The Red Box and Jason

Note: This is part 2 of a series of posts leading up to 5th edition.

Ten Dollars?!?

I thought I'd continue my journey down memory lane regarding D&D and get a little sentimental. Very few people played first edition. Unless you are about twenty years older than me and 100 times geekier, you probably didn't. First edition was very basic. Illustrations by Gary Gygax basic. It was that bad. It was the evolution of the Chainmail system by Gygax that Arneson usded to take the focus off of miniature wars and put them on individual miniatures. However, this was a different time and these were old school geeks who were into the details more than anything. Kind of like how old school nerds designed computers to be functional and hadn't ever considered that they could be sexy until Steve Jobs got his hands on one. In the old books, the dungeons and tables were the centerpieces. Characters and sometimes story were incidental.  A far cry from today where characters are the centerpiece.  I never played this version though.

Happy National Geek Day!

What I can speak to is the original Red Box. I actually have my old Red Box books.I got it in about 3rd grade, so that places things in the mid to early 80's. This is the one where there are only seven classes: fighter, cleric, magic-user, thief (not rogue!), elf, dwarf, and halfling (the races WERE classes then).

Why did this unlock my imagination so? I'm still not sure. I suppose that since I was into fantasy books, the prospect of making my own fantasy adventure was empowering. I bought a bunch more of the Advanced D&D books but I essentially lived in the rural country. The closest person my age lived about a mile away, so my odds of finding someone I could actually play with were really slim. I attempted to play D&D on a few occasions around school and with friends, but without a car, gatherings were nigh impossible. It possibly would have faded from memory if not for Jason.

When I was in middle school, my mother brought in some extra income by tutoring a teenager named Jason. My mother would pick me up from school and I'd wait in the car while she tutored Jason in math and I would come in towards the end of the lesson when I couldn't stand the boredom. Jason was a paraplegic who only had the most limited movement in one hand due to a car accident, but had a fully functioning brain. In a situation like that, it's only natural that you would develop an amazing imagination. Jason had long hair, loved heavy metal music, and had an large colleciton of crazy RPG materials like Gamma World and Shadowrun that he would talk up and lend to me.  He was eccentric and intelligent and I remember thinking he was pretty cool.

Unfortunately, the age gap prevented any real friendship (I was in 7th grade and I believe he was a sophomore in high school). Very sad really. While 4 years age difference doesn't seem like much now, it was half a lifetime back then. By the time I was a teenager and likely old enough to hang out with him, I was way too much into all the teenage high school drama to think of contacting him and my mother had stopped tutoring him years ago.

Jason is gone now. He passed away in his mid 20's. When my mother showed me the obituary, I did find myself feeling regret. In some ways, I feel like my self consciousness about being a geek really robbed me of experiencing some truly legendary adventures with a great guy. Maybe it's kind of paltry, but I like to think that when I put myself out there on a limb openly indulging my geek nature by doing things like going to conventions or unapologetically confessing my love of D&D, I'm at least doing right by his legacy.