It was the total opposite of the sanitized, system-focused design that came with later editions of D&D and were pioneered, at least in my head, by GURPS, an amazing system in its own right. The first DM’s guide was a look into Gygax’s campaign - seeing his influences, what mattered to him and what was interesting. There was real magic in Gygax's old Dungeon Master’s Guide, the one with the giant Demon on the cover, the one that I used to sit and pore over in class while I was supposed to be learning algebra or holding forth on the clarity of the New Deal or whatever it was that kids in high school did before mobile phones. But there was some part of me that hoped D&D could be better than that, if we could just grow up and get less stupid about our imaginations. I didn’t play again for a long, long time. At some point my friend said he had to go do homework just to get away. It was probably one of the worst sessions ever DM'd in the history of humanity. Then we rolled a bunch of dice and everyone was dead. I think I included a blaster from Gamma World because it seemed cool. What the fuck, right? We were 14 and we didn’t know any better. I remember the first time I played AD&D First Edition with a good Dungeon Master.Īll the episodes prior to that featured my own poorly plotted adventures in some thinly veiled Lord of the Rings knockoff or a friend’s horrible 'Let’s kill you all with pit traps in Tomb of Horrors' power-trip extravaganza.
