Wow, I feel like the baby of this forum. I'm 19, from northern New Jersey, ans I actually started gaming with the first printing of the 3.5e Basic Set; the one with the black dragon. Previously I had really only been exposed to low- or unflashy magic settings in books, such as "The Chronicles of Narnia" and "Dark Lord of Derkholm," as well as some of the video games of the time; Zelda: Majora's Mask stands out in my mind as an influence, and I also played final fantasy and whatnot (but I quickly realized that fighters don't get spells and stopped trying to mix the two, haha.)
Todd Lockwood's grainy, sketchy drawings of objects and skeletons and other things in those brown pamphlets really set a few foundation stones in my head with what DnD was, and to me it was this dusky, sepia-and-gray and mysterious world.
Granted, I didn't get any real campaigns or sessions in until a while later (friends never 'got it' and I didn't have an organizational skills to run a game, one of the many failings of the 3.5e DMG was that it wasn't so much a guide as a bunch of rules the players didn't really need to worry about), after I had the 3 core books (I actually got the MM2 before the MM1 ) And I had started playing online in a (now-defunct) community that pulled from a pool of players for its games. The harsh conditions of the shared setting meant experience points were low and treasure lower. Masterwork items were prized and treasured, and +1 items were out of many character's reaches. Eventually though, the community fell apart, and I drifted among other ones over the years.
As I grew older, I learned all the silly things in 3.5, from psionics (a feat that lets you run on the walls!) to wizards living in volcanoes and flying around and nuking the countryside. It left an unsettling feeling with me, it wasn't the DnD I knew. I tried to think on more of a heroic scale level, having played several MMOs by that point and seen some anime. I didn't exactly do it quite right, and only recently (past 6 months or so) been realizing that I needed a different system.
A while back I discovered Gary Gygax's Lejendary Adventure, and while searching for it within some... I'll put it as "Try before you buy" sites, I ended up getting ahold of a large amount of games that started with L. Mostly things that were either too long to bother reading or just looked uninteresing, among those were Living Steel, Legend Quest, and the Lamentations of the Flame Princess Deluxe Edition.
I read through it, loved it, starting following James's Blog and such, and bought the grindhouse a bit after it came out (along with hammers of the gods, grinding gear, and stargazer.) I've been haphazardly following OSR stuff as best I can since, and though I don't have the age-old wisdom of some of the veterans around, I try to understand and learn more every day.
I've never been one for those 'jump out at you and scare you' style horror media, more for that ever-present sense of dread. AKA I prefer movies like "Knowing" to "The Ring" (still haven't seen it haha!) LotFP also introduced me to Clark Ashton Smith's works, which I feel is a good representation of that dread.
Plus all that dungeon-crawling weirdness is just awesome.
Last edited by Neko--kun (2011-09-24 09:17:20)