I was introduced to D&D by the death of my father.

The two weren't related or anything, I just inherited his D&D books and stuff after he died, and kind of taught myself and several of my friends how to play (I was about 8 years old at the time).  I've been playing and collecting ever since, though I don't have any active campaigns going at the moment.

A lot of years ago, around 1983, I was a nerdy kid buying all the issues of the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and I read an article about 'fantasy games' and this weird concept of role playing. Living in a small town, some 30 chilometers from a big city, I didn't pursue the concept. Flash to 1986. I moved to the Big City (Turin, by the way) one morning I decided to get some rest from school    and I went straight to the mall where I found a game store and something called Dungeons & Dragons - Red Box. "Hmm, I  remember reading something about this..." and I bought it. When I opened the box I wondered about the lack of a gameboard then I read the solo adventure and I was hooked   I was so enthusiastic that I called I guess every toy store of Turin looking for the Italian edition of the Blue Box (Expert Set - no luck, it didn't exist yet) and the couple of solo adventures (M1 and M2) mentioned in the Red Box (they never came out in Italian   but I found in a toy store the B2, B3 and B4 modules. The rest, as you could say, is history  

Apparently my older brother and/or older sister had played the game at a friends and asked for it for Xmas, and we got the Holmes set w/ chits as a family.  I was probably 8 or nine, don't remember.

Anyways, our mom put together our first adventure, which was basically two rooms and a hallway.  We rolled up characters, and I had a bit of luck and ended up with an uber-man, far better stats than my brother and sister.  I led the way, and fell into a 10 ft square pit trap behind the first door of the dungeon and died immediately.  My siblings defeated a goblin, but ultimately succumbed to a group of giant rats not long afterwards.  We were hooked.

I was somewhere between 8 or 9 when I first got interested in the fantasy genre.  I remember several factors occurring around the same time that pushed me in the direction of D&D.  About this time my mom bought me a couple of the Playmobil Knights sets.  I remember having some guys on horseback with lances and a small castle.  They were very cool.

I spent a couple of weeks during the summer of 1979 at Texas Tech university at a kind of summer camp where I got to learn about computers, astronomy and other nerdy stuff.  A couple of older kids in my astronomy class were writing up a list of gear for an adventuring party.  I asked what they were doing it for and one of them asked me if I had ever played D&D.  I told them no so he gave me a pretty quick rundown of how the game worked.  I was mildly interested but at the same time thought it was a bit silly.  Why play a pencil, paper and dice game (with no board) when you could play video games instead?  While I was there I also got to see an animated film made by a guy named Ralph Bakshi.  The movie was Wizards.

One of the video games that I enjoyed playing was Atari's Adventure which was also released in '79.  Not much to look at but it was a lot of fun battling dragons, finding keys to open the castles, and locating the magical chalice (and the easter egg).  I also played quite a bit of Temple of Apshai on my Apple II computer in 1980.

The following year I got the boardgame Dark Tower for my birthday.  My brother and I played it for hours the first day.  It was only later that we realized we were playing it wrong.  Still had a lot of fun.  

I remember seeing both of the animated Rankin and Bass adaptations of The Hobbit and The Return of the King at some point during '80 or '81.  I also read The Hobbit novel.  I also saw the movie Excalibur shortly after it was released.

Later on in 1981 when I started school in the fall I became friends with a guy a year older than me.  He made a lot of pencil drawings of guys in armor with swords and other weapons.  One particular picture he drew was of an albino wearing black armor wielding a black sword.  It instantly caught my attention and I had to know where he got the idea.  So he let me borrow his Moorcock books to read.  I also met his older brother who was a dungeon master (at the time I thought WTF is that?).  He had all these hardback books with demons, monsters, and adventurers on the covers.  I thought the artwork was cool but he wouldnt let me look through them.     So later I told my mom how much I wanted to play the game (I think she thought it was a boardgame).  Some time later that year she bought the D&D Basic set with the Erol Otus artwork.  The Expert set came a short time later.  I read over the books numerous times and memorized every little detail about The Keep on the Borderlands and the Isle of Dread.  Not long after that I started playing in an AD&D game with my friend and two other guys my age.  After the first game I was hooked.

And even though I cant remember what I had for dinner last Tuesday.  I can honestly remember when & where I was for every D&D purchase I made while I was in jr. high and high school.

Beyondthebreach wrote:In a stoke of brilliance, I removed the spinner from "The Game of Life" and used it to simulate a 10 sided die (two spins would equal a roll of a d20).

That is brilliant.  I would have never thought to do that.

Plaag wrote:My brother got me the Red Basic Box Set Christmas of 1989 and I started playing the next day.

With your reverence of Judges Guild I would have assumed you started playing much earlier Shane.  How did you come to be such a JG afficionado with such a late start?

Well, lets see.



I started with the set right here:




** expired/removed eBay auction **




Surprised I can even find the set somewhere these days.



Got the set at a garage sale in about 1970-1971



I played with this set of knights and castles, I just liked them better than the army men set I had. And some times the knights had wizards and the magic defeated the army men and tanks and jeeps.



I created "adventures" to rescue the fair maiden, slay the dragon, and fight the orcs and goblins (army men made good green goblins, and orcs and trolls).



My knights became barbarians, and paladins, and rangers (robin hoods men), and other things I had read about. They gained fame and fortune and became kings and barons...



I also read lots of comics, built radios & balsa wood airplanes out of kits you could by at the local hobby store (it was actually a 5 & dime store called M.E. Moses) ... I went there every week to get new comics and see what else was new... until one day, there was a brown box with a knight on a horse on the front ... and the books inside had dragons and pegasus ...



The rest is history



I think I realized that gaming was going to be something I could do into adult hood since I saw a movie in 1971 called Bedknobs & Broom Sticks. It was a kids movie and during the movie some old old geezer dudes were playing with tin soldiers in a massive "minis" battle and tossing books to simulate cannon fire or something like that... it was awesome as I'd never played with that many "minis" (a few dozen plastic kights and army men maybe)...

Come on, we all know millions got their start when introduced by the Satanists down the street. Let's not hear these 'cover stories'.

It was just when computers were first coming out.  My friend had a commodor 64 and had a program that showed a dungeon layout and your character whet around to the different rooms and fought a monster and then found some treasure.  It was the most basic of computer games.  From that, we learned there was a book version.  From that point, the story is the same as the other storis here.

Martin

Oh and since then I've picked up another 1st edition group (Frank's bi-weekly game), and another Pathfinder group (my bi-weekly Monday night game)

Blackmoor wrote: I took a few years off of D&D during university and my first few years of work

I did that too: played actively until mid-way through college, then dropped it for the next five years. However I continued to collect old-school RPG titles, & this actually became a depressing pursuit. It was before the www, so unless I wanted to travel to GenCon, there was no way to find the stuff. I'd call book-search services & check the used-book stores, usually to no avail. There was a shop called T&T Dry Cleaners next to one book shop; each time I'd fail to find any old-school RPG books there, I'd feel like this sign was mocking me with its Tunnel-&-Trolls-sounding name.