frightening, but it’s true. many of you know the story of where this url came from, along with my instant messenger accounts, my email addresses, and yes, even my bbs logins from back in the day. i pulled the handle, quite fortunately, from my second dungeons and dragons character.

with the passing of gary gygax it seems at once mandatory and yet cliche to discuss one’s d&d characters and their introduction to the hobby - to take someone’s legacy and reduce it to their impact on your fictional character. but yet, in a real way roleplaying games were his legacy, and the man remained a gamer to his death.

my introduction to roleplaying games actually came about through an entirely different angle. one summer i came across a copy of the robotech rpg, a series i was enamored with. i picked it up and read through it, and then begged my mom to purchase it for me along with the requisite dice set - two each of d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, and d20. (in the intervening two decades i’ve managed to lose four of those dice.) with just myself and my younger brother interested in it, our games were loose interpretations of the rules at best, but i kept devouring the stats and plotting grand adventures across the cosmos. in robotech, of course, my name suited the characters best - i could really imagine myself growing up to be a veritech fighter pilot just like rick hunter - so why invent a persona for a character?

eventually i was curious about the origins of role playing games, and luckily the public library had a set of several first edition advanced dungeons & dragons books behind the counter. unfortunately, they weren’t available for checkout. in their stead i checked out the dragonlance series of novels, and when it came time to return them i would wander down to the library while my family ran errands and sit studiously reading the rulebooks. i attempted to create my own characters for the fantasy world as i understood it, a mixture of hyboria and krynn and my own imagination. of course, advanced really meant advanced, and i found myself fumbling over rules and conflating concepts between the two very different approaches to game design. the end result, however, you can see above. i’d crafted a half-elven cleric-fighter-magic user named, brilliantly, leeardathas half-elven. he was a master of magic both arcane and divine, and handy with a flail to boot. minmax much?

eventually i picked up my own copy of the 2nd edition player’s handbook and my next character had a slightly more creative name, or at least one i’m more willing to own as a domain.