Your First Time

In many ways, I'm a child playing among the shadows of those who came before. I wasn't there to experience the mother of them all. And, in fact, I didn't get into the hobby until the early nineties.  Where most folks cut their teeth on the World's Most Popular Role Playing Game, I ended up going an entirely different direction.

No exotic, Tolkienien beauty for me with her strange landscapes and mighty magics.  No, my first was that vulcan-jedi-roadwarrior cosplayer at Gencon. That's right, my first was Palladium's Rifts.

Much maligned (and some of it rightfully so), Rifts has always been the geeky cousin to D&D. Socially awkward, never sure of herself, a bit hard to get to know. But once you did? She knew your favorite movies, your comics, the names of all your transformers.  She didn't care about the minutiae, but of the big screen explosions and madcap insanity of Saturday morning cartoons.  And yet, at times, she could take you places and teach you things that the other kids on the block never would have dreamed of.

I remember clearly my first gaming session, the first time I was introduced to any game, even Rifts. My brother's group had lost a player due to summer vacation, and they needed a Big Guy With Guns. So, considering I was a bit smarter than your average eight year old, they gave me a character sheet, told me to do what the Glitterboy said, and to be quiet otherwise. While they referenced such lofty things as Star Wars, Heavy Metal, and The Terminator, I looked over my sheet, and waited for my instructions.

When they came, they were too simple.  "Shoot anything that sounds terrifying."

I could do that. I had guns, I was BIG GUY WITH GUNS!

My brother, the GM, sent an adult dragon flying overhead. Dragons are scary things. It was a total party wipe, and I was banished from the table.


 The seeds were planted, it was puppy love that would blossom into a real crush two years later, when my brother allowed me to borrow his books to run Rifts for MY friends.

It was another total party wipe. And it was amazing.

Though I've courted others throughout the years, trying the exotic, the mundane, the downright freaky, I've always come back to Rifts. She knows what I want, she scratches that itch nicely.

So, Blogger. Who was your first?