I, Gamer: Epilogue

In re-reading my testimonial, it is really glaring how, when I was a kid, I didn’t get any real exposure to the original versions of D&D (i.e. Classic D&D, the versions behind much of the old-school renaissance) before I picked up with 1st Edition AD&D.

Many of the blogs I read are written by guys who started gaming in the 70’s or early 80’s, so they started with OD&D/Classic (aka Basic) D&D. I started in the late 80’s, so my first exposure was to AD&D. I had just a vague impression that something had come before the game I was playing, but no real interest in “going backwards.”

However, I did eventually pick up the Rules Cyclopedia, but that was more out of curiosity and a desire to add the book to my collection (it was advertised/talked up big time in Dragon magazine of course, and I guess the hype worked on me). I never really had any intention of playing it, however.

And for good or ill, my personal Dungeons & Dragons “fate” was to begin my gaming career not long before the appearance of 2nd Edition. I tend to associate 2nd Edition with the decline of my first era of D&D gaming during my teenage years. It may just be my least favorite version of D&D...or maybe not. No, come to think of it, my least favorite version would have to be 4th Edition. More power to those who like 4E, but it's not for me. Like many, I was intrigued with the arrival of 2nd Edition’s numerous (perhaps TOO numerous) settings like Spelljammer, Ravenloft, Dark Sun, Planescape, and the rest. But I never really found these settings interesting enough to actually use them.

Yeah, 2nd Edition never really felt right. I never truly got comfortable with it, due to what I considered its unnecessary complexity, the move from the Monster Manual to the Monstrous Compendium, and what I considered to be some of the “lower-quality” artwork (I never was a fan of artist Tom Baxa, or at least the art he produced for 2E AD&D and especially the Dragon magazine of that era).

Anyway, this is all just more navel-gazing on my part, so I’ll stop rambling for now. Some of the stuff in this post will be fodder for other posts, for sure. Until then, game on!

I, Gamer: A Testimonial in Three Parts (3)

PART THE THIRD: How Drance Got His Game Back
(Ages 25 to the Present)

 

So, we arrive at my last post in my gaming testimonial. By the end of the second post in the series, I was a young adult in the post-9/11 years, and the terror attacks were a major catalyst in the cessation of most of my gaming activities. By the time I turned 25 I was also heading into a period of personal upheaval with regard to friendships, family relations, and especially my dealings with significant others that would come and go. This era in my life would last for years to come. I won’t go into the details of my baggage, of course. I’m sure you get the idea.

I say MOST of my gaming activities ceased, but I was actually still gaming in various ways. It was just face-to-face, table-top gaming that had totally ceased to exist in my life. And that was a significant source of sadness for me, a malaise that would wax and wane (but never truly leave me) as the years went by.

The primary way in which I got my game on after college was through RPG video games. These, of course, are a good way to get the RPG experience without the need to get together with anyone else. You can have adventures all by yourself. And there were some great games, especially the D&D games like the Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale series, and later Neverwinter Nights. But these games are a double-edged sword. It’s a great way to get that dose of adventuring you need, but it’s not really roleplaying in the pure sense. There’s no human interaction, and eventually it becomes a hollow experience. I know that some may argue that MMORPGs like Everquest and World of Warcraft combine video gaming with a “virtual” human touch, but I never saw the appeal of MMORPGs (I’ve heard a lot of horror stories, most focused around veteran players swindling “noobs”). Call me old-fashioned, or maybe just old.

And as I touched on briefly in my second post, I also got into board games and card games that—in greater or lesser ways—emulated some of the experience of roleplaying. Or I would try to inject some type of roleplaying into a game, with varying degrees of success. These games included the Game of Thrones board game from Fantasy Flight Games, Shadows Over Camelot by Days of Wonder, and a game I discovered called “Thieves Guild.” These did a bit to sate that roleplaying desire, but were never really that fulfilling.

Fantasy Flight Games in particular has a good number of board games and card games that seek to emulate the roleplaying experience (like Runebound and Descent) but the cost for these games is, more often than not, very high. Trust me, these games can be very tempting, because for the most part they are very well done with regard to mechanics, presentation, artwork, etc. But I wasn’t about to try to buy all these different games in order to emulate what I used to be able to do with just a couple of books, a few friends, and our imaginations.

