Introductions

NOTE: These are taken from the FUM site.

I thought we could use this thread to introduce ourselves. As the group moderator, why don't I go first. I got started with D&D back in Beaverton, Oregon in 1980. My first experience was with the Holmes Basic Box Set. My cousin and I created a small gaming group with our friend and neighbor from across the street. I was always the DM-- mainly due to temperment, I guess. We quickly moved on to AD&D and real dice-- I think our Holmes had chits. I remember it was a big deal saving up the $15-20 needed in those days to buy each of the core books. I know that we played a lot of published modules, but the one that left the most lasting impression was A2 Secret of the Slaver's Stockade. What a hard dungeon that was! In fact, the guys didn't appreciate that series very much. They still talk about with scorn. I stopped playing D&D sometime during college in the late 80s. I don't know that I ever played Second Edition. My career kept me pretty busy in the 90s and it wasn't until the year 2000 that I happened to see the 3e PHB in a London bookshop. Intrigued, I bought it. The first thing I noticed about the new edition were all of the stats. There were abilities for everything! I was so glad not to have started as a DM with 3e. That would have been tough as a 10-year-old. I had the odd playing experience with 3e and 3.5, but never got involved with a permanent gaming group. It wasn't until the publication of 4e and my trip to the US this Summer that my old interest was reignited. I had been following the publication of 4e when my old gaming group in the US asked if I had seen it. They said that maybe we could start playing again using DDI. Once I saw that DDI wasn't going to be available, I started looking for alternatives. I don't remember how I found FGII, but I'm glad I did. I hadn't heard of Castles & Crusades before, but I saw that its ruleset was available with FGII. The promotional material described a playing experience that reminded me of our old days playing D&D, so I thought I'd give it a go. This is the first C&C gaming group I've run and it's been fun. The guys put a lot of effort into the roleplaying and problem-solving. It's just the kind of thing I was looking for.

HIGHWAY MAN Wrote:

Well I guess I started playing D&D in 1989 when I was like 12 years old or so. I was really big into fantasy video games for the nintendo like Dragon Warrior, Final Fantasy, Zelda, Battle for Olympus, etc which made D&D very appealing to me. I even remember my first character which was an elf with a quarter staff (My friends and I loved Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Donatello was my fav). Anyway we ended up in a dungeon being chased by Quaggoths and they killed my friend's character and then I tried to pole-vault over some pudding or slime with my stick, but failed and the damn thing ate my elf. I have been hooked ever since. Played pretty much AD&D through out high school though I did try a few other games like the LotR rpg and a few others, but I didn't like them. Later when in the army my roommate and I really lucked out because we were both really into rpgs and our barracks room (Room 227) pretty much became the official hang out for gaming. Played a lot of Star Trek and Rifts and those two games have become favorites of mine. After the army there really wasn't anyone around to play pnp games with so I got into online gaming which started with Mechwarrior, but then moved to playing Baldurs Gate online and then Neverwinter Nights which I played for way to long, but it is where I really honed by role-playing skills. I was then pointed in the direction of Virtual Table Tops a couple years ago and well here I am. I am not a fan of WotC or anything they make and I hate generic gaming systems like d20 that can be used for any and all games or genres as well. D&D 3e ruined D&D and 4e to me may very well be worse with its total lameness. Castles & Crusades is a great fit for a player like me since it has the old school D&D feel, but with some updates to make things go a little faster. I enjoy playing dwarves the most and love the dwarven race and culture. My favorite class however is wizard, but that doesn't fit well with a dwarf, so some times I'll play a human or halfling wizard.

TENKAR wrote:

