Greetings!
I'm sure many may realize I'm "machfront" on any given forum, etc. and I've related the following a number of times when pertinent though in such times it surely is very little signal amongst the noise. Perhaps it will 'matter' a tiny bit more here considering the focus.
This is personal. It's probably too long and too meandering and makes too much use of parenthesis but there ya are... :)
I'm uncertain of my very first awareness of D&D as a 'thing', but I can recall a buddy of mine in 3rd grade or so while we were filling out our Scholastic order forms recommending me to also get a certain book. This book was "Revenge of the Rainbow Dragons", a TSR Endless Quest book. I was strangely ignorant of the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure and assorted like books of the time. My friend explained the concept and further explained that this book was of the type but focused on the D&D world and ideas, etc.
I ordered the book and fell for it. The younger of my two older sisters loved it as well and explained the inherent coolness potential of the D&D Basic Set (an ad for Moldvay Basic) in the back of the book. We sent off for a TSR catalog and never received it. (Though I realized later that it probably did arrive and was intercepted by my mother who later voiced her hatred for this the "Devil's game".).
No matter. The doors to the underworld were well and truly thrown open in the pits of my imagination.
A short lifetime of loving the old sword-swingin' movies of yesteryear and children's books on monsters and fairy tales and eyes wide during the network showings of Rankin-Bass's "The Hobbit" and "The Return of the King" (how my young mind HELD onto the vision of the Witch King of Angmar in the latter...wow) had primed me to the full for this.
It wasn't until I began 7th grade that it all came to fruition.
A buddy of mine began to talk about D&D. He had learned it and played it with his older brothers. He proposed he and I and a handful of other play the game at school during lunch.
To prepare, he loaned me a D&D rule book.
That book was Holmes Basic. No cover. The VERY first Dungeons & Dragons rule book I ever saw and ever touched was Holmes. The very first actual D&D piece of art I ever experienced was therefore, the lizard-riding lizard man.
I poured over the rulebook the next handful of days, becoming at once more perplexed and yet more excited.
(Note that this was 1986 and full into the "Mentzer and Easley 1E covers era".)
My fighter with a strength of 9 (!!!), (named Cuthalion because I'd flipped through my oldest sister's copies of the Silver Jubilee editions of her Tolkien paperbacks) was my first means of experiencing this hobby in full force.
Only a year and a half later I bought copies of Moldvay Basic and Cook-Marsh Expert from another friend for two dollars. In the meantime I also had my younger-older sister (who worked at an office supply store at the time... she had previously worked for the biggest mom-and-pop VHS rental place which was the coolest, but I was finally thankful she no longer did...) make photocopies for me of a lot of the Fiend Folio, a friends copies of Mentzer Companion and some other stuff besides. I secretly conned my eldest sister (the one who had the LotR books...and wrote a paper on "The Silmarillion" in collage) into buying me a copy of the AD&D 1E PHB and kept it all secret from my folks who (since it was 'innocently' based on "The Hobbit") bought me a copy of the First edition revised box set of MERP that next summer. My eldest sister from then on almost always bought me Tolkien stuff for my birthdays and Christmas...even gifting me the ICE Lord of the Rings Adventure Game when I was in high school. Thank goodness. What a neat little game that is, though I hated it at the time.
I was off and running in my crazy, wild-n-wooly, mis-matched mash-up of anything and everything my young hands could grab (and a number of issues of Dragon, new ones from Bookland that kept issues from the last year or two on it's shelf of rpg stuff and even older issues from a used book store one town away, as well helped fill in some gaps here and there... I actually always used "Condensed Combat" from Dragon 117. Heh.).
B/X was long my mistress and even later in the 'OSR' birthing but Holmes remained a an important part of my mind and heart. I found a love of OD&D, heretofore unknown, via Swords & Wizardry (which love still exists) but there's always that something that may well be only "nostalgia" which is strong but real and good and how can that be a bad thing anyway?...
RC later became MY D&D soon after it's release, but my love was always B/X. However I never forgot the magic of that "old D&D book"...that..."blue book" that I didn't know until later was the "blue book".
When I first began the couple of tentative steps "backwards" in the early '00s, it was that "old" set of rules I sought. A good friend felt out with select questions concerning my early experiences and bought for my birthday off, the then only five-or-so-year-old, eBay a Basic D&D box set in near mint condition.
There she was. Holmes D&D with B2. Glossy. Stiff. Still slightly bulging at the center, and not mashed flat with use and time. So weird. So wonderful. So full of promise. Being a child of the 80s (born in '74) it, even in 1999 and with years of more "sophisticated" rpgs until my belt, shouted the promise of those S&S book covers I'd gazed at in my parent's used book store as a child and movies like "Sword of the Valiant" and "The Sword and the Sorcerer" and "Hawk the Slayer" and video games like "Dragon's Lair"...story books with records I'd had such as "Sleeping Beauty", the Prydain Chronicles, and of course the grit and pagantry and fun of the early Hollywood examples of "Ivanhoe" and "The Three Musketeers"...those strange fairy tales and monsters I discovered in books as a child...
There it was...distilled and condensed though not diluted in the form of that wondrous game of imagination! Just like it was in the fall of 1986.
My first 'touch' of DUNGEONS & DRAGONS.
Screaming happily at me in form of a red dragon dressed in blue.
