Troll Lord Games

Most of the stories I've seen on this site involve 1E or OD&D, which is cool to hear about the begginings of the early fandom of the game. I thought I'd share my stroy as well.

In 1993-94 my friends and I were really into the Medieval Lego Sets. We built large castles, siege engines and taverns for our plastic knights and soldiers. Then one day my friend got a box of old D&D stuff from his uncle, inside were the 1E PHB, DMG, MM and many old modules. We read through the stuff, but as 12 year olds thought there were too many rules. We decided to make our own game, using lego men as minis we made 4 character classes: knight, wizard, ninja and thief. My friend Paul played the knight and wizard (he named them Lancelot and Merlin) and I played the ninja and thief (Shadow and Spike). We used 3 dice, d20, d8, d6. All of the characters attackecd with the d20 (we used THAC0) the knight and ninja did 1d8 damage, the wizard and thief did d6. The wizard could cast fireball and fly, the thief could open locks and set traps. The knight rode a horse and had the most hit points and the ninja could dissappear and make invisible attacks. Our campaign world was my friend John's (the DM) house, we set up our lego castles in various locations. The castle in the kitchen was the great seaport, the couch were the great mountains where the northmen lived, and the basement held the hordes of evil and the dreaded Witch Queen. We played this for an entire summer and it was honsetly some of the most fun I have ever had. When we started middle school we moved on to 2E and played a FR campaign, though we never played the same characters more than 5 sessions. In high school we primarily played GURPS, as we lost interest in the many expansions and editions to AD&D. We played a long running horror survival game with GURPS complete with zombies and vampires. After high school I joined the Marine Corps and started playing 3E with a buch of Jarheads and Squids, we played a long 15 month Forgotten Realms campaign. This was an awesome gaming group and it was sad when it broke up as military groups tend to do every few years due to orders and such. When I started college 3 years ago I looked long and hard for a good group, I played a one night game here and there, but never could find a group the was worth staying in. Then back at ECon 2004 I met Steve and Todd of the Trolls, they were good people who could relate with my frustrations of finding a good gaming group in the days of 3.X. I was invited to play in a playtest of a new Sword and Sorcery game with Todd as the GM. The following session was perhaps the single greatest session I had ever been a part off. We forged documents, burned down an inn, made a puppet out of a man's head and foiled a plot by an evil lord - all in one session! This was an amazing game. Little did I know that this was an early playtest of C&C. At the 2005 ECon I once again met up with Steve and Todd, purchased a C&C PHB and introduced the game to the gaming group that I just joined. That gaming group is still around and we have been playing C&C since. And without a doubt C&C best captures that feeling of fast action stroytelling I first experienced at 12 years old with the lego game.
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CK the CK
"My goddess touched me at an early age."

-Grikis Valmorgen, Paladin

The beginnings of my homebrew campaign world and info for my play by chat game:
http://kbdekker.googlepages.com/home

Mine is only unusual in that I didn't start as a kid. It was there, i had my opportunity with Todd and Scott Sontag (sp?), but passed. I was geek enough to play Chess, but not D&D.

Then I went in the Navy. When I got to my "A" school in Dam Neck, VA in Feb of 1985 my life was about to have a very unusual hobby added to it. Thanks to a room mate from Penn. named Jim Shelhimer (sp?) He started us out with AD&D characters with me playing this fighter/mage with cats claws and a tail (Arduin) with some guy called the "Cat Lord" as his father. My characters name was a variation on my real name, Treebore. We adventured in this "World of Greyhawk" setting.

From there my history is pretty much the same as most others. Played OD&D, Paladium, Traveller, and many others. Navy guys liked trying out many systems and I was happy to go along.

I never went to Cons, even though I could have. Mybe I should have. Now I am fixing that. Going to GenCon, TrollCon V, and the next LGGC. Maybe even GenCon in CA in November, if my CA buddies go.