Let me figure the math on when I started playing D&D... I was in Junior High... 8th grade... it was the spring '81. I was the ripe old age of 13. It was me and my best friend... he DM'd, I played a Fighter named Striker. All he owned was the DMG... he had to call a classmate to see if I leveled. By mid-summer I had all 3 core books for AD&D thanks to my mother and a kick-ass set of poly dice. I gamed in the summers in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania and in the outskirts of NYC during the school year. The gaming group that formed during my High School years still has a tight core of friends and gamed regularly from the early 80's until 1997. That's when real life... work, wives, kids, and all the other obligations of life cut down on the face to face gaming... we migrated online to EQ, Anarchy Online, EQ2, LotRO and now Warhammer Online. The urge to game, to hang out, even from our own desktop, is still there. They just haven't taken the next step yet... pen and paper roleplaying on the desktop. This is the second campaign I've played in using FG2. The other was a Warhammer 40k: Dark Heresy game. That one is in the process of switching to a straight WFRP game. I've played around with just about every online rpg interface you can find, and participated in a Klooge one off a few years ago. Not one is perfect, but FG2 more then does the job. Back in the day I usually DM'd the AD&D games and an occasional SpaceMaster game. Was a player in Rifts and GURPS and dabbled with way too many rpg systems to count... as my closet and basement will no doubt prove

TEGEUS wrote:

I actually heard of D&D in 197(6) ? in an article in McClean's magazine. But it sounded dumb - where was the board, playing pieces and you use your imagination?? I started playing Christmas break 1981. I got the AD&D PHB and DMG and the Red Box D&D. No one I knew played so I had to figure it out myself and my friends could not understand why it took me all day to set up. I ended up playing D&D as it was the easiest to understand. I remember asking a another gamer at school a few months later which book was the rulebook for AD&D. The DMG and PHB just seemed badly organized and confusing. Where do the rules begin. My Gaming group through High School lasted into University and beyond about 15 years with myself as GM and we stuck to D&D with some house rules. It was a lot like C&C actually. In University we had a great large Gaming group and I got exposed to lot more game systems. One or two editors for Palladium were in the Club so we played a lot of Palladium fantasy, Amber, Beyond the Supernatural etc. After University I moved to the big city (Toronto) and met I lot of my old University friends and gamed with them (Traveller, WOD, Magic) and tried to keep my old group together but now we tried RuneQuest and Harnmaster. Last few years most of my Gaming friends have moved away or moved on to boardgames only so I have been playing online in MMORPGs and through Open RPG. I bought FGII with the intent of using it as a Campaign tool to get back into writing and GMing. tegeus

CAMLIN wrote:

I thought I'd posted to this thread a while back, but never did! Well... I'm John, a life-long central Marylander, living close enough to BWI airport that if you've ever flown into Baltimore, there's a fair chance you flew right over my house. I'm married to a very tolerant woman and we have two kids - a daughter, 15, and a son, 11. Both kids are turning into gamers, which my wife observes with bemusement. I run a C&C game for the kids and some of their friends once a month. By day I'm an information security guy for a financial company. My gaming life actually began with wargames in middle school, 1976 or 77. Kingmaker, Squad Leader, Panzerblitz, then later on to Third Reich and other games (more about that later). As a freshman in high school I was introduced to D&D, then AD&D, and then to Traveller. I played all of these (and other games - lots of MicroGames and early Task Force stuff) through high school and during my stint in the Army. Though I picked up the Advanced Squad Leader rules and Beyond Valor when they first came out, I didn't actually play ASL for several years. I was fortunate to belong to a game club in high school, but it had folded by the time I left the service. Some friends restarted it in 1988 and through that club I got exposed to miniatures, Civilization, Nuclear War and a plethora of other games. I got turned on to Shadowrun around 1989 or 90 and ran a campaign for several years. Around 1994 I finally started to play ASL and hooked up with a group of local players. ASL crowded out the rest of my gaming life for the next 7 years or so, and I wound up a playtester for MMP. Eventually I earned a leader counter with my name on it in Doomed Battalions, the last ASL module produced by the old pre-Hasbro Avalon Hill. I also played in tournaments regularly (if not well ) and was part of a club drawing from the DC metro area. I succumbed to MMOs for a time beginning in 2001. I still occasionally play with some folks I've grown attached to. MMOs pushed out my other gaming for a few years, but I eventually wound up playing some D&D 3.5 with a group at my FLGS in 2004-5. My work schedule eventually conflicted with the group's, but I was able to sneak some games in occasionally. Last spring I decided to start running the game for the kids and asked around for a good rules set to help introduce my young crew to RPGs. Several people recommended C&C and WHAMMO! It was just like picking up the AD&D PHB way back when. Our game went on hiatus over the summer, but we picked back up with a few new players last fall, and I now have 5 or 6 of them around the table each month. Perhaps it's due to my formative gaming years back in the days before published settings, but I've always been a fan of homebrew settings when the system permitted it. I quite gleefully steal and adapt characters, places, and situations from any and every source - my current campaign is draws heavily from Poul Anderson's "The King of Ys" novels, some Lois McMaster Bujold, a campaign I played in during my Army days, and a bunch of stuff I've simply absorbed over time. (I also muck around with my homebrew Traveller milieu once in a while, though I haven't played Traveller for a while.) Anyway, that's me! Well met!

