Hiya, all. I am a 41-year-old Carlos Murphy from California. I started playing D&D with the Mentzer Red Box 32 years ago when spending the night at a friend's house. The lazy get and his folks sleep in, I was bored, and I spotted the box. I started a campaign governed by janky house rules that I fabricated on the fly; we called it Days in the Dark Realm. We stayed in crazy ad hoc rullng land for a while as we cobbled together Arduin Grimoire, D&D, and AD&D books. I've played loads of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (1st Ed.), most of the Palladium games, Savage Worlds, Labyrinth Lord, and D&D 3.5. Oh, yeah, Car Wars and GURPS, too. My daughter started playing D&D with me when she turned nine.
D&D 3.5 and especially reading Pathfinder and 4e turned me on to the OSR. I am sick of dense, often poorly indexed volumes that are rubbish table references and playing to the rules. Existing canon in the newer D&D editions cramped my DMing style, and I loathed even making characters to play.
The OSR is producing loads of charming, sometimes innovative, sometimes amateurish, but usually fun material. I dig the entrepreneurial and collaborative spirit of old-school gamers as a whole. What LotFP - my new game of choice - did for me was marry up pro production values with a B/X core and a Warhammer-like, low-fantasy milieu. Simple rules. Subtle spins on old tricks that work well mechanically. Ripper product line. A suggested and preferred aesthetic that is implied by the Rules & Magic book but actually kept mostly out of the rules, thereby slaying the demon Canon.
I am currently running my group through Better than Any Man and having a blast. I am dropping threads in the campaign that could lead to Vornheim, The God that Crawls, or the Monolith...but it looks like when the gang is done with Lower Franconia, they are heading for China. Qelong?
Thanks, Jim. This game is gold.