Current mood:	busy
Entry tags:	dead 'uns, gaming, geek

Valé Gary Gygax
The man who not only invented Dungeons & Dragons, but by extrapolation the whole roleplaying hobby, passed away today a few months short of his 70th birthday.

I got into roleplaying via my best friend in Highschool. We'd both been avid fantasy and SF readers and after a trip into the city he bough a copy of D&D. This would have been 1981 I think. From there we started a school group, which included getting permission from the Physics teacher to skip the school sports carnival and stay in the physics lab playing D&D for the day. The Phys Ed teacher was not impressed :-)

The following year I attended my first roleplaying convention where I met some amazing people from a club called The Wizards' Council. This club formed the central part of my socialising for the next 15 or so years. While most of the people involved I've lost track of (though some have found me via Facebook) there are a few people who were really influential on me and that I still keep in contact. One of whom is the mother of one of my classmates at Uni. :-)

And while Gygax was unashamed in being "influenced" by various fantasy elements to create his worlds, but also came up with some unique and lasting variants, such as Drow elves.

I'm still peripherally interested in roleplaying, though I haven't done anything actively for many years.

I doff my hat to a man who had an idea and virtually created an industry.

Valé