MGHOLSON wrote:

Introduction as follows: Name: Matt Gholson Location: Harrisburg IL. Age 29 and 11/12th Profession: Education Married: Yes Kids: Unfortanitly not Warning, long winded introduction ahead: Gaming History: In eighth grade I got into collecting comic books, I had been collecting baseball cards like most of my friends, but I realized that I had no real interest in the game, players, or any actual sport, therefore I must be a nerd. Comics seemed good for a nerd so I took that up. I soon had a few comic book friends and at lunch, open campus, we walked across town to a local comic/porn shop and used our lunch money to buy comics. While I was there I would always look at the AD&D books and think about the game. I knew what an RPG was because I had gotten Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy on my Nintendo and I thought they were some of my favorite games, but I was always annoyed by the limits of the video game RPG, like how I could only say what the game programmer wanted me to say and thought a real life game would be way more fun. Another friend had a 2nd edition AD&D handbook and had played with some people a few times and wanted to start a game. I couldn't do it at my house because I didn't really have a place that would work and my parents would have been freaked out. We got only a few sessions in at friends garage over a summer before high school, and most of that time was spent making characters. As freshmen we kept it up by playing everyday a lunch on our walk to a nearby restaurant. My friend I mentioned with a phb was the DM, he spent half the first session trying to figure out what we were going to do. I remember speaking up and saying something like, "Why don't we go destroy that den of brigands who live in the cave outside of town." He thought it was a good idea and the next day I became DM. We had no books, no sheets, no maps or counters, just freeform imaginative gameplay where as DM I might roll dice once a day. If I thought that a character had a good chance to hit he would, if I thought he didn't then he would miss and I applied my opinion based ruleset to most actions. This was probably my favorite time gaming. There was a group a few years older then us that had an excellent DM named Preston, he was a strange dude, very much like a Guru, his life was D&D and acting. I didn’t get to play with him much but he ran memorable games. I remember one where the party thought they were rescuing damsels in distress only to find themselves tied up to trees naked without a shred of armor, clothing, or anything.

MGHOLSON wrote:

A game store opened in my small town about this time mainly because of the growing popularity of Collectable Card Games. I spent way to much time in there getting hooked on Magic the Gathering. I ran a few one shot 3rd edition D&D games when it came out but never got a solid group together for it. White wolf games were popular among the players and I played in several of them but they were always cheesy. All the games I ran with Vampire turned into vampires ransacking the town and burning down taco bells. Warhammer was popular at this shop and I tried to get into it even spending lots of money. Despite the fact that I could field a 3000 point wood elf army I never actually played a game. The game store closed and I got out of gaming for awhile, did some computer games, but never really got into anything. Tried UO, Asheron’s Call, Everquest, well almost every MMO and never got much past the free month. A few years later my original friend who got me started on D&D invitied me to come play Chill with him at a friends house. This was a weird game in lots of ways one was because the nature of chill freaky supernatural stuff, the other because there were women playing, several in fact. It was a neat game and I went to a few sessions, but my friend quit going and I didn’t feel like going alone, it was an hour away. I discovered Online Table Tops shortly after that and tried to get into several D&D games using openrpg, the problem was they were always canceled or postponed. I got mad and started my own, which was good fun and lasted almost a year with a core group of 3 players and supporting cast of 5-6 that came in and out of the game. What was cool for me was that I used all those characters we made up in those old lunch time sessions as the great heroes of my world. Eventually I got tired of sitting in front of my computer so much and quit. Fast forward 3 years and I get to bug again to game, I find some old warhammer figures laying around and paint them, it was fun so I start buying them like crazy on ebay and painting them up. Just like last time I can’t find anyone to ever get into a game with so I ebay those for a nice profit. Next I get into wargames and get a few friends to come over for axis and allies. That lasts for awhile, but dies off. Next comes Magic, I start traveling an hour to go play magic tournaments. That takes its toll and starts to get old so I start looking at RPGs and Virtual table tops again. This time it looks like openrpg is gone, so I buy fantasy grounds. So far I like it much better and have gotten into a couple of good groups and just started my own. If you read this far go get a cookie you earned it.