But I have played every edition of Dungeons and Dragons, loved every one of them, because they were fun at the time. Now C&C is it for me. It embodies everything I want out of a RPG. We all know what that is. I'm just glad the system is finally here and that I discovered its existance rather early. The last 9 to 10 months of gaming have been the best I have had since Dam Neck, VA. in 1985. Helps that it has been with my wife and 3 kids.

Let's see... hmmm. I started on my own, actually. All I had was the PHB for the AD&D game, and I was trying to use it to play out the episodes of the D&D cartoon, since I figured they had to be related, even if one of them said "Advanced." After a while, I managed to get a DMG for AD&D, but I was still playing on my own, for the most part, though my older brother would sometimes game with me. Eventually, I moved to California and joined Boy Scouts and that's when I was introduced to this called Gamma World, and then, Marvel Superheroes and the whole of the TSR line. I also had a "real group" and didn't have to DM all the time, and I could also look at these strange books called "Monster Manuals" and "Fiend Folio." Since I'd been playing without them, I thought they were kinda cool, but didn't like being told I couldn't change what they said, which is the same time I decided "if I buy it, its mine, and I'll change whatever the hell I want." So, anyway, I basically just started playing AD&D and Gamma World, until high school, when I started writing my own games, and exploring other game systems, just to see what "else" there was.

I loved hobby stores in the mid '70s - for their Avalon Hill Wargames (Gettysburg, Alexander the Great, etc) and Tamiya tank models. My dad was also into both of these hobbies. One day in '78 or '79 my parents and my friend Chris and I went to Heritage Hobbies in Needham and there was this cool-looking blue box with a dragon on it. I convinced mom to drop the cash, and Chris and I were hooked. We played B1 a billion times (new monsters each time), and roped in my brother (another Chris) and three or four neighborhood kids. Then my friend Chris showed up one day with the Monster Manual and I was green with envy. All six of us from the neighborhood spent the afternoon poring over these strange 'monsters' and plotting how we could use them (probably in B1). I scored a PH shortly thereafter, and then a DMG, and we were on to AD&D. The modules started appearing in our local book store and we snatched those up, too. Then another friend, Brian, began DMing a homebrew that was amazing - I remember knowing fear and respect for the monsters (a Dwarven citadel) for the first time. We played in his world for the next three years, monomaniacally. Ah, those were some fun days.

Geleg

I heard about this cool game called "Dungeons & Dragons" from guys at school. I mentioned it to my parents, and to my great surprise, my dad (he looked surprised, too) got his briefcase and pulled out a copy of the Holmes "blue book." He said guys at work (he was in the Army) were playing, and he had just bought the basic set a few days ago. The box was at his office, but he let me look through the rulebook.

A few days later he brought home the boxed set, which also had B1 in it. Of course, I bugged him to actually *play* this game, so he created a small dungeon called the Dungeon of Kraylor. I rolled up three or four PCs and we were off. I was hooked. Dad didn't stick with it, but I'm still at it. I recently started running games for *my* eldest son.

Anyway, after playing with Dad, I quickly joined in with the guys at school. We'd play anywhere: the bus, recess, et cetera. Most of us had the Holmes rules, but we gradually added the AD&D books. A guy named Pat caused waves of jealousy when he came in with the Moldvay/Cook basic set, but soon, a lot of guys had those rules, too. We mixed and matched between the rules without missing a beat (or realizing there was a difference, in most cases).

My parents decided I needed a hobby/ social life. I was corrupted early, 1978-9 or so.
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"We'll go out through the kitchen!" Tanis Half-Elven

Peter Bradley

I was in 6th grade, around 80-81.... the school guidance counselor noticed my interest in Fantasy and Sci-Fi and asked if I knew about D&D... then she loaned me the Basic Box Set with the Blue Cover (Dragon). I was hooked from there.
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John "Sir Seskis" Wright

Ilshara: Lands of Exile:
http://johnwright281.tripod.com/

High Squire of the C&C Society
www.cncsociety.org

Short story:

Brother played in late 80s or early 90s till current day.

