History of a gamer

Well this was how I first started gaming, using miniatures initally with hardly any rules using the old Airfix plastic figures in 1/72 and I also had Britains 54mm plastics. Probably the first rules I can remember using were the ones from Don Featherstone's Wargames book and then I got fairly into Western Skirmish using the rules published by Skirmish Wargames.

At a similar time I'd started playing D&D using the White Box rules in 1977, and continued with these for a while as the AD&D books were fairly expensive on import and the paperback Games Workshop editions didn't come out till around '79 or so. My brother bought most of the D&D stuff and the RPGs I bought were Metamorphosis Alpha, Bunnies and Burrows, Flash Gordon and the Warriors of Mongo and RuneQuest2. Of those RQ2 was the one with by far the most play and I largely abandoned D&D for RQ by the early '80s. I'd also discovered Judges Guild by then and bought my copies of the City State of the Invicible Overlord, Wilderlands of High Fantasy, Thieves of Fortress Badabaskor and a lot of issues of the Dungeoneer.

The second rulebook for the Old West Skirmish actually had a lot of rules for characterisation which certainly moved it well towards RPG, I'll have to dig it out to look at when it was published as it shows that RPG forms were not unique to the D&D community in the States.

I dropped out of gaming pretty much entirely in the mid 80s due to starting full time work, moving more to drinking and pubbing as social activities, then going to university where there wasn't actually an RPG or wargaming society in the first two years and increasing my commitments to running and my athletics club. I still occasionally played Call of Cthulhu and even some supers games, but not often.

2003 I came back into D&D starting again at GenCon Europe in London, with 3e rules playing through the Wizards Amulet/Crucible of Freya from Necromancer Games. This did get me back the gaming bug and I've been playing steadily since then, with two different groups, one being my old group and the other one I joined through an advert on ENWorld.

I've GMed a campaign in the Wilderlands for a few sessions using a couple of homebrew adventures and a prepublished one from Dungeon magazine. I've also had a chance to play the Conan RPG which I like and I have the original edition and haven't really had that much of a problem with the typos for all the ire that they caused at the time of publication.

With the main D&D Campaign I'm currently playing its using the Lost City of Barakus from Necromancer Games and am one of the two players to have been in the campaign since the beginning as sadly a lot of the other players have had to drop out for personal reasons. This has proved to be a good campaign as most of the characters are able to have their own quests and motivations which have given it a bit more life than a straightforward dungeon bash.