Konrad wrote:

I started playing D&D back in the early eighties with the Moldway boxset (incl the pre-colored dices and crayon). Later got the Holmes version which got more playtime, much due to Elmore's inspiring illustrations and the expansions. Later dabbled some in AD&D 2nd ed and Greyhawk RPGA style play, never lived up to the early days tho due to excessive rule crunching. Took a break from D&D and made a foray into other systems (BRP and D6). Anyway, used to modify systems in most campaigns to allow for more roleplay than rollplay and level craving. Me and some fellow friends took turns DM'ing different games. Nowadays, I have had a almost 10 year draught of pen and paper RPG involvement due to work commitments, university studies and life in general. So currently looking at getting back into the hobby again, preferably to play some of the older systems for old times' sake. Prefer dark, horror fantasy or sci-fi (Traveller) type games and scenarios. Come early 2000, played and got involved with some 3E games, first I was excited, there was so much character development etc. Later became bored with it, too slow paced with soo many splat books that it sometimes would take a whole session just to resolve one encounter. More recently, flipped thru 4E in a book store and...meh! I guess it's the D&D of the MMO generation. So, went looking for a substitute and found Paizo's Pathfinder. Yet again, more of what I wasn't looking for. Although, I think I would prefer it over 4E. Nah, wanted another type of fun rather...So perused Labyrinth Lord, Swords & Wizardry, Mazes & Minotaurs and the small OD&D books for some retro inspiration in an attempt to rekindle my interest again. Just look at the resurgence of old school gaming on the internets after the release of 4E. There seems to be a plethora of disillusioned players out there, since blogs covering OD&D and other oldies are popping up everywhere. Castles & Crusades, I like what I see so far, to do away with 3E's skills and feats is applaudable. The game pace flows more streamlined, which contributes to a better gaming experience overall. C&C is more of a beer & pretzels game of classic D&D style, something I have been looking for.

STUART wrote:

I started role playing with Tunnels & Trolls in about '72/'73 I think it was ... a looooong time ago now. Then the red boxed (well it was in the UK) Basic Dungeons & Dragons came out in the mid '70's. In between rugby and school I then picked up the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons and with some friends, had a group of 6 or 7 players every Tuesday night for about 6 years or so. Flirtations with various other systems followed but I was hooked on TSR until in an epiphany, I discovered Rolemaster. That pretty much was my main game (Shadow World but mostly Middle-earth) until I moved to the States as a research scientist. To my horror, no one played Rolemaster and by then, all things rpg were beginning to slide ... back to D&D but that too died. I ran a PBeM game helped by ICE (Rolemaster) for 3 years; epic epic game with 4 different groups of between 6-7 players in about 10 different countries. We ran for 3 years (Court of Ardor) until I returned to the UK. No game groups ! Arrgghhh ! Then about three years ago I stumbled across Fantasy Grounds and the world is now a rosier place. I've played and run most of the games out there using FG (D&D, Arcana Evolved, Cthulu, Savage Worlds etc etc) and I think the role playing opportunities because of the essential anonymity of the internet are huge. The trouble with FG games is the huge prep needed by a GM ahead of the game. In my experience, double that of a pnp GM.

I should add, I ran the A2 Slavers Stockade using FG a while back and re did all the maps using Dundjinni (or it may have been CC2) .... the A1 to A5 series were AWESOME.