I started 3 years ago. Fred brought his gaming group home for Friday night gaming due to the LGS selling drugs and stupid gamers. I wanted to put a fig on his b-day cake for his group. Didn't know anything other than I wanted a dragon fig. Fred and I started to discuss figs and dragons. We thought it would be neat if I played a silver dragon in human form as advisor to the king in Sunndi in Greyhawk.

Met and started to work for Trolls a little over a year later and am almost 2 years into my sentence.

Wouldn't trade it for anything, except maybe an something to work on now.

Saw moldvay set in Waldens Booksin 1982. My mom bought it for me. I tried playing it, couldn't. 1983 we moved and at new school found group of other 8th grade Basic D&D'ers and the rest is history. Started on AD&D 1e in 1984, graduated to 2e at some point when the release came. Quit gaming around 1994. Sold all my stuff around 2002. Needed a hobby, got into gaming with 3.5e 2003 or 2004, can't remember. Found C&C in 2005, starting running it in 2006 in place of 3.5E.

I have since managed to buy back about 1/4 of what I had in gaming stuff.

The prize of my collection before I sold? An original D&D in white box with the three manuals in mint condition. Plus the old Dieties and Demigods for that version, blackmoor, and greyhawk. ALso had the Cthulhu Deities and Demigods. I had a 1973 copy of Empire of the Petal Throne too.
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Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire called conscience.

-George Washington

In my '82-83' school year (6th grade) I was hanging out in a friend's basement when he showed me this cool book called the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual. Flipping through it I was instantly hooked. A month later I had saved enough money to buy the Basic Set, then a while after that, the same friend got out of gaming and sold me his whole AD&D set.

Elfknight wrote:
he showed me this cool book called the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual. Flipping through it I was instantly hooked.

It was the boobies.

My dad was in the Marine Corp and was a tactical instructor and he instilled a love for strategy games at a young age. He started me off with chess at age 4 and as I grew older I fell in love with the Avalon Hill Games. I was an avid reader as well and found Return to Brookmere at a neighborhood yard sale one day for a nickel.

I absolutely loved the book but had no idea what Dungeons & Dragons was except that it was on the logo at the top of the book. Then one day at the store where I always got my Avalon Hill games I saw the Red Box Dungeons & Dragons set (this had to be around '83 or '84, whicever year it came out) and recognized the logo from the Endless Quest book.

I was hooked after I got it. Sure, I was young and none of the young kids in the neighborhood knew what the hell we were doing, but we had a blast stumbling our way through the game.

From there I was introduced to AD&D by an older kid in the neighborhood. As I grew older I expanded to MERPS, Rolemaster, Top Secret, Battlletech, Shadowrun, Palladium not to mention seemingly countless other games.

my mom, who was (is) a bit of a hippie heard about this subversive game called Dungeons and Dragons, and bought this nifty red box. she told me I was too young to play, as it was an 'adult' game. After she realized that there were 'rules', she quickly tossed it aside, but that VERY cool picture of the warrior fighting the Dragon - you couldn't keep me away from it!!! I devoured it in secret, and came out of the closet about a year later...

Cheers,

J.

I was in middle-school in 1986 or 1987. My buddy showed me these trange looking dice (d10's). About a week later or os, he asked if i wanted to play Dungeons & Dragons, I said sure. He brought over to my house the Mentzer Basic D&D box and we rolled characters and went from there. Since then, I have never look back.

....................................................Omote

FPQ
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> Omote's Advanced C&C stuff <
Duke Omote Landwehr, Holy Order of the FPQ ~ Prince of the Castles & Crusades Society

A cousin of mine told me about it in '82. So, on my 10th Birthday (Sept of 82) my parents got me the Basic D&D Box Set and its been downhill ever since.

I first started around 1985 / 1986, after readin those Choose-Your-Own Adventure books. A metal kid name Bill Trip introduced to the game, albeit barely sticking to the rules.

I was and am fortunate to have a twin brother. I picked up the Classic D&D basic boxed set. We figured out how to play and then enlisted some of our friends from there. I have some very fond memories gaming outside during the summer.