It wasn’t until the late Fall/early Winter of 2006 that the urge to roleplay became overwhelming again. But what was I to do? I decided to search the Web for an outlet.

That’s when I came across play-by-email gaming (PBEM). It was a eureka moment, and I set to work almost immediately to get in on the action. It was this decision that truly set me on the path back to the table-top.

I had of course, over the years, seen advertisements in places like Dragon magazine for play-by-mail games from companies like Flying Buffalo. But these never appealed to me in the slightest. The potential time delay between actions/rounds seemed hideous, to say the least. Call me a fiend for instant gratification if you must, but I really would need more immediacy for my gaming experience.

But play-by-email seemed to me the perfect way to ease myself back into roleplaying. It might not be instantaneous, but it would be a heck of a lot faster than play-by-snail mail. I could conduct PBEM games at a leisurely pace, which appealed to me because I knew I would be extremely rusty as a GM and would not yet be able to handle the much faster/instantaneous pace of a table-top game. And technically the “game session” would never end, because the emails from players could arrive at any time of day, seven days a week. There would be no need to get players together in one place at the same time. I didn’t need to stick to my circle of old friends anymore. And the Internet was a good buffer between me and the strangers I would be soliciting to play in my games.

All of this appealed to me…for the time being.

So in January of 2007 I became a DM again for the first time in ages. The campaign was called Wanderers of Faerûn (WoF), and obviously it was set in the Forgotten Realms, my favorite official campaign world. I decided to set the game up as a Yahoo group.

What might be surprising is that for the campaign’s rule set I used a modified version of the Amber Diceless RPG rules. I may have been ready to run a Dungeons & Dragons campaign, but I wasn’t quite ready to actually use a Dungeons & Dragons rule set!

I advertised the game on the Yahoo group called RPG Player Sanctuary and found a great group of players from across the country. I also managed to get a couple old friends to join the game, both of whom were a part of my earliest D&D experiences. This included my old friend Pat, who originally introduced me to the game. This fact in particular made it seem as if things had come full circle in my gaming life.

The WoF campaign went on for over a year, and I can’t describe to you how great it felt to be back in the DM saddle. The game had some great moments, and my six players all did a fantastic job of making our shared adventures thrilling. And my personal roleplaying itch was well and truly scratched.

But by the beginning of 2008 I could already tell things were slipping into oblivion. Certain players were posting less and less. Those who did post were sometimes resorting to one to two sentence posts. Finally, I decided to call it quits in March 2008, and WoF breathed its last.

I tried to start another game in May of that year, using some of the players from WoF, but that second attempt was far less successful, sputtering along for nine months (and we averaged less than 10 posts per month). I realized I was done with PBEM, and this was disheartening. I had put all my hopes into that particular basket, and I was back where I started again: no immediate roleplaying prospects.

Life events swept me up again for the rest of the year. My daughter had been born in 2006, and she hit the feared second year of human life right about the time my son was born in 2008. For the next year and a half, during my free time, I would sometimes flip through my game books and dream of roleplaying. From mid-2008 right up to the present also saw a severe diminishment in my board and card gaming endeavors as well, due to increasing schedule conflicts among my circle of friends. And I hadn’t played a computer RPG in years. I was in danger of slipping into a new period of gaming deprivation…

Which leads me to the dawn of 2010.

The reason my PBEM game used an Amber Diceless rules set was because I wanted a “rules light” game. But towards the end of the PBEM campaign I felt the diceless system was TOO light. I wanted just a bit more crunch to my rules.

Wizards of the Coast had recently released 4th Edition, but I had no interest in the game for many reasons. Taking a look at the rule books, I just didn’t like the feel of the new rules. I also didn’t like the art for the most part, as shallow as that might be. In addition, it wasn’t economically feasible for me to buy the new edition’s books. I had a ton of other gaming stuff at my disposal already. And irrational as it may seem, I was sort of angry at Wizards of the Coast, who seemed more and more interested in the bottom line (especially since they were bought out by Hasbro) than in the legacy of D&D. They had changed their website, requiring users to pay to access information that had been free during the 3.0-3.5 years. I also had bad feelings towards WotC and Paizo for killing my beloved Dragon magazine.

So, I looked at my game book collection for inspiration. I had the three core books of D&D 3.5, which I had bought years before on a lark, during a time when I had gotten curious about what D&D was like in the 21st century. And it was too much crunch.