KAAHEN wrote:

Well, First, I have to admit, that I am happy since it looks as I'm not the older in this group (as always happens to me), when Stuart began to play I had 2 or 3 y.o. ;-). My story is a little different as yours, since I really didn't use to play rolegames. I never heard anything of what a rolegame was till the end of 80s, I used to play with my friends to several games, most of the times we created them, the most similar to a rolegame we ever played was Heroquest, we loved that game and its minis. The first time I heard of a rolegame, was in a chapter of a serie called "American Superhero", excuse me if I don't translate it correctly, but I am sure you know it, it was about a hero that flied (William Katt)but the serie was a comedy. The thing is that in that chapter there was a problem with some Students playing a live rolegame. What I good idea! I thought... Some years later I was watching, one of my favourite cartoon on TV, it was called "Dungeons and Dragons", But it wasn't till the end of 80s when I saw the Tom Hanks movie (which in Spain had the same title than the cartoon), when I realised that this game really existed. I talked with my friends about it, and they all were quite insterested in it. The problem is that when I bought it (AD&D), everything was so confusing, I mean I have to admit than I even bought quite a lot of products and really liked to read them, but I never knew the way it was supposed to be played, so my friends finally rejected the idea to play with it. Another of my friends bought the Lord of the rings rolegame, and it was the same, very interesting everything the books says, but no idea the way to play with it. I played once with a group to Stormbringer, and I liked it, but this group was closed, so I didn't have any continuity. And during all this late years, I had some periods that I remembered the game and tried to play it by Internet, I tried it with DDO,some forums, till I knew about DDI, what I great idea I thought, (in fact not yet)... but I don't know how, I founf FG, and liked it to try. Now the problem I have is that to play with FG I have to do it in english since I can't find any spanish people that has bought it, but, anyway, I can do it more or less so no problem, maybe I won't enjoy it 100%, but is ok for me.

Hello all, I am a late comer to the group/s here, but that doesn't mean that we can't have some fun anyway! And now for the introduction... My name is Russ and I live in Los Angeles, CA. I am a proverbial "struggling actor" with a mass of IT skills trying to find a break in the business out here, though I do have over 20 years of stage and screen training and experience behind me. It is the artist in me that has always been drawn to Role Playing Games though my gaming interest extends to all sorts of board, card and computer games also.

I grew up in middle America on the northern edge of the "Bible Belt", so D&D and activities of that sort were actively demonized as Satan-worshiping games that encouraged loose morals and evil acts in the 1970's. Despite that, I met a friend in 6th grade (circa 1981) with an open minded mother who introduced me to Basic D&D (I still have my original red box set and the shoddy d6 out of the dice set that came with it). I was immediately hooked and our group began meeting once a week after school to play. We were meeting at the school since we all lived fairly close and didn't want our parents to know we were playing the Devil's game. They found out about it anyway and held meetings to decide what to do. They decided that we couldn't play unsupervised so our English teach stepped forward and let us play once a week in his classroom while he graded papers. I guess he felt pretty strongly about kids using their imaginations and knew what RPGs really were. He was a great teacher too.

I was in the army in the early 90's and after that and through the rest of the decade, I was heavily involved in the SCA (Society of Creative Anachronisms) which allowed me to learn to fight with a number of medieval weapons and move around in a variety of different types of armor as well as participating not only in single combat, but also in mass melees with literally hundreds of combatants on a side. These activities have been invaluable for giving me personal insights into modern and archaic weapons and methods.

Fast forwarding... over those times and into the more recent, I continued on from 1st through 3rd editions (I haven't had much interest in reinvesting all the needed money into 4th ed., and I have heard that they have dumbed it down considerably). Over the years and amongst my D&Ding, I have also played GURPS, Planescape, Shadowrun, Cyberpunk, Twilight 2000, Call of Cthulu and others along the way. And now I am getting to explore the Castles and Crusades ruleset with my most recent creation, the mighty halfling ranger Alton Tosscobble of the Gullykin Tosscobbles. So, let's get this party started!!!

