Gary Gygax

Gary Gygax has passed away and an entire generation of nerds is mourning his passing.

For the non-nerd members of the audience, Gary Gygax was one of the co-creators of Dungeons & Dragons. If you don't know what D&D is, then this post won't mean much to you. Suffice to say that D&D has had a profound impact on my life.

I still recall the first time I came across D&D. We had just moved to our new house to the east end of Glasgow - I can't remember when this was but I guess it was around 1985 or 1986. We didn't know anyone else in the estate we had just moved to but we knew there were a couple of other chinese families so my brother and I wandered over to say hi to some of the other kids.

While we were there, we noticed a box lying next to the sofa. "What's that?" my brother asked.

Our new friends replied "Thats Dungeons and Dragons. Its a role playing game."

"What do you do?" we asked.

And so began my journey into RPG nerddom. For years, we spent every Sunday huddled round the dinner table as we went on incredible journeys across foreign lands, a place where swords and magic were commonplace, a world where Gods walked the earth. Every Sunday was spent defeating monsters and saving damsels in distress, villages or even continents from evil sorcerors and bandits as our heroes grew in power and stature.

There are simply too many good memories of that time to go over in this limited blog. I still recall our first ever game, where all of us had chosen Elves (both sword and sorcery in 1 package!) and consequently died a horrible death as our party was too one sided. Or how in our next adventure, I lost two fighters (one fell to his death while climbing up a mountain, the other fell to his death while climbing down the other side!) before ending up with the party cleric who then stayed with me until the very end. I also recall how every time my cleric cast a healing spell, I would always roll a 1 for the amount of hp healed which made me really popular with the rest of the group.

I can't even imgaine what my life would be like if D&D had never existed.

Gary - thanks for the memories.