The Oldest RPG I've Played

RPGaDAY 2023 Day 5

My Personal Copy of the White Box

I’ve mentioned that my first role playing game experience wasn’t a good one and that it’s kind of amazing that I love the hobby as much as I do, but I do love the hobby. I think it’s a wonderful way of bringing people together and building friendships. Some of my happiest memories are associated with role playing game sessions and the in jokes and digressions that occur within them. That first session may have been terrible, but the subsequent games I played with my friend Sean as we explored what I only later realized (like 7 sessions in) were Snake Mountain and Castle Greyskull are still vivid memories. They are memories that made me love Dungeons & Dragons and they are memories that made it emotionally difficult when my family left Reno for the Bay Area when I was in middle school.

At the time I’d only played Basic D&D and some Advanced Dungeons & Dragons and hadn’t even seen the little brown books that started the hobby. Heck. I didn’t even know that the little brown books existed until I read about them in old Dragon Magazine articles I read at the library, but even then I knew I’d never get to see them. They’d long been out of print and there was no eBay when I was a kid. Then one day, I found out how wrong I was.

There was a local toy store, not a Toys R Us, but a locally owned toy store similar in layout and cleanliness as those local hardware stores with “knowledgeable staff” that exist in cities of a particular size. It was a kind of dimly lit and dusty place that had a lot of new inventory and in the back of the store in some forgotten corner was a White Box with the words “Original Collector’s Edition” on it and a price tag of $10. That was a cheap price, but I didn’t have $10 to my name and I wanted it so bad I could taste it.

Every day, for a month, on the walk home from school I would wander into the back of that store, look at that little boxed set, and contemplate how to steal it. Should I use my backpack? Should I try to stuff it under my sweater? Should I just grab it and walk like I already paid for it? I knew I couldn’t afford it and my parents had just moved to the Bay Area and were strapped trying to afford the increased cost of living and save up for the first and last month’s rent on a good place (we were staying with a friend of my parents at the time). We did not have that kind of money. For a month, my temptation continued until my parents and I moved from our temporary residence to a more permanent one that was a few cities over. No longer was temptation lurking in the shadows of a toy store on the way home from school. I had been saved by circumstance from getting caught, I would certainly have been caught, and paying the consequences.

That was the one and only “chance” I had to own the White Box before I became an adult. I certainly never thought I would actually play in a White Box D&D game as the rules eventually moved on to a 2nd, 3rd, and eventually 4th edition of AD&D, but somewhere in the first couple of years of 4e I did get that chance. A friend of mine was playing in a D&D game that used the original edition rules with a screenwriter and some of his friends. I was intrigued and asked to meet this group and I eventually got the chance. They gave me a link to a set of the rules they were using, a single volume version of the White Box rules, and I finally got the chance to play the game as originally written…or at least a semblance thereof. I also found a copy of the White Box, and a number of expansions, for sale on eBay for a very affordable price. It wasn’t $10, but it was far from market premium. I had my white whale. Oh, and I was able to purchase the pdf from DriveThruRPG too.

Do you even Fantasy Heartbreaker, bro?

My chats with my friend and the screenwriter eventually let to me working on a Fantasy Heartbreaker that fused old school (Oe and Moldvay/Cook) design with 4e innovations. That Fantasy Heartbreaker is called The Secret Fire and I am extremely proud of my contributions to the game and think it is a really fun adaptation of old school rules. One of my favorite design choices of the game was to have “Some X” charts for the different backgrounds that individualized how characters understood their and other character’s backgrounds. Take a look at the “Some Dwarves” chart below. This would be rolled by a Dwarven character to help them play their character, but the result is something that is only true of “some” Dwarves and not all. It’s something I’ve liked to incorporate into all my later game play and our use predates 5e. One of the takeaways I have from this experience is that working on a Fantasy Heartbreaker is something I think everyone should do at one time or another.

I’ll be posting more RPGaDay2023 posts as the month goes on. I don’t know that I’ll be daily, but I’ll always follow the day’s prompt.