Having discussed those times when I gamed with other people in live RPGing situations, I figured I might as well also talk about my limited experience with PBeM RPG gaming. That is, Play By e-Mail. It’s an offshoot of the older PBM gaming that developed before the internet, but I never played that. My first experience with remote gaming was online.

At some point during my first three or four months of using the Internet–which puts this back in 1995, I think–I discovered the website Mormegil’s Scrollworks (now defunct, do it’s a dead link) run by Christian Walker, a wonderful guy with whom I struck up my first online friendship, and who went on to found the Scrollworks RPG zine. Christian ran a PBeM RPg game with my ex and me for a while.

Continuing on my memories and reflections on RPGing as a hobby in my life…

A few days ago, I ran across some fanfic I wrote in middle school. It was fanfic for someone else’s world, but not for a movie–though I’d been writing that (for Ghostbusters and, thinly veiled, The Neverending Story/The Princess Bride) for a long time.

No, this was fanfic that I felt was my own creation, even if it was set in the franchised world of TSR’s The Forgotten Realms campaign setting. Realms is a sticky thing for me, now: for a few years, I spent every bit of my pocket money, paper route earnings, and Christmas and birthday money on supplements. Somehow, I couldn’t keep up, though. There were just too many supplements. All you guys at TSR, I hope you know I was just a kid out there, paying into your kids’ college funds. Ha!

The cover from the original boxed set of the Forgotten Realms campaign setting. The first of many Realms products I spent my pocket money on.

I started gaming with a guy named Devin Waldner, who, with his elder brothers, introduced me to D&D Basic at around the time when his brothers were getting him into AD&D. We played for a year until I moved away to another part of town and his home was suddenly a 40 minute bike ride instead of a 20-minute one. We met up again a few years later, by which time I had the full set of D&D Basic boxed sets (yes, even the basically unplayable box #5, Immortals) and a few modules and things photocopied from the local library’s collection of Dragon magazine.

Some discussion of types of superheroes and superpowers over at Stephanie Denise Brown’s LJ led to a pretty fascinating exchange in the comments section, finally (for me) culminating in a discussion of gaming with one of the original writers of what remains my most fondly-remembered RPG system, Wraith: The Oblivion.

My Wraith books were, along with nearly all my other White Wolf RPG books, lost in shipment to my parents’ home when I left for Korea. It’s been eight years, but the loss still stings a little. I had almost everything that had come out in the Wraith line, as well as many Vampire: The Masquerade and Mage: The Ascension books. (Never had many of the Werewolf books, as the guy I played Werewolf with had them all and was willing to lend them out.)