Hello hello,

it took me a while to get this out there, but here it is. My name is Alain, I'm 24 years old and live in Groningen, the Netherlands. My first contact with RPG's was the AD&D starter's kit which I bought and played with a couple of times with some friends. A couple of years later I saw an RPG book in the store: Vampire: The Masquerade. This immediately grabbed my attention, I bought it and our group had a lot of fun playing. I have to say that even though we had fun, none of us had any real idea of what we were doing. When I was about 21, a friend of mine introduced me to Call of Cthulhu. We started playing a scenario called 'The Haunting', which scared the hell out of me, a success! However, due to circumstances, we were unable to play on a regular basis, until a year ago when I decided to start a CoC group. We've been playing for almost a year, and ended with a bang: everyone died, but they saved the world! Our group is now continuing with RPG, but have laid Cthulhu to rest for awhile. Getting killed off 2 times in one setting is too much for some people. Instead we are now playing a German RPG called Das Schwarze Auge, translated into Dutch: Oog des Meesters and translated into English it became: The Dark Eye. Immensely successful in Germany, it failed massively in Holland and England, which is a shame as it is, in my opinion one of the most atmospheric settings, even though it feels a bit cheesy at times. At the moment I play a charlatan, a magical character who is more skilled in ripping people off than actually casting something successful! It's a great opportunity for some fun roleplaying, which is one of my main interests in RPG. I'm not that interested in rolling dice over and over again (Of course, it cannot be avoided and that is fine, but I'm opposed to games that are only about that). I haven't played Castles & Crusades properly yet, but what I've seen/heard of it, it sounds cool and I'm looking forward to playing!

Hi there

I'm Russ, I live in Northern Ireland. Bit of a late starter, I'm 42 and only really got into this whole RPG thing a couple of years ago. Role playing is fairly common here if you live in the capital (Belfast), where there are quite a few groups and a big games convention every year at Queen's University, but there's very little going on elsewhere. So if you live out in the country, as I do, the only real option is the online stuff.

I've already played a few DnD games with Fantasy Grounds and one abortive Savage Worlds sessions and I play in a couple of PbEM games. Getting good VT opportunities in the GMT time zone is a real trial, but I've recently joined Rob Merino's Sasserine's Hammers group on a Tuesday evening and I'm really enjoying that. I have a couple of requests in with other games, so we'll see how they go.

I love the whole character building thing, devising an engaging, believable backstory and then playing that character in a well thought-out adventure -it's great. Can't wait to do it some more.

Thanks for reading

Russ

PS - glad to see there a few other old wrinklies like myself in this forum as well !!

Hello there

I'm a 40 year young Welshman, married with 3 children, and I have been roleplaying (in some capacity) for the last 25+years. Old school I guess.

I havent actually played much at all for the last 10 years, so there's a bit of feeling my way back into things. However, I'd be very interested in hooking up one evening in order to play.

For the record, I did purchase a full licence FG2, but for some reason it seems to have downgraded to a trial licence. All I can think is that I must have deleted the wrong one - very unlikely but there you go. It's gone either way. I'd be more than willing to get hold of the full licence again though, that wouldn't be an issue. Would I need the book as well? Again, not an issue because I'll be getting one anyway. Isn't there a new reprint of the C&C core rules coming out soon?

Peace

Warden

Hello everyone, I'm Mr_H (which you probably already gathered from my name being on this post), and I'm a newcomer (which you also probably noticed, since you haven't seen me here before). Anyhow, I saw that you all were looking for some more players, and since my schedule sucks for weekly games, a once a month game looked pretty darn good to me.

I've been playing RPG's for a long time, about 20+ years. My friends and I started with the Red Box of D&D before we even knew all the rules (rolling a 11 or higher meant we hit. The # of hit dice of a creature was how many succesful hits it could take, etc). Since then I've played every version of D&D, Star Frontiers, Top Secret SI (SF and TSSI are my two favorites in the whole world), Teenager Mutant Ninja Turtles, Teenagers from Outer Space, Paranoia, Star Trek, Marvel, Toon!, GURPS, Twilight 2000, Big Eyes Small Mouth, Macho Women with Guns, Shadowrun, Middle Earth Roleplaying, Star Wars, and maybe a few others I've forgotten about.

We were quite active in college and high school, but after that all my friends moved away and gaming took a nosedive, except for online text games (which I still play). Then I found Fantasy Grounds and I was able to bring in a couple of friends to start playing some games again.

At the moment I'm attempting to run a Gurps World War II game with some friends (schedules interfering),and I'm looking at starting a Gurps Star Frontiers game (school work interfering). It'll be nice to play a character again.

So, look forward to joining the Company of Dwellers group. I'll be Leo

PS Since work keeps me at computers all day, I'm pretty fast about answering emails and message board postings too. A nice benefit:)

Mr_H / aka Jon

Ok. Another new guy here, and I suppose that I should introduce myself rather than simply remain the mysterious wizard in the corner.

