great college friends at this time as well, Matt Sisk. I don’t recall the DMs name (the PhD), but his roommate Dan played, as well as an older fellow who played a Druid named Lug-lan-flyda (beats me where that came from). It was my last time to play “all nighters.” I thoroughly enjoyed the DMs game. Until 2003, my books lay gathering dust in a computer paper box in the garage. My friend John Toups invited me to join him and four others for a weekly game that I enjoyed, but one guy move, John ramped up his karate training, and the group fell apart. I jumped at the chance when my co-worker David approached me about forming a group. He ran the game for the first four months before handing off to another co-worker, Darrell. We had six players and a DM. Darrell ran steadily through 2006 (about 2 years) when I stepped in for just shy of a year in the land of Tairn. When my son was born, Darrell took back over until Andrew stepped forward to run us through Tomb of Horrors in August 2007. We plan to return to Tairn later this year after a little more time in Darrell’s Six Nations.
