I was a child gamer.
Much of the blame (and props) for me being a giant freaking nerd lies squarely on the shoulders of my parents. My mom is a giant nerd who devours books on everything from Zen Buddhism to football to computer science and studies foreign languages for fun; she is a Star Trek fan and a member of MENSA. My dad is a giant nerd with a Ph.D in plasma physics and (not-very-)secretly enjoys being a pirate; he builds accurate scale models of historical ships … when they’re not sailing their actual sailboat or backpacking. He’s also one of the best AD&D Dungeon Masters I’ve ever had the chance to game with.
When I was six, they helped me build my very first character so that I could play in the weekly game with the adults. His name was Cargo and he was a dwarven fighter. I suspect my dad still has the painted pewter figurine somewhere, along with his 1st edition Deities and Demigods and campaign notes. He had whole sets of house rules. The other players in the campaign were my mom and my dad’s PhD candidate friends.
Yes, I grew up playing AD&D with a group of wickedly smart, highly educated, funny as hell people. It was pretty awesome.
Especially that one time he did a one-off Halloween adventure and halfway through it I realized he had based it on the fourth book in the Wizard of Oz series. (Yes, there were over sixteen of them. The fourth involves falling into the center of the earth during a San Francisco earthquake.)
Anyway …
This week, I happened across a link that sent me to a blog post that sent me back in time to my childhood. Someone found and scanned a pristine, uncolored copy of the Official Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Coloring Album.
You can get your copy at: http://monsterbrains.blogspot.com/2011/10/greg-irons-advanced-dungeons-and.html
I printed out a copy, found my coloring pencils, and brought them all to my Wednesday night AD&D Encounters group over at The Portal. Everyone was amused, at least three other people recognized pages from their childhood, and I colored in this:
I brought a color sketch of my new wizard character!
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Yes, we were that cool.
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