Nostalgia Trip: D&D B/X

I've been feeling extremely nostalgic lately about some of the games in my collection, both physical and digital.  In particular I've been paging through the cover-less copy of the D&D Rules Cyclopedia a very old friend gave me back in junior high school (circa 1994?).

I got started in role-playing games with a big black box with a warrior facing off against a magnificently rendered red dragon.  Jeff Easley did some really nice covers for D&D overall, and the cover of that box is the image that still sticks in my mind when I think "Dungeons and Dragons".  For long-time fans of B/X (Basic/Expert or BECMI) D&D, this was kind of the last hurrah for the system.  For my brothers and I, it was our introduction to role-playing games.  I think my father bought it from K*B Toys because I remember seeing the thing displayed prominently at that store just before it was given to us kids.  I played with my brothers because we were fifteen miles from town and most friends' parents didn't want to drive all that way.


I don't think we really knew what we were doing when we played, we just sort of made stuff up.  It was fun.  The part that left a lasting impression was the tabbed cards that introduced the core concepts of RPGs and D&D bit by bit, leaving a long lasting impression that a DM had to try to be fair in their rulings.  So the concept of the Adversarial DM that I encountered in online accounts at the time and much later in Knights of the Dinner Table was a pretty alien concept for me.  I don't remember all the exact contents of things, but I distinctly remember drawing in the killer rabbit from Monty Python & The Holy Grail because it was silly and we were not serious when we played.  My youngest sibling would have been very young at the time, so I guess maybe it accelerated his reading comprehension skills?

One of the (now that I think about it) dirty tricks TSR of the era pulled was trying to get people to buy into Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, which was in its revised second edition at the time.  It certainly worked on me, as I borrowed a friend's core books for an extended period (they were returned) and we played AD&D 2e.  Talk about a gateway drug.  Other fragments that come to mind is seeing the Hollow World Campaign Set in a used bookstore.  It was something I wanted but I don't think I ever voiced this to my parents at the time.

I collect B/X Dungeons & Dragons stuff now (along with AD&D 2e and 3e).  There's a lot of really interesting things in the 19-22 year history of the game, but the downside is that physical items were pricey for a good long while.  These days, I can buy print-on-demand copies of just about everything from DriveThruRPG, including the D&D Rules Cyclopedia.