The Adventure Starts Here

As the chaos of the summer draws to a close and we come closer to the structured time of the school year (not only am I an academic, but I am married to a teacher and we two teenagers!) and rugby season (still going even as I dash towards fifty), I started thinking about planning for an autumn game for the family, and in doing so thinking about the bits and pieces of my own gaming history that revealed the promises and possibilities of roleplaying games. And this image here is pretty central.

So, sure, I had explored the Forest of Doom, the Island of the Lizard King, and had trekked across Sommerlund, but when it came down to sitting at a table and adventuring the vast majority of my time had been spent in funhouses full of straight lines; a universe in two dimensions, constrained by graph paper. We did not own any adventures, so that was how we played the Basic set. But then we got the Expert set - was Expert better than Advanced? I wondered at the time. 

And there was an adventure and it was classic. As with mapping the The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, I would hazard that exploring the wilderness of the Isle of Dread is an almost universal experience for gamers around my age. Pirates! Dinosaurs! Zombies! Kopru? Phanatons? Perhaps if we had had access to a Basic level such as The Lost City we would have already advanced our game to something that involved more than kicking in a door and killing everything inside, an analogue version of the arcade classic Gauntlet. But we did not, so the Expert Set was a revelation and totally transformed how we played D&D.

And a MAP! Every young fantasy reader's favourite part of a novel was the map, which promised the reader a bigger world that whatever sub-Tolkien quest they would read over the next 300 pages. You could look at the map and imagine what better stories were going on in those curiously named places. Well, now you could imagine them together!

And that is the sort of feeling I want to relive, and recreate for my players.

(Seriously, I got quite a thrill digging these out of my BECMI box in the cupboard. Kinda makes me regret that I have discovered better games...)