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Tell me about your first time.
Apr. 14th, 2008 05:10 pmSort of a rambling post…
While Elizabeth was attending a birthday party yesterday, I took the opportunity to walk about the neighbourhood around my old elementary school. It was curious to see what has changed and what has not. One thing that made me smile a bit was a hand painted “Beware of Dog” sign that’s been on a house near my old school for as long as I can recall. The sign is intended to look fierce, but in actually looks like a giant, grinning happy puppy.
I poked around the back of the school, where remain the remnants of the metal stairs where I would play in elaborate Doc Savage and Doctor Who imagination games in the 4th and 5th grade, as well as the terribly rusted baseball… fence… thing… that was installed when I was in 3rd grade. It served as a “forcefield array” and castle in our various roleplays.
I then drove out to Westdale to visit J&F Hobbies, the dingiest and strangest of RPG outlets in Hamilton, a little store operating out of an odd nook. Much work had been done since my last visit. The owner seems to have thrown his lot in with an airplane model builder, and various model kits and a tidy construction space now occupy the back half of the store. The airplane model area is much more presentable than huge pile of moldering game books and dusty minis. I had some idle chit-chat with the owner, and the fellow who seems to be running the airplane section, as well as a customer, whom I recognized as the (past?) president of the Hamilton military gamers group.
The game store had acquired some “new” stock at some point, in the form of old unsold stock from elsewhere. I snagged a 1st edition of Shadowrun for $15. The cover is crisp, the pages are white, and it looks as though it came straight from the display rack at Games-A-Lot in the basement of the Eatons Centre, circa 1989, where I first encountered Shadowrun. The condition is so good, you’d almost think it was a reprint, except everything on the title page says it’s the 1989 edition from FASA.
Shadowrun came out when I was 15, and it was so cool it actually depressed me a little, because I was nowhere as cool as anyone in the game, and never would be. In other RPGs, you were making characters for worlds where coolness was simply not an issue. Either you were operating in a universe where power was everything, or the quality of cool was informed by standards that had no connection to the real world. A half-cloak is cool in Star Wars. Purple spandex is de rigueur in Champions. But the styles in Shadowrun were a fairly close approximation to the real world, and 15-year-old game nerds like us were painfully unable to deal with that.
Possibly it would not surprise you, then, to learn that my first Shadowrun character wore an aviator jacket over a red and white track suit. And sometimes, he wore a cowboy hat.
*cringes*
So, on that note, tell me about your first RPG characters, for whatever game.
Please. :)
While Elizabeth was attending a birthday party yesterday, I took the opportunity to walk about the neighbourhood around my old elementary school. It was curious to see what has changed and what has not. One thing that made me smile a bit was a hand painted “Beware of Dog” sign that’s been on a house near my old school for as long as I can recall. The sign is intended to look fierce, but in actually looks like a giant, grinning happy puppy.
I poked around the back of the school, where remain the remnants of the metal stairs where I would play in elaborate Doc Savage and Doctor Who imagination games in the 4th and 5th grade, as well as the terribly rusted baseball… fence… thing… that was installed when I was in 3rd grade. It served as a “forcefield array” and castle in our various roleplays.
I then drove out to Westdale to visit J&F Hobbies, the dingiest and strangest of RPG outlets in Hamilton, a little store operating out of an odd nook. Much work had been done since my last visit. The owner seems to have thrown his lot in with an airplane model builder, and various model kits and a tidy construction space now occupy the back half of the store. The airplane model area is much more presentable than huge pile of moldering game books and dusty minis. I had some idle chit-chat with the owner, and the fellow who seems to be running the airplane section, as well as a customer, whom I recognized as the (past?) president of the Hamilton military gamers group.
The game store had acquired some “new” stock at some point, in the form of old unsold stock from elsewhere. I snagged a 1st edition of Shadowrun for $15. The cover is crisp, the pages are white, and it looks as though it came straight from the display rack at Games-A-Lot in the basement of the Eatons Centre, circa 1989, where I first encountered Shadowrun. The condition is so good, you’d almost think it was a reprint, except everything on the title page says it’s the 1989 edition from FASA.
Shadowrun came out when I was 15, and it was so cool it actually depressed me a little, because I was nowhere as cool as anyone in the game, and never would be. In other RPGs, you were making characters for worlds where coolness was simply not an issue. Either you were operating in a universe where power was everything, or the quality of cool was informed by standards that had no connection to the real world. A half-cloak is cool in Star Wars. Purple spandex is de rigueur in Champions. But the styles in Shadowrun were a fairly close approximation to the real world, and 15-year-old game nerds like us were painfully unable to deal with that.
Possibly it would not surprise you, then, to learn that my first Shadowrun character wore an aviator jacket over a red and white track suit. And sometimes, he wore a cowboy hat.
*cringes*
So, on that note, tell me about your first RPG characters, for whatever game.
Please. :)
