Dungeon Master

I bought this in 1989 when it first came out. The purchase was made for no reason other than the fact that the painting on the cover was one of the most bad ass things I’d ever laid my eyes on. I took it home and what I tried to read was way to complicated for my young brain and I knew the job of Dungeon Master was far beyond my current abilities. I thought that perhaps if I was studious and I worked really hard I could one day be worthy to bear such a title that people would refer to me with the utmost reverence as “Dungeon Master!” Unfortunately I could never figure this damn game out. So I consulted with an older smarter kid at church I knew he had a lot of knowledge in this territory and I inquired to see if perhaps he could groom in the ways of D&D. Instead he introduced me to different game titled MERC by Fantasy Games Unlimited. This game was awesome. It came in a box. You got a manual these sort of classified looking character creation sheets and It was super easy to understand. Sadly I rarely had the opportunity to play it with him much so I did what any kid going through puberty, that was still afraid of girls, and often ostracized by ones piers for still playing with GI Joe’s, watching cartoons and having a love of comic books and all other things awesome would do and I got my grandmother to play it with me. Unfortunately she didn’t want to kill anyone and in this game MERC stands for Mercenary and Killing is the whole point of it. So after playing several non-lethal versions of this game I knew I had to move on. Fortunately it was right at this time I found TMNT and other Strangeness. This published around 1985 this was an older game but it still checked out. This game is loaded with illustrations by Eastman and Laird it had really cool character sheets, you could have Weapons, Weapons Proficiencies, Special Abilities, Scholastic Skills, Combat Skills and everything was an animal mutated towards a human. I spent hours creating the most awesome characters imaginable and there really wasn’t any purpose in rolling dice because I would just re-roll the dice until I got good numbers anyway. Then I’d type my characters up and file them away. The book TMNT and Other Strangeness is only 112 pages and it’s mostly about character creation with not much to go on by way of stories or adventures and so after having created an army of the most bad ass mutant animal characters that could still be comprehended by a human mind I lost interest in role playing games and I never became a “Dungeon Master!”