My name is Matthew, I live in Canton, Georgia (the "crappy" Canton) where I'm an accountant for a large agricultural company, and I'll be 33 in about two days. I'm also currently back in school working on a Masters of Accounting degree with which I hope to make large piles of money so that I can afford to build the ultimate gaming room by the time my two-year old son is old enough to roll the dice and play some games with me. My wife fears this day greatly.

Growing up, I always had an interest in traditional fantasy tales involving knights going off on quests and wizards like Merlin as he appears in Disney's Sword in the Stone. This lead to watching Dungeons & Dragons when it was a Saturday morning cartoon show, while being completely oblivious to the fact that the show was based upon a game of the same name. I believe that I was about 7 or 8 at this time.

Fast forward a couple of years (1986?) and I was living in Fort Lauderdale, Florida where I began reading the Lone Wolf series of books. While on a Boy Scouts single-day outing, myself and a few others played a freeform version of D&D in the back of a truck with a camper top. "Dungeons & Dragons? Like the cartoon? How do you play? I can do anything?" I was hooked. Luckily, one of the other scouts lived in my neighborhood and suggested that we go play that night with some if his friends. I really didn't get to do much, but I just remembered being very excited at the concept if this game.

I didn't really get to play again in Florida, but about two years later we moved back to Georgia just north of Atlanta. One day while hanging out with a friend of mine, I asked him if he had ever played D&D. "Not really, but I know what it is." We felt like playing that day, but neither of us owned any books. We just made our own game, called Sword of Fire. I actually kept it and found it during our last move a couple of months ago. Funny stuff. We unknowlingly named the kingdom Alderaan.

A few weeks after our all day Sword of Fire session, I got my hands on some of the core AD&D 2nd Edition material. I managed to introduce several of my friends in my small town to D&D, and we branched put into other games. We played plenty of Star Wars, Space: 1889, D.C. Heroes, TMNT, and more that I'm probably forgetting.

In college, I didn't really game to much although I did keep all of my materials. Vampire was really big at the time, and, while I bought the core book, I just didn't dig it that much. College and much of the period from '95 to '05 was a dark, empty period in my gaming career.

In 2005 I was back in school to get an accounting degree and I began playing Dungeons and Dragons Online after purchasing a new computer fir school. I really liked the game, and I still play a regular game with friends today when I'm not too busy. Although lately, I've been too busy. A child, a career, and a return to school will do that to you. I did, however, began taking an interest in playing some table top again, but I didn't really care for 3e in its entirety.
Enter Castles & Crusades. I found C&C after looking around for some alternatives to 3e. I liked that I could use classic D&D modules and Monster Manuals with little effort and managed to play a few games with some friends and family.

I also managed to discover Savage Worlds and fell in love with Deadlands. I've picked up Realms of Cthulhu and I'm greatly anticipating the release of Space 1889: Red Sands for the system. I've tried 4e. And I did enjoy it, but without a regular group I am not picking up the materials just for the heck of it. Not yet anyway.

However, it was still difficult to find regular games. I them found out about Fantasy Grounds, picked up a copy and manages to get into a Call of Cthulhu, Beyond the Mountains of Madess campaign. It was greatgun and playing within FG could be just as exciting as in person.

I actually haven't played in about a year, but I felt the need for a game so here I am. I like a fun game with a good mix of combat, puzzled, general problem solving and social interaction. Combat is great, but I don't like games that focus solely on combat, regardless of what system it is.

I look forward to playing some more and I hope to help everyone tell a good story.

Matthew

"Zorovar"

Hello chaps.

New man White-Devil here from the country that gave the world: dynamite, meatballs, ABBA and most recently: me!

I'm a 20 years old D&D newbie. I've had a hard time finding a group where I live to play with but I've always been interested in trying it out.
Currently I'm working off and on and will hopefully do so this summer and autumn, at which point I will start taking two smaller courses, but I doubt it will get in the way of playing.

So please be gentle with and do give me feedback, tips and tricks and other things that you think I should know or do differently

Hello all.

My name is Brian and I have a question: Why is it that in popular media, the guy called Brian is always?

