My blog

Oh my blog.  What's it for?  Again, to jot down thoughts as I work through a hobby and a pastime that I've never been particularly close to.  I'm not a professional writer.  Dave's my name, and banking's my game.  But when my boys became particularly enamored with all things fantasy - having grown up in the heyday of Jackson's LoTR and Pottermania - I decided to step in and share their memories.  Especially since we've always been a close family who lives by the adage 'the family that plays together, stays together.'

Not that it's always been that way.  On an intellectual level, it was history, not fantasy, that was my first love.  It still is.  First as a child with WWII, largely due to the number of close relatives who served in the war.  I then went through a phase in which I discovered ancient Greek and Roman history and mythology.  That was really where my earliest interest in mythology was born.  By middle school, I was becoming a revolutionary.  Perhaps it's because I always loved autumn, and the Revolutionary War was studied during that time, but I soon found myself gobbling up anything from Colonial America to Napoleonic Europe.

It wasn't until high school, 11th Grade in fact, that I began to show interest in Medieval history.  This interest was spurred on by the number of classmates I had who were, at the time, immersing themselves in this new fad called Dungeons and Dragons.  It was also the result of our 11th Grade English teacher (what we now call Language Arts), and a segment on Beowulf.  I can still see her standing in front of the class, reading a description of the world out of which Beowulf emerged.  The cold, the dark, the small bands of people huddling in their great houses against the outer nighttime - it somehow caught my imagination.  Of course it didn't hurt that she also had a reputation for inviting various male students to her house way out in the country.  But that's another story.  There was enough combining to get my interest in medieval history jump started, and fuse it with at least an underlying interest in fantasy.

This was also during the Great Fantasy Renaissance that began in 1977 with the release of Star Wars, and continued until about the mid-1980s.  That fall semester of my 11th grade year, when I sat listening to the unpacking of Grendel's world (including a rousing account from John Gardner's Grendel), was still part of that period, though arguably toward the waning days of the Fantasy Renaissance.  Return of the Jedi had just come out it's true.  But the Excaliburs and the Conan the Barbarians were giving way to a growing number of Terms of Endearment and Wargames themed movies.

Nonetheless, by that time I had already dipped my first toe in the bubbling stew that was fantasy roleplaying.  I always had a soft spot for movie monsters and mythology.  And now I was being turned on to the particularly beautiful and brutal period of history that has been my primary focus for all the years since.  So when my boys came to me and asked ol'Dad to roll up his sleeves and have a go at the old 20-sided, I had enough interest, just enough experience, and plenty of curiosity to make a go of it.  And that's what this is for.  To sift my ideas out, have a place to put them down, and who knows? Maybe someone with infinitely more knowledge and experience in the hobby will come by and give me an insight or two I've not thought of.  Till then, here's hoping.