I'm not sure how it happened. I was happy playing board games and some games by post. I even managed to get involved in some old school miniatures wargaming (although my diminishing eyesight hasn't done my painting skills any favours).
But there was an itch that just wasn't being scratched.
"You hear a sound like nails on a window pane and it suddenly feels cold, very cold.
There is breathing behind you, not the gentle even breathing of Tara, but a coarse sibilant panting. It is several minutes since you heard either Tara or Morgan speak. Do you turn and face whatever evil hunts in the dark, or do you try to run?"
The answer of course is that you're dead either way.
After Mick's great Pendragon campaign in 1992, in which we did some half decent deeds and slew a few gormless Saxons (who had it coming), the old dice bag went into temporal stasis.
There were some near misses, but everyone seemed to want to play the new games where they would be computer hackers in trenchcoats with difficult personalities or vampires living in attic appartments in Manhattan. If this was "adult mature" roleplaying then I didn't want any part of
it.
Frankly, and this is terribly judgemental, they just weren't the kind of people I wanted to go to the pub with.
It did however spawn my own game "Katanas In Pyjamas" in which edgy
blokes with dark secrets try to live normal lives as shop assistants or chartered accountants, while keeping dangerous animals from hell's 5th plane in the garden shed.
Anyway, I reluctantly let it all go and for a while there was neither motive nor opportunity.
Fast forward to a bit earlier than now. Seventeen years after the millenium bug was supposed to have airliners falling out of the sky and twenty-five since Sir Lucas (for that was I) rode across England in search of the Holy Grail, or a fair damsel (if the Grail wasn't available), I've decided that it's time to be someone else again; Khaldarth Ironhand (the dwarf from the 'Norf), Keefer (the ex-Scout and his Vargr sidekick). Maybe those Wilko reading glasses are just too rosy-tinted, but let's see how it plays out ... a critical hit or a sad embarrassing fumble.
