TDL’s Sports, Wrestling, & Otherwise

My descent into true fantasy geekdom can be traced back to one guy. In seventh grade, a buddy of mine (who we’ll refer to by his nickname “Huge”) moved to my school. In eighth grade, he started talking about Dungeons and Dragons. By halfway through eighth grade, I was going over his house pretty regularly to play with a group involving me, Huge, another guy from school, Huge’s uncle, and two of Huge’s cousins. By three-quarters of the way through eighth grade I was looking in the fantasy/role-playing section of Waldenbooks (in those dark, dark days before Barnes and Noble or Borders) for new stuff to buy. I brought my first Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide sometime that year. My mom and dad were really not cool with it at first… the “Dungeons and Dragons makes you commit suicide, rape babies, and kill your parents” stories from the late 80s were still fresh in their minds. Apparently, my 14-year-old diplomacy skills were well-developed enough that I convinced them that Huge’s uncle was, in fact, NOT training me for a life full of Satan and Black Sabbath but was helping me use an imagination which I was often wasting on nothing.

Y’see, I was an only child. I did a lot of things to entertain myself. I played eight-man games of Monopoly by myself and secretly rooted for the dog. I filled a ton of spiral notebooks writing stories about nothing. I picked up a board game called HeroQuest and played through all the quest packs by myself. I’d come up with different backstories for the characters and the bad guys. Playing AD&D was good for me and I appreciate my parents being cool with stuff that was, in retrospect, kinda creepy. “Yeah, dad… I met this kid at school and I’m going over his place to play Dungeons and Dragons with his 40-year-old uncle. That’s cool, right?”

I guess parents in the early 90s hadn’t been conditioned to assume everyone with a penis was out to molest their children.

Anyway… later on after I had all the game books I started drifting over toward the novels. TSR had novels set in all their major worlds: Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms, Al-Qadim (!), Greyhawk, and Ravenloft were a few of them. For whatever reason, I went with the Forgotten Realms and I’ve been a fan of the world setting ever since. At 15, I bought the AD&D Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting for 2nd edition. I remember my mom being ticked I’d spend $50 on something like that. I also remember poring through every scrap of stuff in the box set. The box set contained huge maps of the Realms which I’d still be using today if I had a D&D group. I remember taking the adventure they gave you with the setting (designed to take level 1 characters to level 2) and modifying it enough to set up a huge 20-level campaign. I have friends that still tell me it was the best campaign they’ve ever played and that makes me very happy.

The first Forgotten Realms novel I picked up was Elfshadow. This was book 2 (I think) in the Harper’s series. After reading through all the Harpers books I started reading through some of the various trilogies until finally finding the Icewind Dale Trilogy by R.A. Salvatore. The trilogy was about an evil artifact that found its way into the hands of a wizard who was using it for evil. One of the characters in that book was Drizzt Do’Urden, a dark elf who’d thrown off the evil tendencies of his race to become a hero on the surface.

As it turned out, Salvatore struck gold with Drizzt… a character he insists was supposed to be a supporting character in the trilogy. This led to a prequel (The Dark Elf Trilogy) and to date, 14 other books — some of which have cracked the New York Times Bestseller List. As it also turns out, I happened to notice that the New York Library surprisingly has most of them. I decided to go through the Drizzt series chronologically before undertaking the absurdity that is the Wheel of Time.

This is as much an experiment to see if the fantasy stuff I read in my earlier years holds up as it is to remind myself about the characters and events that lead into the books of the series I haven’t read yet.