Greetings

[SaintMeerkat]

Greetings, fellow horror gamers.

I have been gaming since my cousin, David, introduced me to AD&D in 1979 on a cold, rainy Saturday October afternoon in rural Alabama. David's mom only bought him the dice and the B1 module, so he made up the rules on the spot. We rolled the dice and moved a little plastic insert from a retractable ball point pen around the map like a board game piece. When we got to the room, he would tell us what was in there, and we fought the creatures using his completely improvised combat system. He was so good that we never questioned whether he actually knew what he was doing. I have been gaming ever since.

That Christmas, I got the Player's Handbook, my best friend got the Monster Manual, and David got the Dungeon Master's Handbook. We would take turns DMing, running each other through the dungeons we'd designed. Our group slowly grew to 8 people, two of whom I am currently playing with online on Friday nights.

I was introduced to the works of HP Lovecraft by the best friend mentioned above. He had one of the Ballentine collections with the bizarre eyes on the cover. I borrowed it, and Lovecraft became my favorite writer instantly, supplanting Tolkien. At first, I thought the books he mentioned in his writings were actual books. I actually spent time in my rural city's public library looking for all of the books that he mentioned in his writings. I got so excited when I actually found The Golden Bough, and hurriedly skimmed it, so horribly disappointed when I didn't see any spells.

I knew there was a Call of Cthulhu game because I saw it advertised in the copies of Dragon magazine I would purchase at B. Dalton's on our rare excursions to the big city, but I couldn't convince my parents to write a check that large to Wargames West (from whom I made infrequent purchases of inexpensive Judges Guild stuff).

Fast forward to university. One Friday night, I was walking through the lobby of one of my friend's dorms headed to meet him, and was surprised to find it packed. Every flat surface had people packed around it. OH MY GOD THEY HAVE ALL GOT WEIRD DICE. My pulse soared as I walked around from table to table. People were playing GURPS. D&D. And CALL OF FRIGGIN' CTHULHU. They didn't have an opening in the CoC game, but I gave them my PO Box number and they promised to let me know if there was an opening. I ended up playing in my very first GURPS game, and played on and off with those guys for most of my freshman year.

I taught school for 21 years, and I had an after-school student gaming group at every school.

I didn't end up actually playing Call of Cthulhu until 5E era, when I ran some one shots with my high school student group, and ran the Nocturnum campaign for some friends and started Beyond the Mountains of Madness before that group fell apart.

Meanwhile, I GM'ed a lot of small conventions during the 3.5 D&D era, running a lot of games for Living Greyhawk and Pathfinder Society. I volunteered for the Dave Arneson's Blackmoor Organized Play campaign, and I wrote 4 adventures. One for LG, one for Blackmoor, and two Pathfinder PDF only Pathfinder adventures.

I am looking forward to getting back into play by post gaming. I spent a lot of time on RPOL back in the day, and that is still my preferred method of online play.

SaintMeerkat

[Mr. Handy]

Welcome, SaintMeerkat, you've come to the right place! There's a Trail of Cthulhu version of Horror on the Orient Express that should start soon and still has a couple of openings, plus I'm running two games of my own. They're in progress, but you could join them without too much catching up to do.

I'm running Zombie Apocalypse, which is a modern non-Mythos game using the CoC rules. It's still early in Chapter 2, so you could easily play characters that were just added at the start of the chapter. The game is currently stalled due to lack of time on my part, but I hope to get it moving in the next week or two. There's also The Masque of Nyarlathotep, which takes place in southern France in 1517. It's still early, and you haven't missed too much. It's the sixth adventure in my Doctor Who/Call of Cthulhu campaign, but you don't need to know anything about Doctor Who or the first five adventures to play. You're free to read the previous adventures, of course.

[SaintMeerkat]

Thank you. I don't mind jumping in to games that are already in progress.

I own the Trail of Cthulhu book, but have never actually read or played it, but I am willing to give it a shot.

[Deadly Treadly]

Well, SaintMeerkat, I can definitely say you're a veteran gamer

[SaintMeerkat]

Well, SaintMeerkat, I can definitely say you're a veteran gamer

That's a very kind way of saying old fart.

[Deadly Treadly]

That's a very kind way of saying old fart.

Well, we're about the same age so I say it with the same aches and pains you have
Still, that's a lot of gaming experience