Forward Into The Void...

Welcome to Old School Eclectic, yet another blog devoted to old-school roleplaying games.  I've called the blog this because it reflects my early experience with RPGs; I played a lot of different games from the time I started RPGs in 1979, and I'll probably be talking about all of them here. 

I think I'm a bit atypical in the old-school community because D&D was not my first RPG; that honor goes to The Fantasy Trip (or the combo of Wizard and Melee, really).  In addition, I played hex-and-chit wargames before ever playing any RPGs, which is what led me to Wizard. Going from wargames to role-playing is probably not that odd, but being a ten-year-old wargamer was definitely weird.  It also meant that I hung around with older gamers sometimes (as often as they would let me), which helped expose me to lots of different games early on.  Within my first year of gaming, I had played D&D (Holmes edition, followed quickly by AD&D), TFT, Tunnels and Trolls, Runequest, and The Complete Warlock (sort of, anyway).  I actually played TFT and T&T more than D&D/AD&D at first; I would have kept doing that, except that soon all anyone wanted to play was AD&D.  Oddly, there wasn't much B/X action among people I knew, with one important exception to be covered in a future post.  So, as you can see, I have roots in a lot of different games, and I'll have something to say about all of them here.  I particularly intend to do several posts about The Complete Warlock, since I've never seen it discussed in any old-school blog.  It's not a great game, but it is important as an early response to OD&D