* A complete ass.
* The first to die
* An emotional pushover
* Boring
* Socially Inept
* The guy who never gets the kill (or the girl)

I like to think Im not any of the above, but in my biased opinion I could be completely wrong. Im 30 years old and started playing way back when my cousin handed me the red box edition of D&D when I was about eight years old. Of course, back then, we had no concept of what was actually meant by "role". Honestly? In our eight year old little minds we thought it was just one of those crazy different spellings that are used on the other side of the pond. You know, as in "armour" as oppossed to "armor".

I learned better in high school, where I got into the RPGA in a big way. I tried out LARPing, and have gone through stages on both loving and hating it (probably depending on the folks Im LARPING with). I'm a published author *Cough* -by which I mean I had two short stories published in various magazine about a decade or so ago and havent been published since. (Which could have something to do with the fact I've barely submitted anything. All my great story ideas go into writing adventures for my campaigns instead). I game face to face with my latest group of novices about twice a month on an irregular schedule due to working shifts. I tend to start up novice groups every other year or so and teach them the ropes. These campaigns almost always start because I've run a "one-off" game for various people who ask me, "Roleplaying, whats that?". The ones who really get into it tend to become good friends but most of my regular novice players gradually drift away to other groups that can meet more regularly or else start their own campaigns that I get to make the odd guest GM/ Guest Player appearance in. I also game with a group of players who have all been gaming for at least fifteen years -with the exception of my fiancee, who has been gaming for three. We meet much less regularly than my novice group, due to several of us working conflicting shifts and the rest of us having small children. Its a good year for us if we manage to get together together twice a season.

Anyway, I'm really excited about this game. Ive never played C&C before but like to think of myself as an old school gamer -by which I mean the type of guy to prefers to find traps by poking around and describing what he's looking at rather than just making a dice roll. But it seems to me that every other person I meet who thinks of themself that way has a different idea of what "old school" actually is. For me, it means using your imagination and inventiveness more than dice.

Im really looking forward to gaming with you all on Sunday.

Ok, looks like we revived an old thread but why the hell not!

I am Blake, just turned 31 years old, from Canberra in Australia. Started gaming when I was 7 (must have been '86) with my big brother and some of his friends, we played basic dnd, the red box version too. I travelled around the world a fair bit and worked many jobs but was a bar and hotel manager the last few years. Then I decided to quit and go back to uni, studying to be a teacher now.

My first game my brother let me take over a PC that had been turned into a fire giant by a potion, I was devastated when I found out all my characters couldn't be fire giants, but I was hooked. And guess what Brian? The first module I ever played was A4- "In the Dungeons of the Slave Lords"- Now that was a tough module!

We played basic, expert, then adnd 1e, then 2e (and probably a mishmash of all of them and our own houserules) but I never warmed to the later editons and refuse to play them (from 3e on...). I guess that makes us "old school" holdouts.

I DM a face to face game with a few other like minded souls in Canberra, but only my brother remains of my old gaming buds, the rest moved away, died or floated away years ago.

I recently came across C&C and thought it retained so much of the 1e flavour, whilst simultaneously improving the mechanics, streamlining it and fixing a few "broken" things/classes in ways that just seemed to gel with how i liked to play (it is like they took half my old houserules, improved them and made them standard in C&C).

I joined this game to stretch out my 'player' muscles again, to try out the C&C system and to have some fun as the setting looked good (similarish to how I was planning my next campaign).


PS; White Devil- you can add an item to your list of things Sweden gave the world... my first broken heart. My first love came from Vaxjo, she broke my young heart, i'll try not to hold it against you

Hi..
My name is Ari or people usually call me Harry or Ari..any just fine with me. I just started play D&D seriously last year. Yep..I think it's a bit too late for 34 years to play D&D. And now, I got addicted. I usually play offline once a week with a small group bunch of expat in Indonesia. It's very hard to find D&D group here because I don't think people would understand the art of the game and second, most of them can't understand english very well. I've known D&D since 2004, while I was in Australia. I played with a small group there for a while, but I moved back to Indonesia for good...Anyway, since it's very hard to find another group of D&D in Indonesia, I tried to play online. Bought the FG2, then I realised it's very hard to find a perfect time for me to play. Since most of the gaming occurs at dawn my time..I found this group and the time of the game is quite suitable for me, since I'm a night owl. I hope I can play very long campaign in this one..cheers