Sometime in 2008 I had scored a major find on the Web: a PDF of pretty much all the 2nd Edition books (for the life of me I can’t remember where I found it). So I looked into that, but again, it all seemed overwhelming.

Within the last year or so I had also remembered that my buddy Pat had some of our group’s old D&D stuff. Most of that old material had disappeared over the years, but I remembered that he had our copy of the Rules Cyclopedia (which we had bought but never played). I paid him a visit and picked up the Cyclopedia and whatever other random old D&D materials he had. But for some reason I even found myself overwhelmed by the Cyclopedia. Perhaps it was the small type and the sheer volume of stuff it covered, but even this “simpler” version of D&D seemed beyond me.

I started to get frustrated with myself. What the heck was I looking for?

In despair I turned back to the Web, and that’s when I found the old-school renaissance. I started reading blogs about the subject. And I learned that people were resurrecting the old rules and republishing them in new packages. And most of these "new-old" games, these so-called "retro-clones," were available for FREE. I was instantly intrigued.

So started a personal quest to find the right rules for my return to the GM’s chair! I began to refresh my memory about Original/Basic D&D (which I never really played, having gotten my start with AD&D 1st Edition and moving on to 2nd Edition) and delved into the retro-clones. I really seemed to focus on Swords & Wizardry, but after a time it seemed TOO simple. It took me a while to really get back into the mindset of old-school D&D, where there weren’t rules for everything and there were no feats, skills, and the other stuff that had been added into the game since 2nd Edition (reading Matt Finch’s Old School Primer helped out a lot).

So I began attempting to house-rule Swords & Wizardry into my own “perfect” rule set. And I spent a lot of time on this. I made several attempts, and got fairly far each time. But I discovered that I didn't have the time to really do such an effort justice, with all the adult responsibilities of my life. I just didn't have the time I would need, like I did when I was in my teens (and even most of my 20s for that matter). It was a tough fact to confront, but then I realized that I could just search through all the great games people were resurrecting/ producing and settle on one that most closely fit what I wanted in a game. And believe me, I studied them all: Labyrinth Lord, OSRIC, Basic Fantasy, even Microlite74 and its ilk.

It turns out that I would settled on a little game called Castles & Crusades for the game I want to run. I know that it's not really a retro-clone (I think). But I feel like, for what I want to do as a dungeon master/game master/referee/castle keeper/whatever, it's the “D&D-esque” game that will allow me to do the least amount of house ruling as possible. So I can focus on game prep and actual gaming. I feel like C&C is "rules light" enough (or I can make it so) and yet has some aspects of more recent versions of D&D (3.0-3.5) that makes it unique. The rumor that it had the involvement/blessing of Mr. Gygax himself is a bonus.

At any rate, I am just happy to have finally settled on a game!

At the same time, I put out a call on the Web (through good old RPG Player Sanctuary) about my desire to meet up with new gamers, since all my old gaming pals had scattered to the four winds. That’s right, I finally overcame my trepidation about playing table-top D&D with strangers. I was at last ready to break away from my association of D&D with just gaming with old friends. Anyway, I was contacted by a guy who I had spoken to briefly in the last year or so with regard to PBEM. He asked if I was interested in joining one of his Pathfinder games, and I've pretty much agreed to do so. And I am very excited about the opportunity. Now, would I ever want to run a Pathfinder game? Probably not. As a GM I know that I want to run something like the older editions of D&D. But damn it, I am itching to get back into the gaming scene, and therefore I have leapt at the chance to join a gaming group. Even if it means I will be playing a more recent edition. Which is more than fine by me.

So there you have it! Writing this testimonial has really been a good experience for me. I’ve been able to finally reflect on my own personal gaming history, and it’s been more of a revelation that I first imagined it would be. Sorry for being so damned verbose, and I hope this doesn't seem too incoherent.

And of course, to those of you who read this, please feel free to share tales of your own gaming histories.

Thanks for reading! And don't forget to read the Epilogue!

P.S. My newfound determination to find new people to game with may even extend to board and card games. Stay tuned…

I, Gamer: A Testimonial in Three Parts (2)

PART THE SECOND: Long Game’s Journey into Night (Ages 19 to 25)

So, you’re back! I guess the prospect of reading some guy’s sob story didn’t scare you off? Good! Sorry it’s taken me a few days to post this second part. I know all my readers were waiting with bated breath ;-). Let’s proceed, shall we?

