I started roleplaying in 1988, when I was thirteen. That year, I freed myself from the draconian prohibitions against roleplaying inflicted upon me by the church I attended with my family. No amount of fear-mongering religious tracts or the paranoid tears my family shed for my immortal soul would stop me! The Satanic Panic be damned!

Along with my close friends, I dove eagerly into the pages of the 1st edition AD&D books, and we had many a youthful adventure using those rules.

However, in short order, a second edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons arose to capture our imaginations! This new edition would come to engross us utterly, with its more streamlined content and the amazing color artwork of those creative wizards whose names loom like giants and cast titanic shadows across the decades: Elmore, Easley, Caldwell, Parkinson, and others.

Ah, the memories of the days my teenaged self spent adventuring with good friends and good books! The seemingly endless weekends where we’d hold marathon gaming sessions while perusing the 2nd Edition tomes as well as issues of Dragon magazine, with its insightful articles and alluring advertisements. My head swam feverishly with adventure hooks, possibilities, and limitless worlds.

By the latter half of the 1990s my friends and I had incorporated other RPGs into our gaming rotation, and AD&D began to fade, as interests inevitably do over time. We eventually set aside roleplaying altogether for a while, only briefly exploring 3rd Edition.

I came back to roleplaying in earnest around 2009, after discovering the OSR blogosphere. I was so inspired by the robust online RPG community I started my own blog, as a means to chronicle my return to the beloved hobby of my youth. [Side note: it’s “comitragic” to be in 2025 and read my first post from June 2010, where I call myself an “old dork” … if I was a dragon, I suppose I’d now be considered “ancient” …]

For the last fifteen years, I have wielded pencil, dice, and books with my old companions and new allies as well. One of those new allies is Ron Meischker. He recently started up a new 2nd Edition campaign, and I jumped at the chance to join.

Stay tuned, because I’ll be chronicling my experience as I dive back into 2nd Edition AD&D. In the meantime, I’d love to hear about your own personal journey with roleplaying! Did you play 2nd Edition back when it was the “current” edition back in the day? Are you playing it today? Have you been using 2E rules since that version of the game was in print? Let me know!