About 1978, just as I was leaving a particular university, I saw a book sitting on a table in one of the work rooms. The Players Handbook. I was startled. I asked the guy who had been holding it, if I could look thru it. He said yes. I ooohed and aahed over it.
Asked him about it, rather enthusiastically. He, and the other folks standing around, said they hadn’t realized I might be interested. I told them I was interested, but since I was leaving I wouldn’t be playing. I had looked around, and just found Tunnels and Trolls. So, I bought Tunnels and Trolls, 2nd Edition. I played a number of the solitaire adventures. I lost the solitaire adventures, but I recently found my Tunnels and Trolls book.
Reading the book gave me a major headache. It certainly wasn’t as clear as the other information I had encountered. I tried to read it, and failed. My folks and I had job problems, so we moved to another state, hoping the job situation would improve. It did for my folks.
I went to college again, change in study field. Computers. That helped my job search. Unfortunately, there are morons out there that have the bizzare notion that computer abilities decline after age 25. That’s absurd. My personal experience shows that ability working on and with computers is independent of a person’s age.
In the summer of 1979, I found out there was a game store nearby. In September or October, 1979, I bought the first edition players handbook, the referee’s book, and the monster manual. Along with a number of dice. Since then my dice collection has grown to over 3,000 dice of many different shapes, sizes, materials, and colors.
I even wrote some Sinclair ZX-81 BASIC and some CBM Amiga computer BASIC programs. I left out any copyrighted material, like the to hit tables. I read those 3 books. Made notes. Used a highlighter. Drew maps on graph paper. Bought the B-1 module ‘In Search of the Unknown’, and ran some characters thru it. Taught myself a number of things, like how to misread a d4. I asked someone at the store, and they pointed out my error. I thanked them. I went from there.
The first few times I ran a game, it was very haphazard. No miniatures nor floor tiles. Then I bought miniatures. Encountering players who had the game memorized didn’t help me… I did learn how to referee a game. I wasn’t using the floor tiles then. Later on, in 1980, I noticed them on a store shelf, and bought a box of them. I decided after seeing how little was in there, to make my own.
Several folks complimented me on my DM skills and the game aids I used, but then I had plenty of time being unemployed at the time to work on being a DM. I ran a number of games. After a while, there were three game stores in my area. One closed and moved to New Orleans, Louisiana. Another opened up. Most of the games I ran at game stores had a high player turnover. Lots of folks moving in and out of the area. Some of the folks asked me to run a game elsewhere. My parents had a large room with a dining table, used to be a garage, so we played out there.
Why don’t I mentioned the store names ? All are gone now. I have no way of finding the former owners and asking their permission to put the store names here, but they were all on coastal Mississippi.
I learned rapidly. One of my game aids was using old file folders, draw on them, and use them for mapping tiles. I had some drafting gear left over from my university classes. I’ve seen a few pages in past years with some beautifully drawn dungeon floor/mapping tiles. I am not an artist… I have scanned in some of those game aids I created. They are below.
1) A game aid you might find useful: I had a difficult time figuring out/remembering where the player characters’ lanterns could light up what areas in the dungeon map. So I took a piece of clear contact paper, plastic film with a glue and non-glue side, and drew the path for a bullseye lantern on it. Put two pieces together, and used it to show me how far the lantern’s light went. Worked great ! I also made one for a coin or rock with Continual Light cast on it. Along with another one for a regular lantern and torch light distances. I found this to be useful in determining what the characters could and could not see. It also helped me determine a nice distance to put traps and arrow slots for monsters to fire through. Oops. Well, the campaign is over with… supposedly.
2) Character turns for combat game aid. Now I know in 3E the 6 second segment is no longer used. Ah well. But here is what I used in 1E. I took a small 9 inch by 12 inch drawing pad, with the pages on a wire binder. Took 15 pages and drew lines and numbered them. The rows were for each character in the adventuring party. The columns were for the ten 6-second segments making up a combat round. Each page, at the top, was numbered as ‘Round 1’, ‘Round 2’, etc. And then I put the clear film shelf/contact on the pages. As each round finished, I turned that page over. To keep from having to write the character names down 15 times. I cut the pages, so only the round/segment columns turned over. The scan of it is the link at the beginning of this paragraph.
3) 60’ Character infravision game aid
There were good players, average players, bad players, and players who took the game much too seriously and let their egos get involved and got upset with my decisions and the decisions of other players.
I enjoyed my time refereeing ! Well, there were a few bad spots, but overall I enjoyed it.
Over the years, as money allowed, I bought modules and game aids made by TSR and Judge’s Guild. I particularly liked Village Book 1 and 2 by Judge’s Guild. The village name generator was in Book 1, I rather liked that. The hexagon mapping pages were the correct size for me to use in drawing up my own towns and villages. The pages had some buildings on them drawn in gray, you just drew over the ones you didn’t want. I always modified the modules as some of my players bought everything and then memorized them. I used the JG Treasure Maps books as quickie adventures for my regular players to get characters up and running. One of the modules was an old rickety manor called The Lone Tower. The players won it, against strong odds, and were given it from a grateful area commander. Confirmed by the Bard King. I didn’t use all of the modules I bought for gaming, but I did get a number of ideas from them to use in my campaign.
That manor is where some of their characters retired. To a well-earned rest. Taking care of a castle, they remodeled the manor from wood into stone. Several villages sprang up near by. It had been a lonely stretch of road on the northwest edge of Trillolara. Now protected by a group of stalwart adventurers who now have a place to return to after a strenuous adventure. There is Dwarf Home to clean out, and on the way there is a modest village with problems, Hommlet.
Later years, mid-1990s, I ran a few games at another game store. The new players, used to Monty Haul type games, encountered a few of the original player characters. They learned not to aggrevate someone, just because she is a woman. Ora Goldsoul, a Bard, was not nice to anyone she felt was a trespasser on land she and her friends had fought a vampire and other creatures for.
I hope you enjoy these pages.