To briefly recap my first post in the series, ages 13 through 19 were the years of my original foray into Dungeons and Dragons. A scant two years (13-15) were entirely dedicated to 1st edition AD&D, and I loved every minute of it. From 15 to 19 I began to play other RPGs (and moved on to 2nd edition D&D), and slowly became disillusioned with Dungeons and Dragons. We return to the story during my 19th year:

So, I began my college career in 1994, and for a short while roleplaying of any kind was on the back burner. I did indeed enjoy myself in college, academically and socially. It was a great time all around. I won’t bore you with the non-gaming details.

I was still in my first year of college when the roleplaying itch returned. How did I scratch that itch, you ask? Well, over the course of the next four years there were two primary ways:

Amber Diceless Roleplaying: If you haven’t read Roger Zelazny’s Amber books, you are doing yourself a great disservice. I heartily recommend that you check them out! For my own part, I had never heard of them until a strange little game called Amber Diceless Roleplaying (ADRPG) came along. A roleplaying game that was DICELESS?! Who could fathom such a thing? It took a man named Erick Wujcik (who had also done work for Palladium Books) to come up with the idea, and he became to me a new Gary Gygax. Both men created games that I came to love and associate with good times in my life.

The Wujcik diceless concept seemed to me the epitome of elegance, something that could strip away all the heavy mechanics many other games sported, and only pure cooperative storytelling would be left behind! It would take a skilled GM and players to handle the “high art” of the Amber game. It was me and two other old friends who primarily explored Amber, and we did so with relish. I felt like some of the magic of my original gaming experiences had returned, from a source totally separate from D&D.

So, yes, I became something of a roleplaying snob. Amber became to me the “grown-up” version of roleplaying. D&D was for kids! I pretty much vowed that I would never play anything else but the ADRPG. Silly man…

Looking back, it was just important that we were having fun. And we did a good job of striking the delicate balance between GM/player connection/trust that is so necessary to ADRPG. If you haven’t played the game, it’s hard to describe…at least for me (I may not be smart enough anymore to explain it properly!). Suffice to say that it’s sort of rules-light and yet somehow “heavy” at the same time, if that makes any sense. Maybe it’s more accurate to say that it’s rules-light but cooperation-heavy. I’ve always felt that Amber would be nigh-impossible to play with anyone but close friends. But I’ve been known to be wrong more than once. It would be interesting to hear what other people who have played Amber think (hopefully someone will read this blog and respond! ;-)

Live Action Roleplaying (LARPing): Another type of what I—at the time—considered “roleplaying for grown-ups” was LARPing, which was a relatively new phenomenon back then. Yes, some of you are shuddering. But my decision to LARP was really born out of my surge of social interaction. And part of it was the novelty of getting up from the table and still roleplaying. I was involved in acting on stage during high school and on into college, so LARPing seemed a natural extension of that. I got into a good group of people who were LARPing Vampire: The Masquerade (I’m pretty sure White Wolf almost single-handedly created LARPing…or I may be wrong. Maybe someone can clarify the history for me. Maybe the people who do war reenactments were the first to LARP in a primitive way, and I am sure the people at the Society for Creative Anachronism and Markland have something to say about their role in all of this). All in all, I had some good times LARPing, but after a while it seemed to all become more about who was dating who and other real-world social intrigues rather than the gaming aspect. So I eventually moved away from that scene.

Actually, when I come to think of it, there was a pseudo-third way in which I got a roleplaying fix: board and card games. From my late teens until just a few years ago, myself and a handful of friends played a lot of these types of games, such as Risk (and later A Game of Thrones and Munchkin, but I wouldn’t get into these until years after college) and other (sometimes more obscure) games. Personally, I liked to interject some histrionics and at least a skeleton of a storyline when playing those types of games. But that can only take you so far.

And to some extent reading fantasy novels was another indirect outlet for the gaming itch (and still is to this day). As I read, I would think about how great a novel’s setting would be as a game world, or what a character’s stats would be, or how one would resolve an intricately described combat.

