outrider

Bio

Born in 1957 which makes me one of the old guard for gaming. I discovered Avalon Hill historical board games in 1967 when my parents bought me a copy of Blitzkrieg for Christmas. I bought and played Avalon hill and SPI games for many years. I had also discovered historical miniatures during this period. At one time Avalon Hill had a house magazine named the General with opponents wanted ads. I found an opponent and drove to his house to play a game of Diplomacy, but we ended up playing another board game because we didn’t have seven players. We were between games when I spotted a brown box that said dungeons and dragons. I asked him about it and he showed me the game. I knew what to ask for next Christmas and got a 2nd printing of the Dungeons and Dragons game. This was 1975.

My first group was in 1976 early in the year, The General magazine had revealed another person living nearby. We corresponded by mail and discovered that he too had the D&D game. I volunteered to DM and drove over his house and met my first two players, Curt and Derek. We played for several hours and agreed to meet again. We added more guys, mike , bill, chris, Tom and eventually moved to a library. There the games were mass chaos with about 15-20 players all trying to get in. This lasted for a couple of years until a smaller group could be had and we met for nearly seven years playing. I in the meantime had starting working in a game store and found additional groups and games to play and explore.

My campaigns have grown from these origins. I have tried to figure out how many people played in my games over the years, my best guess is about 120 people, playing from 6 months to 25+years in a couple of cases.

I have always been a player of games. I constantly tried to get the family to play board games and when I went to work at the game store, it was a real pleasure to be able to play the various games that we sold as part of the job.

I also played various miniature games, primarily historical until I was introduced to the original version of WFB. The historical miniatures went away and it was only GW mini’s for many years. I also got into the card games, mostly Magic but tried a couple of others.

I have always enjoyed reading and writing, in no particular order, history, science fiction, fantasy, horror,some mysteries, and anything else I found interesting. My favorite authors, RE Howard, Fritz Leiber, Michael Moorcock, Roger Zelzany, JRR Tolkien,HP Lovecraft, Stephen King, George RR Martin, Barbara Tuchman, John Toland, Arthur C. clarke, David Webber and there are others.