Supposedly, I killed off my brother's first character in his first adventure, but I've no memory of doing any such thing. Year's later, he's still gaming with me, so it couldn't have been all that traumatic.

Gamed through the ages and editions until about 1995, when I went to college. Started gaming again around 1998, briefly but with much fun. Then started up again in around 2001 and have stuck with it ever since.

3e brought me back to gaming, but C&C made me stay.

I got a late start into gaming, it wasn't until my best friend was home on leave from the Army that I was introduced to the game. (He was introduced while in the Army). So I was about 19. It was 1E and I DMed for some younger cousins and a few friends. I never really learned to play btb (but we did have fun). We also dabbled in Marvel Superhero game. When 2E was released we switched over later I met some life long friends that bacame my group for years. When 3E was released we made the switch, but it was then that life started to pull our group apart and another group was formed with one player from my 2E group my son and a younger cousin and two of thier friends. I grew to hate 3E and was ready to quit gaming all together when C&C came along. Since I have ran one short campaign, played a short 3E campaign, a short 2E campaign and now am a player in an irregular C&C game.
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Never throw rocks at a man with a Vorpal Sword!

A friend of mine had a copy of Avalon Hill's "Tactics II" in her house tucked away amongst years-old magazines, and we started to play it (we must've been around 7; this was back in the early 1970's). I was immediately hooked and started branching out into other AH and SPI games (and even press-ganged my father into driving us into NYC so we could playtest SPI games in their "open playtest" nights). I still have fond memories of playing War in Europe and Invasion: America. (Still own 'em, too.)

I stumbled on a copy of the old D&D white box set (I think it was at the Compleat Strategist on 33rd Street in NYC), and it turned out that this was something very much like I and my best friend had cobbled together as an over-the-phone game using an old AH CRT and inspiration from a catalog of fantasy miniatures. We set to playing, and lo! and behold, a lifetime hobby was born.

Thulcondar

My dad taught me chess at 6. I loved it!! I would play Monopoly with my next door neighbors and my brother for hours on end. Card games with my neighbor's aunt. Games were always being played.

In sixth grade, 1981 or so, I kept seeing these comic strip advertisements in my comic books advertising this game. I was drawn to the adventure the characters were having and wanted the next run of the ad to come out so i could know the end of the story. The art was cool. To this day, i don't know who the artist was. These characters fought green slime I remember and the warrior found a maigc sword to replace the one he had lost to the slime.

I must of had some idea of what the game was from the ads because at school, I drew a dungeon on a piece of paper and made a spinner out of a paper clip and told my friend next to me that as he moved into a room a skeleton attacked him and he had to get a 6 on the spinner to kill it. That Christmas, my parents bought me the Moldvay boxed set and I was off. I tried to figure out the rules with my next door neighbor and we muddled through. We made tons of mistakes with AC and hit points and stuff, but we had fun in the Keep.

Then as we got better, learning as we went, we bought the AD&D books. I found the Monster Manual at a weird store at our mall for half price in a clearance sale!! This store also carried Pente. Great game.

From there we branched out to Gamma World, Gangbusters, Marvel Superheroes, Star Trek the Role-playing game by FASA, but it was AD&D the stuck with us. We really took off after the 2nd edition was published and experienced one of the longest running campaigns we had ever been a part of. College came and I played with my neighbor and his friends in the summer and Christmas. But he had founded a gaming society at Youngstown State University. Golden years. There he met most of the people we game with today, including his wife.

We have played many different games through the years beyond those already mentioned. But 3.x was the main core. Now, though, we have switched to C&C as the core only digressing to other systems as others take over the screen.

It has been an incredible journey that is ongoing and I wouldn't trade it for anything.
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meepo wrote:
It was the boobies.

I swear that had nothing at all to do with it!

Thulcondar wrote:
A friend of mine had a copy of Avalon Hill's "Tactics II" in her house tucked away amongst years-old magazines

I loved that game. I liked Blitzkrieg, too. Wooden Ships & Iron Men. Cry Havoc. Red Storm. Harpoon. Wish I still had those games.