Some of you might be asking: What about computer-based RPGs? Well, when I was a kid in the 1980s and early 1990s it all came down to economics. We were able to afford Nintendo, so I did play a lot of Legend of Zelda and Dragon Warrior, and Shadowgate was a personal favorite. However, I missed out on all those great Ultima, D&D “gold box” games from SSI, and other such computer games because my family couldn’t afford a computer. The only exposure I got to these types of games was through the father of a friend, who played such games fanatically. This guy eventually built himself a replica of a medieval fantasy tavern as a gaming room, which he stocked with those replica swords and miniature suits of armor you can buy from catalogs. And the heart of this really cool room was his precious computer and a huge bookshelf of games. I would watch him play for hours sometimes, amazed at the graphics, but of course there wasn’t much opportunity for me to actually play. It wasn’t until after my mid-20s that I consistently had a computer of my own with which to game. I’ll talk more about me and computer RPGs in the final post in this series.

During my college years, there were times now and then that I did indeed think about table-top Dungeons and Dragons, remembering with fondness the golden years. By then D&D was already becoming inextricably bound with my memories of my youth, and I couldn’t separate one from the other. Indeed, these table-top thoughts and the accompanying nostalgia have never truly left me. They persist to this day.

By the time of my graduation from college, I had long before gotten out of LARPing, and my Amber table-top games were few and far between. Most gaming endeavors were drowned in my transition from college to “productive” member of society’s labor force. It was the late 90's, and the (then) dreaded millennium creeping up fast. I was filled with great expectations for the new century. I read scores of fantasy novels, and kept on dreaming…

But dreams can be so easily dashed by reality. I was 25 when September 11th happened, and my hopes for the new millennium were darkened by the billowing clouds of smoke rising from American soil. Suffice to say, RPGing wasn’t just on the back burner anymore. It seemed to be banished forever, a relic of my lost youth and innocence, never to be seen again. It seemed that there would be no more innocence anywhere ever again. For a while I looked on all my pastimes as frivolous, wondering if (especially after the terrorist attacks) I should assume some stereotypical form of adulthood and give up daydreaming about gaming.

I entered a personal gaming Dark Age for a time, where only fantasy novels sustained me. I was certain that nothing would ever be the same again. It turns out I was both correct and incorrect…

To Be Concluded in Part Three!

I, Gamer: A Testimonial in Three Parts (1)

PART THE FIRST: Portrait of the Gamer as a Young Man (Ages 13 to 19)

So, in reading many gaming blogs recently, I’ve seen several authors give accounts of their personal RPG journeys. Therefore, unoriginal and potentially boring as it may be, I think I will do the same. This is really more for my own benefit, when it comes down to it. I’m trying to codify my own gaming history to get some perspective, etc.

Here goes nothing:

My mother was into a strict Baptist thing when I was very young, and she therefore saw fit to indoctrinate me, her imaginative and bookish son, into said sect. Suffice to say that as I neared the teenage years and the subject of Dungeons & Dragons came up, she and the preachers at the church went all hellfire and brimstone and denounced it as a tool of the Devil. And of course, I was given the infamous Jack Chick tract.

And the smear campaign worked…for a while. Yes, for a while I was very VERY scared of Dungeons & Dragons, and how the game could supposedly lead my immortal soul into the clutches of Satan himself.

Oh, brother. Well, he who isn’t naïve as a child is a rare bird indeed, and much poorer for it.

But as time went on, certain elements within me conspired to eliminate my fears. First was the obligatory teenage rebelliousness. Second was my inexhaustible imagination, curiosity, and innate open-mindedness, fueled by devouring many books over the years (much to the chagrin of my blue-collar father and my macho older brother). And third was my best friend at the time, Pat, who happened to possess several Dungeons & Dragons books (I believe they were the 1E AD&D books with the revised covers). Pat was a Catholic, also, and I think the Catholic priests were much less rigorous than their Protestant cousins in their denouncement of Dungeons & Dragons.

Around the time that Pat was showing me D&D (this was the late 80s, around '87 or '88), I also discovered a book called Stormblade, a novel in the Dragonlance world (I’ve read/heard some controversy surrounding the supposedly “negative” influence of Dragonlance and other “shared worlds” on D&D, but that’s a discussion for another time).

