Although I had played quite a few choose your own adventure books, and especially the prolific Fighting Fantasy book series, I had never actually encountered role-playing games in their true form until I reached secondary school. My introduction came through a good school friend named Martin who had inherited a large collection of games and rulebooks from his older brothers when they moved out. The collection was eclectic, and probably worth a fortune nowadays, and included dozens of early Games Workshop games from their early pre-warhammer days, original copies of first edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons rulebooks and heaps upon heaps of old White Dwarf. The collection was a veritable Aladdin’s cave of gaming treasure.
He also had recently acquired a copy of Dungeoneer that he brought into school with him one day. I don’t remember how we got talking about RPGS, but we uncovered a mutual interest in the games and their worlds.
Dungeoneer is the main rulebook for the Advanced Fighting Fantasy game system which is an extended and improved version of the rules used in the Fighting Fantasy books. Written by Marc Gascoigne and Pete Tamlyn it is unusual in the RPG field as it was published by Puffin Books, an internationally known publisher of mainstream children’s fiction rather than by a specialist RPG publishing house. Even more unusually it was a trade paperback sized book that could be found on the shelves of John Menzies.
My first ever character carried the resplendently half-inched moniker of Rab Cee. He was supposed to be a fighter/barbarian type from the far north, and naturally he had high skills in hitting stuff with weapons and grunting. Unfortunately his intelligence was on par with a wooden door stop and his social skills were somewhere between the Incredible Hulk and a dead frog. In all fairness he was little more than a two dimensional caricature based on Rab C Nesbitt. That is Rab C Nesbitt if he had lived in world of swords and sorcery and had developed an unhealthy interest in both fire and more specifically magical fire pellets.
Even though you may already have guessed, I suppose I should stop here and tell you what the hell a fire pellet is. Now, as I’ve already described, my mate Martin who got me into the whole RPG thing in the first place had a couple of handwritten books of items for sale and monsters that could be used in the game. One of the items that caught my eye, after the prerequisite two-handed sword and coat of mail armour, were the fire pellets. A fire pellet is a glass sphere, about the size of a tennis ball, filled with a volatile incandescent liquid. I suppose you could think of it like a sort of magical grenade, if a grenade was filled with atomic napalm and exploded at the slightest impact. Smashing just one of these things was the equivalent of setting off a fireball spell and could unleash holy hell on whatever it hit.
In hindsight they’re probably not the best thing to give to a starting character, especially when the player is only twelve…
I spent most of Rab’s starting allowance of gold pieces on a two-handed battleaxe, some chain mail armour and a leather sack filled with as many of these magical bombs as I could afford. I even sold off some of his standard equipment such as rope, grappling hook, his bedroll and even his torches were all sacrificed to finance his fire pellet fetish.
In the context of the game Rab didn’t live long, even though on my character sheet he was clearly marked as being 32 years old, which seemed an adequately ripe age for a drunken pyromaniac.
I’ll admit I wasn’t even subtle about Rab’s characterisation. He quickly devolved into a strange mix of pyromaniac and manic drunken social menace. He had little regard for property and even less regard for whatever quest or mission he had been hired to perform.
My first ever game took place on a rainy day in first year at school when we were packed inside out of the way of the weather. A group of us gathered round with Martin running as the Games Master and the rest of us with our hastily created characters eager for adventure.
There was Rincewind the kleptomaniac wizard who pilfered anything that wasn’t nailed down just in case it was useful as a magical reagent, Tamarall the noble, pompous and self righteous elf archer and Stumm Greybeard the doughty dwarf warrior with a peg leg made of solid iron.
This seminal adventure started out, as they often do, inside a busy tavern somewhere in the pseudo-medieval village of Hoganford. The word amongst the drunken scuttlebutts was that a gang of bandits was terrorising the local farmers and robbing travellers on the road towards the nearest major town. Recently they had grown so bold as to kidnap the infant song of the village mayor and demand a ransom for his return. The local head-honcho was looking for some people to take care of the bandits and rescue the kid.
Naturally the goody-two-shoes elf volunteered us all for this mission in spite of Rab’s heartfelt objections. We filed out of the Tavern, well I say filed. Rab, acting very much within the character I had defined, had to be forcibly dragged out of the establishment with a rope and pulley system.
While Rab stood swaying in the sunlight, narrowly making saving throws to avoid projectile vomiting or collapsing unconscious, the rest of the party interrogated the locals for information. While rolling up these random encounters Martin managed to hit on an odd occurrence whereby Rab noticed a sound coming from down a nearby well. Having encountered deadly random creatures leaping out of stuff in the original Fighting Fantasy books I, and Rab, became convinced that something mighty nasty was lurking at the bottom of the darkened well. Concerned that most of the stuff in the bestiary list which lived in dark underwater caves was too strong to deal with, and lacking a rope and grapnel to investigate the depths of the well Rab naturally decided to drop in a fire pellet to clear it out. Rolling for damage I managed to hit the maximum on all the dice which roughly results in the equivalent of setting of an atomic bomb in the bottom of a very small, shallow well.
The resulting geyser of superheated steam erupted about a hundred feet in the air, and at the top of this fountain of boiling water was the charbroiled corpse of the mayor’s kid. See it turns out that the kid was just lost and the bandits had tried to take advantage of the situation to try and pilfer a reward from the local worthies. Unfortunately this plan was foiled, violently, spectacularly by one man and his obsession with magical explosives.
The townsfolk naturally got a bit pissed at the death of an innocent child, and got out their torches and pitchforks to bring “those damned adventurers” to justice. Sensing that maybe they were in over their heads the rest of the party tried to negotiate with the townsfolk, but Rab sensing that any negotiation would probably result in him being lynched, decided to go down swinging.
The local magistrate had by this point turned out the village’s small militia to try and bring the situation under control before something unfortunate happened. He demanded that the party lay down their weapons and surrender so that the situation could be sorted out with the due process of law. The goody-goody elf and the dwarf both complied immediately. Rincewind had long since vanished into “the shadows” and escaped to the edge of the village and Rab was digging another fire pellet out of his leather bag.
The militia seized the elf and the dwarf. Rab seeing that he was next lobbed a fire pellet into the crowd, a quick dice roll for almost maximum damage later and a dozen charred corpses were flying through the air. Mad with power Rab started lobbing fire pellets around like an Indian fast bowler on steroids. NPCS ran for cover as the half drunk barbarian became Hogansford’s own version of the apocalypse. Houses burned, shops exploded into matchwood and people went sailing through the air propelled by the deadly power of exploding fire pellets.
In an effort to stop the rampage the Elf and the Dwarf both tried to grapple Rab to the ground and overpower him, but instead they all managed to topple over and land on top of the sack containing the remainder of the fire pellets…
Reportedly Rincewind, who was by now over ten miles away on a stolen horse, had most of his hair singed off by the resulting blast and Hogansford was reduced to little more than a deep crater somewhere in the eastern woods.
In all the game, and Rab’s career lasted less than half an hour, but I was bitten by the RPG bug and never looked back from that point on.