I wonder if Rob Kuntz still has some of his??

ScketreWhisp® wrote:It depends if we are talking D&D characters ? or not ...

I have some character sheets from 1976, but I also have some from 1971 when I was 8 years old... let me explain

In 1971, I enjoyed playing WAR, you know, the card game where you have a deck and the other player has a deck and you flip cards and the high card wins the "hand" etc. The game gets a bit boring after while since there is no skill to it.

At that time I loved Medieval stuff. I had a bunch of plastic knights (like the plastic army men in those days), the set came with knights, archers, pikemen, etc. and a "castle" as it were with catapults etc. Setting up these knights and killing each other got boring as well, since there was no way to really tell who killed who except if the catapult rock knocked over your guys, then they were dead.... so we decided to combine the 2 games.... We used the WAR card game portion to fight between individual men...

Later we went on "adventures" to slay the dragon, kill the witch and save "sleeping beauty" and the like.

We named our knights and kept track of what we killed on our sheets of paper (ie: name, creatures killed, name of horse, gold and treasures).

We used the WAR card game portion to fight the creatures (we never thought to use dice for whatever reason)

So I do have some old old character sheets, just not for "D&D" per se. Though the character name on those 1971 sheets was also the first D&D character I rolled up in 1976 - Scketre Whisp

Wow, that almost parallels my experiences.

In the early 70s, I ran into a couple of kids like me....very imaginative, and very influenced by SF, horror and fantasy movie and books.  We would create our own games to play making up our own rules.

In about 1974 or so (right when the original OD&D was being released), we would have "adventures" with separate army men (the "greens" to those of use who remember them) that pretty much followed the plots of comic books, Planet of the Apes, and whatever sf/fantasy was popular at the time. They would combat various monsters such as werewolves, vampires, mutants, apes, etc (these would also be figures we bought). Our yards became vast unexplored jungles that the army men would roll through, fighting menaces behind every tree or bush.  We named all the men  individual names, and eventually we started rolling a single 6 sided dice when they faced an adversay....as Doug's "War" games, the highest die roll won (killed) the other. Then, when our favorite "characters" were dying too often (Mine was a yellow cherokee indian with a bowie knife taken from a cowboys and indians set, another guy's was a greenie swinging his rifle that he called "Batter up!") we instituted a rule that they could be hit more times before they died (i.e., hit points!)

The plots were thought up by me and were often complicated affairs very comic book influenced..they fought a creature called "The mutant master" that was a weird plastic looking monstrosity that I had got out of a gumball machine in one of those plastic spheres..he looked really freaky and awful, and would control men's minds (again, roll a 6 sided die vs another to see if your mind was taken over).  We had a "Hitler" army man (he was grey and was taken from a Normandy battle set that came with tanks, etc) that we said was Hitler "cloned" back into life through super science; a few vampire and werewolf figures, etc. Anything freaky or weird looking would be their opponents. Of course we loved dinosaurs also so the Aurora prehistoric model sets (cmon, anyone remember those?) would often be menaces for the army men. We really got into it to the point where if a character actually "died" (i.e., the figure got destroyed by a lawn mower, or eaten by a dog, or took too many hits during a game), we actually had the army men have a funeral and "bury" the guy, with the other men saying the eulogy praising his past deeds ("Batter Up was able to stop the diabolical plans of the Mutant Master time and again, and killed the cloned Hitler on many occasions, and saved everyone during the last dinosaur rampage").

We stopped playing those games as soon as we got to High school (9th grade or so), so it comes as no surprise that discovering D&D was like our pretend army man and monster games come to life!  

Anyway, I do believe in my papers are the names and adventures of these stalwart men from almost 40 years ago.  It's too bad we didn't know about or have anyone running a woodgrain or white box game 1974-1978 or so, as we would have happily taken to that instead!

Speaking of character sheets, I do have mine (Conan) somewhere in my files, I've seen it a few times over the past few years.  I believe it's from 1979 or so.

Mike B.

My first character was drawn up on a piece of A4 paper (which I'm pretty sure I still have) but was only in something like '82-'83 maybe...

Sounds like WAR was something akin to TopTrumps with the best attribute winning the hand.

Nice to read about your early days though guys, I guess we all went through the same games with soldiers and Action Men dying and living to fight another day! Even when a leg came off, they'd still limp on bravely!  

I've been having a bit of a think back over those early days and I need a bit of clarification if I can.

I think I sat in on my first 'dungeon' that was run by my brother whilst he was at college (1979-81??) kind of time. He was playing with several college friends, maybe 8 or so and I had the pleasure of watching and listening in, (being as I was only 8-10 at the time).

But I may have those years too early as they were playing AD&D and had a MM softback (which I still have) possibly a FF and I think someone may have had the DMG or PHB. ( I know my brother didn't as I bought them a couple of years later)

Would those years tie in with the books available at the time?

Either way, it's nice to remember that I still own that MM from the very first game I ever was involved in (even if I fell asleep around midnight and they were still playing!)  

ashmire13 wrote:I've been having a bit of a think back over those early days and I need a bit of clarification if I can.

I think I sat in on my first 'dungeon' that was run by my brother whilst he was at college (1979-81??) kind of time. He was playing with several college friends, maybe 8 or so and I had the pleasure of watching and listening in, (being as I was only 8-10 at the time).

But I may have those years too early as they were playing AD&D and had a MM softback (which I still have) possibly a FF and I think someone may have had the DMG or PHB. ( I know my brother didn't as I bought them a couple of years later)

Would those years tie in with the books available at the time?

Either way, it's nice to remember that I still own that MM from the very first game I ever was involved in (even if I fell asleep around midnight and they were still playing!)  

Fiend Folio didn't come out until Gencon (summer) 1981, and the MM, DMG and PHB were already released by then, so if you had a FF it would have to be summer 1981 or later.

Mike B.

Badmike wrote:
Fiend Folio didn't come out until Gencon (summer) 1981, and the MM, DMG and PHB were already released by then, so if you had a FF it would have to be summer 1981 or later.

Mike B.

thanks Mike! I'm pretty sure my brother owned the FF before I started buying, so must be '81 then, as he was at college.
I know he was playing before then, but that is my first game memory, including coke, crisps and stuff!

I'm enjoying the stories in this thread. I'm looking forward to scans of some of those 70's characters.

Kor the Destroyer dates from 1977.

Would characters from the original Braunstein game count as D&D characters?

What about characters who first went on an adventure in Blackmoor?  They weren't D&D characters, but they were characters on a dungeon adventure.  They had stats.

Zenopus76 wrote:There's Xylarthen, the sample M-U on page 10 of Men & Magic.

He may have been an actual character since the name appears again in Rob Kuntz's 1977 article "Three Artifacts of the Demon Sender":

That suggests to me that he's one of Rob's NPCs.  I have some old notes from chats with him about the Demon Senders, IIRC.  Just need to find them....