I can remember exactly when and where I got into roleplaying games. It was the spring of 1989 in a school camp in Scotland. I was 9 years old and obsessed with Lord of the Rings, martial arts and horse riding. The camp was a dull affair – walking around some woods cataloging trees and insects, learning about the industrial revolution and being very careful not to make too much noise.. During the few hours we had free in the evenings we were supposed to play football and the like, keep out of the way of the teachers and not break any windows or each other. Football wasn’t really my thing and so I initially spent a lot of time reading. On the second day I noticed a group of boys from the year above me heading off to one of the classrooms. The next day I plucked up the courage to ask what they were doing.
‘MERP’ was the less than illuminating reply. This, it turned out was a game where you could pretend to be a hero, or a villain; to run around Tolkein’s Middle Earth and kill orcs. There were no pieces, no board just imagination, paper and some odd looking dice. I could be anything I wanted, anything in the whole of the Tolkein mythos. Like a Dúnadan fighting monk with a warhorse. This was pretty much the coolest thing I had ever seen. 2 hours in I was hooked. MERP proved too complex for me to play with my friends at home, and a helpful cousin provided a first edition copy of D&D that he had never played. This was the real gateway drug. 1st edition dungeon crawls were soon followed by AD&D, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, Star Wars and tabletop wargaming. I had a freaking huge dice bag and shelves full of rulebooks.
As soon as I went to the Comprehensive school I started a gaming club, with a friend running a totally awesome Warhammer 40k game with on some homebrew rules taken from the Fighting Fantasy books. This was where I met up with friends who I still have now. As we got older we joined a larger gaming club and after a while I got a job running games for the local community centre. The games we played became more and more varied – Blood Bowl, Mighty Empires and the magnificent Cyberpunk 2013. This latter co-incided with my discovery of William Gibson, and the whole cyberpunk literary movement. I was obsessed.
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