Hey, Everyone, ClockworkPoltergeist here having been seduced over by Starbeard to join his Let's Learn… Tunnels & Trolls! adventure. Thinking back on the journey, I guess I started my RPG adventure with the Choose Your Own Adventure books back in the early '80's and progressed on to the D&D boxed sets not long after. Of course, being an avid reader, RPGs are simply the natural extension of the interest to adventure in new realms. A couple of years after the B/E/M boxed sets I picked up AD&D 2nd Ed (Hey, does anyone else find it as hilarious as I do that Wikipedia's first search result for AD&D is Accidental Death and Dismemberment Insurance?). I gamed with that through high school after which it kinda fizzled out when my group went several different directions. I had a brief stint of the next evolution of D&D though I couldn't tell you what the edition or version was. What I do recall is a completely revamped character creation process where the player had to pick a character package of some sort to build a character from. I played a dwarven rat-catcher. Yeah, it was that exciting.
Honestly, it probably had a lot more to do with small group dynamics and such as I was the outsider and no one really bothered to roll out the welcome mat. I picked up one other group in college and gamed with them a few times, I recall Talislanta and some other game that is now lost to the haze of time. It didn't last all that long.I dropped out of gaming for a number of years, you know - life: marriage, kids, job, etc. Picked it back up - oh, 15 years ago - and it's been a sporadic journey since. I got involved with a group from work, whom I'm still gaming with, to play Shadowrun 3rd Ed (?), might have been 4th ed. We jumped from there to Earthdawn and then 7th Seas. I've played some Legend of the 5 Rings and now we're back to Shadowrun 5th ed. I'm having fun evolving the character. In the midst of all that, I picked up the Firefly RPG and played some online, though it's really hard to find a decent group of folks that want to game for any length of time. I also found Tunnels and Trolls and made the Trollbridge my home online.
That's pretty much the gist of the story, though I may have missed a game or three in there somewhere: Classic Battletech, Mechwarrior, Robotech, Advanced Recon, a homebrew or two - the gods only know what else. So, I'm here now to pursue my love of T&T and game with some interested folk. That's pretty much it, a rather typical story, I'd expect.
~ C.P.
