Sad And Lonely Loser Hearts Will Beat As One For Gary Gygax.

Awesome.

This is like a Speak Memory thing, so you'll have to forgive the digression, but I can't help but be taken back to those early flashes of childhood wonderment, before my capacity for point and meaning was fully developed, when there would be no such thing as a nerd for another couple of years. We're talking the no-good crowd of the older brother of your best friend's neighbor circa The Village of Hommlet. From there to the pinnacle of the artform, The Tomb of Horrors. As is the wont, the whole scene eventually got a little out of hand. Half-elves running around with hundreds of thousands of pieces of platinum on their person, without any consideration for weight or inconvenience. We pretty much threw the rulebook out the window when it came to spells. I mean, who has 2 rounds to come up with a fireball (or was it a turn, I don't recall)? Paladins and monks were getting resurrected left and right. I have to admit I was probably complicit in letting our early discipline slide, having been Dungeon Master throughout much of this time. What's worse, I distinctly recall having had a couple of players in the mix at the time, including a 14th level druid and a female fighter who had lost one of her hands. Talk about a conflict of interest! In any event, when the Immortal Rules came around, I decided I'd had enough and cashed in my chips. My next major purchase was an original copy of The Velvet Underground and Nico which I found in a bargain bin in Warsaw in the spring of 1990. Clearly, I had a lot to make up for.