Old Days & Dreams
Posted: Sun Jun 05, 2022 8:37 pm
I thought this would be a curious repository of nostalgic drabble of old days and dreams gone by for those of a unique generation, when D&D was still a strange mysterious game of cult-rumors and bad Tom Hanks movies (hey, everyone has to start somewhere). To begin I thought I would share my experience of a few years ago...
Sometime ago, in the anonymous RPG mosh-pit that is RPOL.net, I found a friend I gamed with as a teenager (a span of almost forty years) way, way back in Northern New Jersey. I can't even remember how we found out who the other one was, bit it happened quickly.
The images of those days at 50 Lincoln Street pushed my fingers to the keys and I wrote this.
50 Lincoln Street
It was 50 Lincoln Street, the giant apartment building deep in Union City New Jersey, between Kennedy Boulevard and Bergenline Avenue, a dated solid brick building nesting with various stores and restaurants. A shame the corner news stand is gone, no surprise, since magazine and newspapers don’t exist anymore.
On the third floor, smelling of ancient town house and roach motel, flakes of paint and rusted bannisters lead me to lands of wonder.
We played, we played hard, three to six teenage boys sacrificing their Saturday for fortune, glory and the lesser known of the three- experience points.
Where our peers sought the malls, movie theaters and parks, trying to figure out ways to round the bases with the ladies, we chose the company of elves and dwarves. In those 80’s, all of us wanted the company of fiction over fact.
Lost in that Vasquez apartment, feeding on tuna fish and milk, our company raided temples and feasted on treasure. Drank deep in taverns and bent our knee only to the finest of kings or the darkest of demons. Sitting in stolen school desks and folding chairs, we lounged in Gygax’s mind, lost to the cold war world that was just waiting for someone to push the button.
Our parents probably called us American psychos, products of a feverish American dream, but we were Heroes by Torchlight, our souls nothing but portable holes filled to the brim with arcana unearthed by a bookmark or a random d100.
Fighter, magic user, or thief, the only careers we could conceive at the time, fueled our passions and dreams into a accountable nothingness. But oh the fun.
While most teens remember the time the smoked, shot, or drank something illicit at the back of a convenience store; my company remembered the storming of castles, the rolling of hits, cracking a glowing chest of unimaginable riches or beaming over a character sheet so filled there was not even room to cross a T.
50 Lincoln Street, the altar of my imagination, where we lifted goblets of time and platters of responsbility in sacrifice to powers better found among dieties and demigods- than on M-TV.
Sometime ago, in the anonymous RPG mosh-pit that is RPOL.net, I found a friend I gamed with as a teenager (a span of almost forty years) way, way back in Northern New Jersey. I can't even remember how we found out who the other one was, bit it happened quickly.
The images of those days at 50 Lincoln Street pushed my fingers to the keys and I wrote this.
50 Lincoln Street
It was 50 Lincoln Street, the giant apartment building deep in Union City New Jersey, between Kennedy Boulevard and Bergenline Avenue, a dated solid brick building nesting with various stores and restaurants. A shame the corner news stand is gone, no surprise, since magazine and newspapers don’t exist anymore.
On the third floor, smelling of ancient town house and roach motel, flakes of paint and rusted bannisters lead me to lands of wonder.
We played, we played hard, three to six teenage boys sacrificing their Saturday for fortune, glory and the lesser known of the three- experience points.
Where our peers sought the malls, movie theaters and parks, trying to figure out ways to round the bases with the ladies, we chose the company of elves and dwarves. In those 80’s, all of us wanted the company of fiction over fact.
Lost in that Vasquez apartment, feeding on tuna fish and milk, our company raided temples and feasted on treasure. Drank deep in taverns and bent our knee only to the finest of kings or the darkest of demons. Sitting in stolen school desks and folding chairs, we lounged in Gygax’s mind, lost to the cold war world that was just waiting for someone to push the button.
Our parents probably called us American psychos, products of a feverish American dream, but we were Heroes by Torchlight, our souls nothing but portable holes filled to the brim with arcana unearthed by a bookmark or a random d100.
Fighter, magic user, or thief, the only careers we could conceive at the time, fueled our passions and dreams into a accountable nothingness. But oh the fun.
While most teens remember the time the smoked, shot, or drank something illicit at the back of a convenience store; my company remembered the storming of castles, the rolling of hits, cracking a glowing chest of unimaginable riches or beaming over a character sheet so filled there was not even room to cross a T.
50 Lincoln Street, the altar of my imagination, where we lifted goblets of time and platters of responsbility in sacrifice to powers better found among dieties and demigods- than on M-TV.