I won't do the whole 30 Day Challenge, but reading about it did give me the urge to tell My Story, such as it is, for your edification and amusement, or perhaps boredom and disinterest.
When I was a young lad, probably around 9-10 years old, I got into Fighting Fantasy books. I don't quite remember why except that I'd read and loved The Lord of the Rings already by that point and so knew that I liked fantasy books, and I had seen a school friend reading The Forest of Doom and somehow got the impression that it was in some way edgier or more adult than Tolkien's work. Since the local library had a large collection, I started going through them at a rate of 3 or 4 a week. (A vagrant memory that just comes to me: reading The Warlock of Firetop Mountain in a dentist's waiting room as I was waiting for a check-up.)
Fighting Fantasy had a more 'advanced' introduction to genuine role playing games, called Fighting Fantasy - the Original Role-playing Game, and eventually (probably after I'd finished all of the game books) I got around to buying this. Around this time a friend and I had started trying to write fantasy novels after school (mercifully these are lost to history); we merrily plundered the Fighting Fantasy books for material, and one afternoon we turned to this 'advanced' tome to find out what on earth this RPG business was all about. We couldn't quite get the hang of it, but this early experiment led to us getting the Advanced Fighting Fantasy books out from the library and trying to figure out those.
A few months later, and coincidentally, another friend started running Basic "red box" D&D at school at lunch times. I have a very distinct memory of my first session: I was told to roll up a character and generated a halfling who had a DEX of 16 - I can't remember who the other PCs were, though. The adventure involved going into a dungeon and killing a carrion crawler, and then being confronted with a red dragon who we tried to negotiate our way past before he killed us unceremoniously with his breath weapon. It was a dick DM move of the highest order, although clearly something about it already had me hooked - though I think that was probably more to do with the Advanced Fighting Fantasy games that I started running for friends in the neighbourhood in after school games.
It's hard sometimes as an adult to remember just how much free time you had as a kid. From 4pm every school night and all day at weekends I had no responsibilities whatsoever. The amount of time I spent playing Warhammer, Warhammer 40k, D&D or other RPGs, reading, writing silly stories, as well as all the other kid things like playing cricket and football, going on bike rides, playing computer games, watching TV...it amounts to oceans of hours. Yet I can hardly believe that I found time to fit it all in, looking back. I must have had a seriously packed schedule. What the hell do I do now that gets in the way, apart from work? What is it about being an adult that makes us kid ourselves that we are actually busy? We should try being children and see what the meaning of being busy really is.
What is it about being an adult that makes us kid ourselves that we are actually busy?
ReplyDeleteIt's the internet.
Spend a few weeks away from an internet connection and a television, and you'll discover time to read all the books and play all the games you want. At least, that's what happens for me.
Yes, I think you're right. The problem for me is that my working life results in me using the internet and email all the time, so it's hard to go 'cold turkey' and cut yourself off. Which is what I'd really like to do.
DeleteI'm just back last Sunday from 8 days up a Scottish mountain with no TV or Internet. In that time my 6 year old son and I played an awesome Dragon Warriors campaign, and the borderline ADD he normally displays was nowhere to be seen.
DeleteNow we're back in London with Internet for me, ipad & Netflix for him, it's sadly tailed off. :(
I don't think today's kids have the same time. It's all scheduled. When I was young, the only thing I knew for sure in the summer was that at some point in the day I'd go swimming and my best friend was just as free. In between we did things, all sorts of glorious things. We dug pit traps in the woods and threw dirt clod hand grenades in endless war games. We rode everywhere. We did everything.
ReplyDeleteNow every kid has something to be played and every parent has an agenda of game watching and chauffeuring. I don't remember my Dad ever watching me play baseball, but our field was a bike ride away and no parents ever watched us, why would they? Now you're a bad Dad if you miss a game and if you have three kids, your inevitable missed attendance will be commented upon.
The internet is a time sink, but so were books, although I feel my own attention span deteriorating, I find myself mumbling about kids these days, and making dire predictions about the future.
I think much of it is you no longer live next to your best friends, who share all your favorite pursuits. It's not that you're busier than you were in college, despite being more likely to sleep in when given the opportunity. You just no longer live in shouting distance of a game in your free time.
I like to think that someday I'll be in my dotage, living in a retirement community, and confused by the type of shows that are on the infernal Apparent Sensory Perception, sim-stem, or holodeck machine. I picture some nice young thing or a fuzzy armed robot will come along and help me and my dwindling circle of nerd buddies to role dice and remember rules. That they'll keep us focused on the adventure and smile politely when we tell them old simulated war stories or start to tell them what life was like when you had to carry your phone or dial up the internet.
You may be right. I'm out of touch with kids, although I've heard parents complain about that: you're a bad parent unless you're ferrying your son to a football game or your daughter to a violin lesson.
DeleteForest of Doom started it for me too.
ReplyDeleteFighting Fantasy wasn't as big over here in the US, but I too first experienced that series via Forest of Doom. Interesting to see a couple other people who had the same start. It had such an effect on me that within the last year I picked up an old copy of Forest of Doom on eBay on the cheap.
ReplyDeleteI think the cover of Forest of Doom had a lot to do with it. It's an amazing picture.
ReplyDeleteThe illustrator of that shapechanger, Iain McCaig, who also illustrated City of Thieves and Deathtrap Dungeon, went on to become a fairly successful production designer for , among other things, the second Star Wars trilogy. He designed Darth Maul, not sure about Jar-Jar. The interior illustrations for Forest of Doom were also very evocative, that illustrator, Malcolm Barter, seemed not to have been published at all after that though I'd love to see him return like Russ did.
ReplyDeleteIt's those little dingus illustrations between the paragraphs that I remember most keenly, the little vignettes that offer a kind of distillation of the essence of adventure.
Yes, I love those Barter pictures. They're similar to Russ's in that they exude griminess and nastiness in the best possible way.
DeleteThe evocativeness of the early Fighting Fantasy art was certainly a big factor for me. The PC sheet pages on my copy of Warlock of Firetop Mountain were destroyed by over use of the eraser. :) Never did complete WoFT the first time round AFAICR, I think for some reason when they republished it in Warlock magazine I was able to finish it. Citadel of Chaos and Forest of Doom I was able to complete, pretty sure I never finished Starship Traveller or Deathtrap Dungeon. Most of those were insanely difficult, though I did complete Island of the Lizard King on the first run-through. I deffinitely prefer the tabletop game assumption that usually the PCs win, as opposed to FF's usually dying horribly. :)
DeleteVery close to my experience - started on Fighting Fantasy gamebooks age 10 in 1983, then age 11-12 ran a bunch of Fighting Fantasy using Out of the Pit - some very cool homebrew stuff I can barely recall, including an sf campaign! Age 12 I went over to AD&D, sadly including Unearthed Arcana which the salesman told me was a "must have" (*grrr*). We had fun but I think how much better my teenage D&D gaming would have been if that book had never existed. Did some Call of Cthulu too. Later in my mid-teens ran PARANOIA and Star Wars (d6), always coming back to AD&D.
ReplyDelete