Dragonquest - a role-playing nostalgia trip

 Role playing  was my first gateway into wargames, some time back around the late 1970s.  My best friend and I spent a lot of our teenage years exploring Dungeons and Dragons (when there was only 1 edition) and then a host of other games...Call of Cthulhu, Gamma World, Chivalry and Sorcery.  I seem to remember we had a particular fondness for game from FGU such as Space Opera and Bushido...games that had a table and a dice roll for just about everything.  This carried on into my uni years with a very active club at Strathclyde Uni (who were secretly the cabal that ran the students union, but that's another story!).  Through RPGs I'd also discovered historical games but these always ran a parallel but separate course for me.

After I left uni and moved south I found a small group of gamers in Surrey...remember this was in the days of cards in games shops (when games shops were a thing) or small ads in a magazine.  This lasted a year or so until work and stuff got in the way and that was that.  Many years later my son discovered my old D&D books in the loft and we've played a few games but never as part of a group.

Back in the summer an old friend from uni days posted on Facebook that he was planning an online role playing session and I decided to take a very nostalgic plunge back into the world of RPGs.  We have been playing every fortnight since June... a mix of players from Britain, Canada and the USA,  all negotiating time zones and hoping our wifi connections hold out.  

We've been playing Dragonquest... a very old school 1980s set of rules (I mean... just look at that cover art!).  The setting is an unusual middle-eastern style world... think ancient Persia... with the usual mix of fantasy races and settings but tweaked to reflect the setting.  The rules are very detailed in a way that only 1980s games can be.  Character creation includes roles for whether you are right or left handed, which birth aspect you have etc, Similarly the combat rules have a host of modifiers and tables and the magic rules seem even more complex: it could become very easy to get bogged down in this but  we have played fairly fast and loose with this and it hasn't got in the way of the game or the story... our DM is very skilled at winging it, an essential skill for anyone running an RPG.  You can always guarantee the players will immediately do the opposite of what you expect and you need someone with the flexibility and creativity to go with it and avoid the game becoming broken.

We've been using Roll20 as a way of hosting the games... to be honest I don't really know how it all works but luckily the GM and some of the players do.  The nice feature is that the character sheets are all hosted on the system and this takes care of all the modifiers and dice rolls automatically for me 

So far we've dealt with an plague that was turning villagers into flesh eating zombies and are now delving deep into an ancient tomb full of traps, orcs (who are actually very friendly) and undead spirits.  My character, Farshad the Halfling, was meant to be a sneaky thief who would excel at sneaking and stay out of trouble, has taken on a life and character of his own and I've discovered he's actually a psychopathic Murder-Hobbit who tends to get stuck into a fight with his short sword and dagger at the slightest provocation... you can take the boy out of Glasgow...

It's been great fun and a really good return to an aspect of the hobby that I'd forgotten.