Mine began with this,
It was as far as I'm aware the first of it's kind. A book that worked like a role-playing game. Create a character, choose your equipment, head off to kill the 'Evil Wizard' who for some reason will end up fighting you in hand to hand combat rather than blowing your head off with a bolt of lightning, get the treasure but not the girl because as far as I remember there wasn't one and become the hero you always secretly wanted to be ;-)
This little book was my introduction to those core concepts that were the staples of 'Fantasy' and I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of their discovery. It was in no small way my introduction to the works of Tolkien amongst many others but I'm afraid I always secretly wished that at some point during 'The Hobbit' that there had been a paragraph that said,
"you are outside a dark cave. If you wish to enter the cave turn to paragraph 205 if you wish to bugger off back to The Shire' turn to paragraph 137"
It was the feeling of choice that I really enjoyed, that heady sensation that I was in control of my characters destiny.
I think I probably ended up with fifty of those books of various types. Not all were Fighting Fantasy though. I had Lone Wolf ones, Grail Quest ones and Car Wars (I dread to think how much money Steve Jackson and/or Ian Livingstone have liberated from me in one way or another over the years) amongst others as well as board games like 'Chainsaw Warrior'...
...and eventually these various bits and pieces led me to the world of RPG's.....
Dungeons and Dragons I'm sorry to say bored the hell out of me though 'Vampire:the Masquerade' is probably responsible for stealing more of my spare time than anything else I ever got involved in (with the possible exception of Diablo 2 which I still play now). Life then chose to re-prioritize these things behind Beer, Girls and the acquisition of Money so I could afford to buy Beer and chase Girls.
Then one day I found myself in a Games Workshop Store being convinced to buy a unwieldy looking rule book and something called a 'Codex' featuring evil space dudes as well as a pile of improbably named models and suddenly I was back into that same land of geekdom again at an age at which I should probably have known better. Though the system was completely different the atmosphere bought back that childhood feeling of being responsible for the evolution of a story that I was the hero of (albeit vicariously through a load of plastic models, lol) and to be honest I've had a lot more fun with that than I ever really get from a 'normal' book.
Even more recently I've started playing the 'Deathwatch' RPG so I suppose things have really come full circle for me.
That's how the bastards got me.....How did they get you?
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