Well, Christmas is almost here. 5 more days. This first one without Dad has me sad, wistful, nostalgic, and pondering my bad life choices. It also has me thinking about Dungeons and Dragons, one of the most fundamental parts of my psychic equipage for adulthood. As I've said before, Christmas of 1980 was my first brush with the game. Santa had it under the Christmas Tree, the Otis cover was enthralling, and I remember staring at it for hours. I was 8 years old, the rules were a bit advanced for me, and I had trouble making heads or tails of which book to read first, and how to put it all together, but I was totally mesmerized by the images, the wierd dice, the crayon...why, I thought, was there a white crayon? it was all so esoteric and arcane and smelt of dank ancient libraries of forgotten, forbidden knowledge... at this point things like Fafrd and the Gray Mouser, and the Necronomicon were years away still. Dad read the rules, and he ran the first game I'd ever played, that very night. we put a sheet of plexiglass on the table with some paper undernieth, and drew on it with crayons as he described our adventure in the Caves of Chaos. for miniatures we used my set of Comic book flat Romans...the best toy soldier investment I ever made, for 2 bucks I got four boxes of them (some kind of error had them send me two sets) yellow and blue guys. I don't know if I loved them so we used them for gaming, or if we used them for the game, and I came to love them...but either way, they still send a thrill through me. Dad ran the most delightful game, he was a master story-teller, and I will always remember the fearful mystery, the scary moments, the delightful puzzle solving, and giant spiders, magic shields, werewolves, a dragon... my brother, mother, grandmother, and uncle all participating as the first party I ever knew. It would be the last time they ever did that. It was too much work for Dad, and everyone else was not interested in fantasy and role playing...but for me, it was the most magical christmas ever...