Greetings to all of the fine collectors found herein! I have only recently found this site and wish to pay my thanks to those who have contributed time and resources to create this truly valuable reference and community. This is my first post to the forums and I hope not my last. For those who like the short version, I will simply say, I am happy to be here to share my love of this game and it's history and am happy to have found you all. It's a special thing when you find your people... or many more of your people. My compliments to you all.
For those who like the longer version ...
I have played D&D since 1981 as a lad of 12 years when I talked my mother into buying me a Moldvay edition Basic Set. I had heard strange tales of other kids playing a game with strange dice and fighting in dungeons among the trolls and halflings. One of my best friends said he had played with some friends one afternoon and, as he told me about it ... I realized I had seen this before.
A couple of years earlier, I was at a strip mall in Murfreesboro, TN and bored while my mom shopped at a clothing store. I wandered out of the store she was shopping in and down some steps to a lower level in the center courtyard of the strip mall. It was dark down there. Kinda creepy but I had to know what was there. Looking back on it, that feeling I had as I carefully descended those steps into a not-well-lit place that I was not so sure I had permission to be in didn't feel entirely dissimilar from the first dungeon I descended into as a player.
I was drawn though, and down I went, and at the bottom of the steps, a hallway stretched off to my left. I saw, down that dark hallway, a light streaming out of an open door. I crept up on it to find something completely strange to me. Tucked away in what was essentially a basement room was a tiny hobby store; probably my very first. I more or less stumbled into the room. There were some model kits and some wood working stuff as I remember, and there ... on the counter .. I came face to face with the Monster Manual, the Players Handbook and the Dungeon Master's Guide in all their Sutherland and Trampier covered glory. I knew I was strangely attracted to these dangerous looking books but I could not put my finger on why. I thumbed through the pages while the fellow running his little hidden shop told me who-knows-what about the game. I asked questions and was fascinated by the illustrations. I knew the pictures of the efreet, the ruby eyed demon altar or the weird creatures gracing the
MM at the time were not going to fly with my my mom's Church of Christ sensibilities. I asked her to come look at them. I wanted one. I didn't get it. I was only about 10 or 11 at the time.
I had all but forgotten my solo adventure to the tiny hobby store years later when my friend was telling me about his having played Dungeons and Dragons. I was mildly interested in the idea until the day I laid my eyes on that Moldvay Edition Basic Set when I suddenly realized that this was part of the same weird and wonderful thing I had seen in hard cover down in that dank moldy room a couple of years earlier. I got that set that day and I talked my best friend into playing with me. We each made our own full party of adventurers and took turns
DMing for each other each weekend. Those were GOOD days.
In the next couple of years I decided I wanted to do it like the books describe, with a
group of players. In order to make that happen I would need to
DM the thing, I knew. I had devoured those books, and my first multi-player campaign was in AD&D. I was the ripe old age of 14 or 15 at the time. I finally got the books and never went back to Basic/Expert. And on it went into college. I met a guy in his later 20s in college who taught me how to be a very good
DM, and I ended up
DMing the finish of his 2 and a half year campaign when his job took him away from us. I continued to
DM after that, turning Against the Giants, Descent Into The Depths of the Earth, Vault of the Drow and Queen of the Demonweb Pits into a three and a half year campaign on their own. I made Erelhei Cinlu rival the concurrently published Menzoberanzan, which I mined for reference and still sits safely tucked away in my collection.
I GM'd other games after that. Mostly super-heroes stuff. I played
GURPS in the late 90's early 00's in one of the best campaigns of my life, and still always found myself, too, playing in someone else's D&D campaign. In my 30s I even spent a couple of years working on getting my own game store off the ground. Life happened to that. There was a long stretch without games. More recently I have played in a couple of good long running campaigns. And now ... well I am finally getting that urge again. I am going to once again immerse myself in the role of Dungeon Master.
That has led me to the process of replacing some treasures I had to part with over the years and also to collecting new ones. I have a vision for the space I want to
DM in. A domain filled with the imagery and a sense of the history of this most excellent game .. the first of its kind. I want to surround my players with a tangible and visible history of the game, both to spark their imaginations, but also to give newer younger players a true sense of that history of the game. I want to build a kind of reverence for what has come before, and I want my players to respect that.
For that reason I am currently working on what I expect will become a pretty fair collection. I am here because Acaeum has helped with that already. My knowledge has expanded greatly by spending time studying the history here, and I hope, will even more so by taking the time to interact here with you all.
Please forgive the stroll down amnesia lane. I simply felt I owed it to those who have come before me to this place to offer my story as a means of connection and understanding. I respect this place. I am happy to have found it. Thanks again to those of you who have contributed to it's making. Cheers!
In All Sincerity,
Cerulean Rex
And if you read this far, but don't feel it was worth your time, then I will say 'Read me no further, Lord or Lady ...", and offer you the blessing my dear departed friend and brother Bill Harper would have offered when he was in his cups ... "and may the road rise up to meet your face." 