Stormblade was a revelation for me. Something about the fantasy genre intrigued me like nothing else before. I had heretofore been mostly a fan of Star Wars and science fiction, but it felt like destiny for me to read that Dragonlance book. I had come home, arrived at my preferred genre. Here was an accessible story that appealed to the sense of adventure and escapism that I craved. The fact that it was derived from a Dungeons & Dragons game world only furthered my interest in the game. Of course all this was before the stigma of “gaming fiction” versus the works of the likes of Howard and Tolkien. Conan and Middle Earth were things I had heard of, but hadn’t delved into as of yet. And I’d never even heard of Jack Vance or Fritz Leiber at that point.

(I know there’s someone out there reading this that is really balking at the fact that a Dragonlance novel was my first real experience with fantasy fiction. Hey, no one’s perfect…)

Back to the game itself. So, after reading Stormblade and having listened to Pat’s rave reviews of D&D, I finally decided that I didn’t believe it was evil anymore. At this time I also had a budding desire to be a writer of fiction someday in the hazy future of adulthood. And therefore the shared storytelling aspect of D&D was also a great draw to me. I wanted in.

I started out as a player, creating characters to play in games where Pat was the Dungeon Master. But as time went on I grew ever more eager to take the reins, devise stories and characters, weave my own legends of valor for my friends to experience.

That was the golden age, a span of a roughly two years (13 to 15) when everything was new. I can see us around the gaming table in Pat’s room…me and Pat and our friends Jay, Dan, and Pat’s younger brother Sean. We spent hours upon hours poring over the D&D tomes in our possession. Whole weekends were devoted to the adventures we faced. We didn’t worry about rules, or the fact that none of our campaigns ever really had conclusions (or that said campaigns lasted no more than a month or two). We started fresh so many times and had a blast every time.

But time ground on inexorably, as it does. And our attentions were drawn further and further away from D&D as we journeyed through the teens. The distractions of high school drama, girls, and other pastimes like video games (which were getting better and better than the old Atari stuff we played when we were really young) and plain old TV ate up precious time (how we squandered it! Youth is truly wasted on the young!).

Between ages 15 and 19 D&D would rise and fall among our group in fits and starts. By my senior year in high school we had started playing D&D with two guys who were from the neighborhood but we hadn’t really been friends with. But we thought it would be a good idea to bring some new blood to the table. As it turns out, that really wasn’t a good idea.

These two had a very aggressive style of play that focused on player characters as just above the level of villains. They were fond of playing drow elves, for the most part. And they introduced us to the concept of the anti-paladin…which never made sense to me. I mean, isn’t a paladin of an evil deity still just called a paladin? Suffice to say that these two guys were “munchkins,” “roll-players," and “min-maxers” to the Nth degree. But since we didn’t know those terms, or they didn’t exist yet, we just called them “a-holes.”

But somehow we got roped in to their antics. And our roleplaying lives suffered for it. Specifically the D&D roleplaying we were still doing. We began arguing over rules, getting angry at bad dice rolls…all of the behaviors that reveal the fact that the pastime was no longer fun.

From 15 to 19 we had also branched out from D&D to explore other RPGs. We as a group became primarily entrenched in the Palladium game system. We played Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Ninjas & Superspies, Heroes Unlimited, and finally Rifts. All of which served also pull us further and further away from the grandfather of all roleplaying games. We slowly began to disrespect our elders, so to speak, and an insidious disdain for D&D crept into our hearts. We began to see it as a kid’s game, in a way, and looked to other games like the Palladium offerings for a more “adult” experience.

By the time high school came to a close, we also turned our focus on the impending higher education experience. To which I was looking forward with great anticipation, having finally been freed from the prison of high school. True to dorky form, I had been tormented for my bookish ways for four years (except for some grudging respect I temporarily garnered for playing on the football team in 10th grade).

By the time I was 19, all roleplaying fell to the wayside. I spent the summer before starting college in sort of a vision quest of self realization. I was full of youthful fire, thinking existential thoughts and plumbing the depths of philosophy with a few close friends. I was an embryonic adult, and had no time for games. I was preparing to come out of my cocoon, to read “real Literature” (there was no doubt I would be an English major in college, my mind firmly set on the certainty of becoming a published author someday). I still loved to read fantasy literature, but was content to use that, rather than a D&D campaign, as my avenue of escape from the trials of life. And I was also determined to really develop a social life beyond the friends of my childhood and teenage years.

For the moment, I had left the gaming table behind…

Continued in Part Two!