You'll notice my memorial avatar is lifted from the cover of the original AD&D Player's Handbook. My first AD&D book and I got it 27 years ago, almost to the day.

You all rock. Since I logged off yesterday, you've all filled an additional ten pages of memories about Gary Gygax, D&D and the man's impact on gaming.

This is the thread that informed me of his passing. That knowledge hit me pretty hard. I had difficulty working yesterday. Memories kept flooding back to me, and I even got up at one point to go pull my old Red Box books (the box itself is long gone) off the shelves so I could flip through them.

My introduction to D&D was in the summer of 1986. I was ten years old. A friend told us he had this really cool game he wanted us to play. We agreed. Before long, that GM (Sean), my brother (another Sean) and my best friend Tim were all sitting in my parents' garage rolling up characters. I don't remember what our characters were, but I do still have images of that first gaming session. We fought a horde of skeletons, which the GM scribbled down on a piece of paper as a bunch of X's. We rolled dice. We let our imaginations run wild.

That GM moved away not too long afterwards, and it would be a full year before I wandered into Leisure World in the local mall, discovered the D&D Red Box on the shelf and forked over the $20 (or was it $25?) in my wallet.

Over the next few years, I scrimped and saved my allowance just so I could continue to buy D&D boxed sets (between my brother and I, we had them all -- from Basic up through Immortal). We played all the time. We never had a plot. I rarely bought or ran published adventures. Our games were very spontaneous and chaotic. We got good out of those wandering monster tables, and I (as de facto GM) built dungeons as I went along, scribbling them down on pieces of paper ("Uh ... okay, it takes a sharp right turn and opens onto a ten by ten room. There's a ... *clatter of dice* ... uh ... six kobolds in the room. Roll initiative.")

We got together on the spur of the moment to play D&D -- on weekends, after school and most likely just about every day during summer vacation.

D&D gave me a connection with my brother and my friends that I likely never would have had if we hadn't discovered the game.

I remember trying to play D&D in the back of my parents' car in the late '80s as we drove to Florida for a vacation. I remember meeting people I probably wouldn't have met if not for D&D. Some of my oldest friends are people that I gamed with back when I was in high school.

Gary Gygax is at least partially responsible for this. Thanks for the good times, Gary. Even just looking at my old Red Box books gives me a sense of nostalgia that nothing else in this world can top.

Chris

That was great -- my first character in D&D was a gnome illusionist!

I love that your rocking the Companion set for your avatar. I cannot tell you how many times I just gazed into that cover image of the knight about to engage the green dragon. Hell Larry ELmore along with Frank Frazzetta are two of my favorite artists of all time.

I am weeping now that this has set in after a few hours.

Back in 1978, as an extremely geeky 12 year old with a poor grasp of English, I was introduced to the world of D&D by someone who had the original books, before they were put into boxed sets. My mind opened up. I made an assassin as my first character; one that worshipped Asmodeus, because I loved the description of his intelligence -- supragenious. There were only two of us in that party, but we played and had fun exploring the world within our heads. This lasted only about one Summer, but I could not stop thinking about this game.

By 14 I had hooked up with another group, one with six-eight players. My English improved in no small part to reading the stuff in the first 2 boxed sets and the Monster Manual....

To follow Osiris'

A haiku,

A man who gave books
Instead of evil or hate
Gamers won't forget

That was great -- my first character in D&D was a gnome illusionist!

That sucks. Well, at least he won't have to play 4th Edition.

Can someone create a beautiful Gygax microbadge. I really like the dragon image that was posted a few pages back from Penny Arcade but I don't know if it can be adapted to a smaller size. Anything to commemorate Gary Gygax would be great at this point.

Changed my avatar to my favorite character to emerge from D&D. Not directly created by Gary but without him that wacky, brooding Dark Elf likely would never have been created.