Ah, shit that's hard. The encyclopedia in my head stops around the middle of volume 2. Somewhere in mid-Volume 5 or 6 I think. It's before she got a rep for being a shitty story-teller.

The Avengers is Volume 8, Issue 7 towards the end. I cheated on that one by using the guide in the Lounge.

You changed your profile picture?

(cont.)

I kept a notebook of gaming quotes, which I highly recommend doing. It's great for reading back over and getting some laughs.

I also kept an in-game journal of one of the campaigns that I played in with some of my college gaming group (though it was after we graduated), and that was great, because then the GM (who is one of my dearest friends, but he plays like it's a competition between the GM and the players) couldn't put one over on us as easily.

I also took to drawing illustrations during other games, which served the same sort of purpose, memory-wise. The GM (Eric, the Hard-Ass) also loved to see what I'd finished by the time the session ended.

I don't really have room to share any in-game anecdotes, but I'll share a joke that my friend Stu (who always played a dwarf) made:

Q: How do you know if it's an undead dwarf?

A: He's the one drinking pale ale.

(I think Cyrus would approve.)

Olde Saranac D&D Nostalgia:

I went to a church that didn't approve of D&D, and my parents were dead-set against it, so playing D&D was my version of teenage rebellion. I had to sneak sessions, so it was hard for me to be a regular player. There was one time, when my Mom arrived early to pick me up so we were kicking books and dice under the coffee table and couches like we were trying to hide drugs or alcohol...

I started playing around '92-'93, with a bunch of guys who were a couple of years older than I was, and I was the only girl in the group. We were playing AD&D: 2nd Ed, and we used the Forgotten Realms world as our setting. TSR still owned the system, and they had a few different worlds to play in. It was basically the same world as the Dragonlance novels, if I remember correctly.

The group usually consisted of the DM and four or five players, sometimes six, but not more than that. We had two different guys who would share DM duty, and they usually wrote the adventures, although they would occasionally pull out a module and tweak it a bit. Usually the modules came in when a campaign had finished up, and they just needed an easy run while planning the next one.

The ratio of shooting the shit:roleplaying varied, depending on who was the DM. One of the guys who took over later (a friend from high school who I didn't game with until after college) was a HARD ASS about staying in character, and if anyone was there who wasn't actually playing they had to sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up. He also didn't allow his players to drink during the game, except during one-shot sessions on New Year's Eve. Honestly, he was the best GM I ever had. Played a lot of stuff with him: D&D, Mage and all the other WhiteWolf games, Legend of the Five Rings. He also ran Shadowrun, but I never really had a chance to play that with him.

(cont.)