My mother first heard about D&D in the mid-to-late 70s, but real life events kept her out of the hobby. Some years later I was a rather shy and introverted boy of 11, and my mother decided that RPGs would be a great way to get me out of my shell. I received the D&D Basic box for Chirstmas '82, and I haven't shut up since. Cheers Mum.

Basic gave way to Expert and then Advanced, and the joyous discovery of the Traveller game. As the 90s opened AD&D and a heavly-modified Classic Traveller remained my games of choice until T4 was released in '96 and then Alternity in '98. AD&D had turned into a swollen giant like a dying star by this point and I was looking for alternatives. The release of D&D3 was something I'd been looking forward to, but the more I read the rules the more my heart sank, and I left off fantasy gaming for several years.

Late '04 had me thinking about fantasy again and looking for a new system. That was when I spotted several C&C threads on RPG.net and decided to give it a go.
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History teaches us that men behave wisely once they've exhausted all other alternatives.

This thread has a lot of interesting stories. A few things that are common in most stories from people:

1. Many of us had experience playing in the military in some form or another (including miitary brats, cause when your parents are in the service, so are you).

2. Many people's parents first bought them the game.

Number its funny, nobody has mentioned that their parents hated the game. I for one was raised by fundamentalist Christians and had to hide my D&D stuff from them. Luckily now my parents have changed, but I find it funny that while other kids were hding Playboy's under their mattress I was hiding a PHB and a set of dice.
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CK the CK
"My goddess touched me at an early age."

-Grikis Valmorgen, Paladin

The beginnings of my homebrew campaign world and info for my play by chat game:
http://kbdekker.googlepages.com/home

I don't want to mention it, because it saddens me. I lost my entire collection at one point, including a white box version, because of that reason...

By the time I was into gaming I was old enough to do what I wanted anyway, but my parents really know nothing about the game other than its name, there are lots of books for it (because I have shelves full and it takes strange looking dice.
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Never throw rocks at a man with a Vorpal Sword!

serleran wrote:
I don't want to mention it, because it saddens me. I lost my entire collection at one point, including a white box version, because of that reason...

That's sad, I never lost any D&D stuff but my Magic Card collection was forced to be sold at the local gamestore (for bottom dollar mind you). I was looking at a list of cards I had and their values, I had over 3K in cards!
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CK the CK
"My goddess touched me at an early age."

-Grikis Valmorgen, Paladin

The beginnings of my homebrew campaign world and info for my play by chat game:
http://kbdekker.googlepages.com/home

Combat_Kyle wrote:
Number its funny, nobody has mentioned that their parents hated the game.

Nah, my parents reserved their loathing for Robotech and later anime in general, not gaming necessarily. It was my teachers in high school that tried to dissuade me. Pfft...morons...made my friends and I simply hide our gaming activities.

I grew up with military personel, wargamers, and reenactors, does that count? ^_~`

My folks are about as fundamentally religious as a 60's love fest. I wasnt restricted in anything growing up. Strangely enough though, I have no vices.

Combat_Kyle wrote:
This thread has a lot of interesting stories. A few things that are common in most stories from people:

1. Many of us had experience playing in the military in some form or another (including miitary brats, cause when your parents are in the service, so are you).

2. Many people's parents first bought them the game.

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"We'll go out through the kitchen!" Tanis Half-Elven

Peter Bradley

gideon_thorne wrote:
I grew up with military personel, wargamers, and reenactors, does that count? ^_~`

My folks are about as fundamentally religious as a 60's love fest. I wasnt restricted in anything growing up. Strangely enough though, I have no vices.

Really? No vices? Have you looked around your place today?

Treebore wrote:
Really? No vices? Have you looked around your place today?

Yup. And there still aren't any vices. ^_~`

While I have many hobbies, there's nothing here I can't walk away from at a drop of a hat.
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"We'll go out through the kitchen!" Tanis Half-Elven

Peter Bradley